JENNINE CAPÓ CRUCET: So my ideas tend to come from things, I think, that I observe or overhear in the world around me. So one important thing for me as a writer is to try to move through the world without a device in my hand, because a lot of the things that inform my writing or that spawn my writing are things I observe or that I hear. And so most of my stories and most of my work does not come from a concept or an idea.
I don't think, I want to write a story about what it means to be a first generation college student. I think of a young woman, I'll have the image of I'll see a young woman, or I'll remember something from college of being a young woman sitting in a library late into the night with no one else around her, and be like, what's the story there, why is that person there at this time?
I remember going to work one day and in an elevator seeing a handprint at the very top of the elevator, so someone very tall or someone that jumped up and smacked it. And it was really greasy and it had these little pieces of crumbs all over it, like it was clearly the bottom of a pizza. And I wrote a whole story based on that handprint of who would do that and why didn't they have a napkin, and what compels you to hit the top of an elevator instead of wiping it off on your pants? It started a million questions.
And I know this is a weird thing, but it becomes like this little tiny grain of sand that the oyster's making the pearl around. So for me, it starts from something very, very small and grows out from there, and that whatever I've overheard or observed makes me want to build a story around it.
And one other weird example-- I have a million of these. And I keep a notebook with me all the time because the world is constantly throwing beautiful things at us or confusing things at us that we can make art out of. And one of the other examples, it was recent, is that I was walking around and I heard a little kid say to an adult that she was with, probably some sort of guardian, she said I timesed it by five. And the idea of saying like timesed it. And the phrasing of that, and I'm just thinking about this kid, and I just know that will end up in a story somehow, or in a longer piece of fiction.
So my ideas come from the universe. That sounds really corny, but you have to be open to it and you have to be able to absorb it so that you can make something out of it. That, and I still stories that my parents tell me.