O IS FOR OPTICIAN!

O is for Optician.  (Skim to the underlined genre or style that best suits you.)

The eyes are windows to the soul, or heart (when you’re writing Romance). And who has the right to get super up-close and personal to your eyes? Your optician. So now you know your hero is going for an eye check-up. The new optician is pretty in more ways than her luscious brown eyes. Her sense of humor gets a glowing review, too, because as soon as he starts worming his way around the question–are you single–she smiles and inquires instead, So, how many people in your family have glaucoma? She lets him sweat a second before she smiles and says, Don’t worry. It’s not looking like you’re going to be the first. After that humorous little ice chipper, your hero is determined to get more than just another appointment for his next eye exam. With any luck, he’ll have her number.

Now you have how they met. You know they both have a sense of humor. So now you just have to add a few mishaps or misunderstandings, or some bigger obstacle, and watch how clear their vision is in the end when they realize that they could never be with anyone else.

Mystery writers, it isn’t the butler who did it. It’s the optician. And guess how? A little substance of something to add a clear coating to the victim’s contact lenses. And going by the estimated time of death, it had to have been done during the victim’s eye exam earlier today. But your sleuth is wondering if that might be too simple. Maybe somebody wants it to look like the optician did it. True, he was having an affair with the victim, and he might have wanted out of it. Divorces can be quite costly and not timely when you’re starting a new practice of your own. So what about his wife? Nothing like the scorn of a jealous woman. But she’s on a Carnival cruise on her way to the Bahamas. Did she hire someone for murder and frame her husband? Their daughter is only twelve years old. Surely she didn’t …

 

You really won’t know who did it until you start writing. The more you get to know these people and the other people in their lives, the easier it’ll be to figure out whodunit. Remember to make sure the characters have some tie in with your sleuth or main character to create a strong motivation to solve the crime.

It’s a Literary tale when the longtime optician finally learns what real sight actually means. For this story, the eye examinations Nelson gives are secondary to the examination he trips through in his own life, but it is that close examination, both outside of him and inside, that will give insights for this story. What does Nelson see when he’s examining the eyes of another? He will see more than pupils and irises and retinas. What will he see when he looks in the mirror at his own eyes? What do these realizations mean in relation to his understanding of the human condition? That should give you a jumping off point, an idea to work with, and now you can shape it into the lyrical prose that lovers of literary stories can’t resist.

It could be an entertaining and informational story for Children if you take your little character, bunny or child, to an optician for the first time. Everything the child will see and experience will be brand new to him or her. It might be a little scary too. I’m never too keen on it when the doctor brings that goggle-like machine up close to my face. But to a child, this trip will prove exciting, and getting a first pair of glasses, with frames in his favorite color, can be exciting, too. My daughter needed a story like this when she was young, because she did not want glasses at all. A positive story making wearing glasses a thing of style and wonder would’ve been good to have in my mother’s tool bag.