Starting a short story

Week 1 of the big new plan to become a fiction writer is over. Where have I got? Well, at least the idea of writing fiction has been budged a bit further to the front of my brain. Fingers to keyboard time was about 3 hours on Monday, all with the idea of writing a story for the Wild Blue Yonder contest. Crazy, I know, as the deadline was today, but you know I'm a deadline-driven kinda gal.

Naturally I'm not going to be submitting anything to the contest this time round, but the nice thing is there are future contests and themes:

• "Go" for May (deadline 15 Feb 07)
• "Cool" for July (deadline 15 Apr 07)
• "Colorful" for Sept (deadline 15 June 07)

Just for the record, here are the musings that got me into the story I've half written.

I don’t have a plot or a theme yet, but I have a character – perhaps if I tell you about him the story will emerge.

From a distance, he looks like a serious businessman doing some work on his private time. Bit of a gut (no time to exercise), neat jeans, standard black lace-up shoes, a polo shirt with a semi-ironed collar, short straight hair, somewhere between brown and grey. He takes his shoes off when he sits in an airport departure lounge but leaves them on at Starbucks. And his paper-thin laptop computer is always there. Like I said, from a distance, you’d think he’s working hard. Sometimes he even spreads thick stapled piles of figures and reports around. But most of the time if you catch a glimpse of his computer screen, he’s playing Solitaire. The 3-card version, not that cheats turn-over-every-card method for quick satisfaction.

Carmel Bird’s book says a story always comes from a writer’s own experiences of life. So how does mine relate to this? Do I need a personal angle to make this story come to life? (I need something, so maybe that’s it!)

My angles: fear of unemployment – he knows he has to work hard to keep his job but he just doesn’t know how or what to do, but can’t bear to turn off the laptop for fear that he’s then giving up. Maybe he’s a frustrated artist in an accountant’s job or something similar.

Since this, the story's made a lot of progress, but let's wait until I sit back down with it before we call it a potential piece of fiction.