Need a Story Idea? Check Lost and Found

My shrink once told me that the most profound crisis of middle life is “loss.” The archetypal story of  loss belongs to the Biblical Job, a good man who lost everything. John Milton named his great epic poem “Paradise Lost.” The most famous Christian hymn testifies “I once was lost, but now I’m found.”  And, of course, ABC has managed to keep on the air one of most indecipherable narratives in the history of television with the simple title: “Lost.”

So it was about two weeks ago, and I sat at my keyboard writing a short chapter for a new book titled “Help! For Writers.” The book will list 25 of the most common writing problems, with 10 suggested solutions for each. The problem in question was “I am out of story ideas.” In a first draft, I offered this solution: 

Look for the lost puppies.

That was a clever line, I thought, simple and direct, but maybe a bit glib.

“I need a real life example,” I thought, and rushed downstairs to grab a copy of that day’s St. Petersburg Times. I opened it to the classifieds, looked for Lost and Found, and spotted this ad at the top of the column:
 

Then I wrote: “It took exactly 30 seconds to find the telephone number of a person who lives on the beach and is heartbroken because her cockatiel –- who whistles at toes –- is missing.  So what are you waiting for? Get to work. Dial that number.”

A little later it occurred to me that the bird story deserved more than a mention in a book that might not be published for more than a year. So I sent a message to editor Kelley Benham at the Times. I had confidence that Kelley, who once wrote an epic story about a rogue rooster named Rockadoodle Two, would give it a good look. Not only did we have a lost bird and a heartbroken owner, but the bird apparently had a foot fetish.

Kelley messaged me back that reporter Stephanie Hayes was “all over” the story. And she was, producing a piece that got good play in the paper, and told the sad tale of an old man living on St. Pete Beach not far from the Twistee Treat ice cream store, whose beloved bird, named Shadow for its gray feathers, had flown away. The man searched and searched through the neighborhood with no luck and then placed a classified ad in the Times announcing his loss and grief.

A trip to an animal shelter led him to a gray bird, but it wasn’t Shadow. He adopted the bird anyway, naming him Shadow II.

OK, I thought, this was a pretty damn good vindication of my original advice. I found the ad, sent it to an editor, who assigned it to a talented writer, who put it in the paper. No Hollywood ending, but at least the old man found a new bird.

A month after Shadow flew off, a couple named Jim and Wendy, who live at the southern tip of St. Pete Beach in a place called Pass-a-Grille, noticed that a rather beat-up looking gray bird had perched on their porch. People in Florida are used to seeing crazy birds in strange places, including great squawking flocks of wild parrots, so this apparition did not surprise Jim and Wendy, until they realized that this was not a wild bird, but a “people bird.”

Not being bird lovers, they thought of someone who might help them, a woman named Vanessa Tonelli Slade, whose parents, Joe and Diane, had once briefly rented Jim and Wendy’s house.  Vanessa, everyone knew, had her own exotic bird, Bandit, and was famous for calling shelters to help save wounded creatures who crossed her path. The gray bird was a people bird, and Vanessa and her family were bird people.

When Vanessa arrived, she saw the bird and recognized it right away as Shadow, the now famous lost cockatiel. She sat on the porch, took off her shoes, wiggled her feet. No whistling from the bird.  She then made some chirping noises and Shadow flew to her shoulder. Vanessa secured the bird in an extra cage she kept for transporting animals to safety during tropical storms.

Vanessa also knew that birds have a special sense about the approach of dangerous storms and, sure enough, that night a ferocious line of thunderstorms, powered by 60 mph winds and illuminated by hundreds of lightning strikes, hit the region. Who knew we were going to be hit by such a violent storm? Apparently, Shadow knew.

Vanessa remembered the detail in Stephanie’s story about the old man living near the Twistee Treat, a popular landmark. She decided, she said, to “wing it.”

With a photo of the bird on her cell phone, she began knocking on the doors of small cottages in the neighborhood and found what she was looking for, which led to another story by Stephanie, this one teased off the front page of the Times. Shadow was lost. But now is found.

That story would be good enough. But there is more. I’ve known Vanessa Tonelli since she was a little girl. I’ve attended wonderful Christmas parties in her house. Her bird Bandit has perched on my shoulder. Her dad, Joe, was the former art director of the St. Pete Times and is now one of my oldest and dearest friends. My 90-year-old mom has a crush on him. Diane is my daughter Lauren’s godmother. The Clarks and Tonellis are almost like family. A story circle unbroken.

I began this narrative with a brief exploration of the archetype of loss. As humans we are alone in the animal kingdom by our understanding of the ultimate loss, the loss of life, our own and that of our loved ones. In Shakespeare, death is the inevitable destination of all tragic figures. Shakespeare’s final plays were not tragedies but romances, stories in which the main characters experienced not only death, but the miraculous rebirth of a child or lover. A life was lost, but now is found.

I don’t know who said that “God writes straight with crooked lines,” but, if true, that would make God a pretty darn good storyteller. There is something powerful and slightly mysterious that happens when an author sees the world as a storehouse of story ideas.

Something opens up: a window, a door, the imagination. It means more than the goodhearted cliché that every person -– or every bird –- has a story. It’s about the web of life, a spiraling circle of surprising connections, answers to our most powerful questions that come to us only if we are curious enough to ask.