Lateral Thinking



via NorthernTool.com

I spent this past weekend with some amazing authors and industry professionals at the SCBWI Carolinas conference. Except it was only when John Claude Bemis gave the closing speech that I felt I was truly swimming in my element.

His talk was about lateral thinking, which apparently expats and multilinguals do very well.

I was like: Hey! That's me! Until he gave us the warm up exercise and I couldn't come up with any evidence that I deserved the points.

In my defense, it was a low-caf Sunday morning and I'd just been bombarded with three days of information. Anyway - my contribution is a red fez - to anyone else who was there.

So Sunday night I go home to mull over everything I've learned. I pick up the short stories on the nightstand, figuring if I could get a few of those in, it would quiet the buzz in my head.

Picture this:

I'm reading in bed, engrossed in the story of an asphalt layer (John Grisham's contribution to Don't Quit Your Day Job) when my dear, dear, dearest husband mutters:

Cordless Super Jerky Blaster?

Now, usually, I ignore everyone and keep reading, but the odd combination of words just pulled me right out of the book.

Me: Did you just say Cordless Super Jerky Blaster?

You should know, my husband speaks English as a fifth language (very well, I might add) so he can be... mislead by some phrases. But he was reading the Nothern Tool catalog.

He offers me the catalog with a gesture that says "Please, help me understand!"

And here's where I:

1) Start laughing until my sides split

and

2) Come up with some great lateral thinking

All I could picture was:

Codename: Kids Next Door

via wikipedia

Have you seen this bunch of ten year olds take down an adult lately? Well, the Cordless Super Jerky Blaster looks EXACTLY like something they would use. AND the next pages in the tool catalog feature go carts to mount them on! Plus a plethora of other interesting items, but I'll let you explore them on your own.

The point of all this is: You don't need to be an ex-expat, or multilingual, or a transplant to find ideas for your lateral thinking. Lateral thinking is just ordinary stuff that you use in an extraordinary way.