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The night that waitress in Waco handed me a napkin with a plot twist on it
So I was at this diner off I-35 near Waco, Texas about three years ago. Stuck on a road trip, no ideas for my novel. The waitress, name tag said Peggy, saw me staring at a blank notebook. She slid me a napkin with a story opening written on it in pen. "A man walks into a bar, but he's already dead, he just doesn't know it yet." That one line broke my block and I wrote for two hours straight. Has anyone else had a stranger just hand them a perfect prompt like that?
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grace_campbell1mo ago
@ivanross That "payphone in hell" line is so good it almost hurts. But @hannah_perry makes a fair point about the logistics, what made you keep it up even knowing it doesn't fully hold up to scrutiny?
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ivanross1mo ago
Man that's awesome! I had a similar thing happen at a bar in Nashville where this old dude scribbled "the last safe place on earth is a payphone in hell" on a coaster and walked off. Still have that coaster tacked up on my wall, it's gotten me out of a rut more than a few times.
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hannah_perry1mo ago
@ivanross that’s a killer line but I gotta say, payphones in hell wouldn’t have any safe places either. The heat alone would melt the plastic receiver into a puddle in like two seconds. Also, pretty sure demons don’t carry quarters. So the whole concept falls apart if you think about it for more than a second. Still, I get why you kept it, sometimes a weird scribble just hits different when you’re in a bad spot. Did the old dude look like he’d actually been to hell or was he just a retired poet?
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