Esther Chilton

Hospital Waiting Rooms, Horrendous Halls and Farm Parks

How many times have you moaned about hours spent hanging round hospital waiting rooms as your appointment runs late? Take a notebook with you next time and put those wasted hours to good use. Or why not take/download a book and see what’s making it into the bestseller charts these days?

Parents amongst you will know just what I mean by the many hours spent ferrying your children to and fro, sitting in drafty corners in dreary backrooms while your children learn pliés and arabesques or trumpets and violins. You’ll often see other parents reading magazines, marking papers, or tapping away on their computers. If they can, so can you; half an hour or an hour’s lesson can be turned into a short story/article or chapter of a book. This is also another opportunity for reading or researching.

Additionally, waiting rooms, halls and farm parks offer a wealth of ideas to the writer for situations, storylines, characters and articles. Another from experience moment again – when my parents took my daughter off to see the zoo animals (yes, zoo animals in a farm park) I found myself drawn to the park area; it had an elaborate dragon theme going on but what really caught my eye was a little girl sobbing her heart out and refusing to enter the park because dragons were scary. Her parents were unsuccessfully trying to persuade her that dragons were really cute, cuddly creatures underneath and that there wasn’t a real dragon about to jump out at her ,but she was having none of it. This gave me the idea for a picture book where the dragon was an extremely nice one who became a nanny to a royal princess. I wrote the whole story in half-an-hour, sat on a picnic bench covered in bird droppings and battling against a blustery gale.  

When children are involved, they can’t help but come out with those hilarious one-liners so you may find a good source of anecdotes for one of the women’s weeklies, as you feed the donkeys and they slobber all over you.

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