Inventors

Preston Sturges before he became a writer and then a director of films, invented a lip-stick which he called 'Desti's Red Red Rouge'; it was sold in his mother's perfume shop called Desti's.
I think a lot of writers, being creative, imaginative people, think of themselves sometimes as inventors. Don't they invent characters, plots?
I used to be a tutor of Creative Writing in an adult education centre. One evening a group of about six people and I were sitting around a table in the bar of the college having a drink. I asked a young woman in the group how her writing was going and she said that she wasn't doing much writing these days because she was tending to concentrate on her invention. Which was? A device attached to the lock of a car door such that a person would be quite safe if the car suddenly came to halt on some lonely road..... Something to that effect anyway (I have to say I didn't understand her precisely).
It was then I said that I too had invented a few things, some of which I had patented. I told the group of one which was a money sorting device..... which, incidentally, didn't work well enough for me to continue trying to sell it.
Then another of the group said he too had a couple of ideas for inventions....
And so it was that it turned out that every one of the group had, at some time, invented some device or other but which they had either never actually made into a prototype or just kept in their minds. But you could see that when they began tallking about their inventions they were full of enthusiasm.
I came to the conclusion with which I set out this blog: that fiction writers are inventors - some of characters and plots only, others who would like to make things that do a job of work.
One ex- pilot who had been in the airforce in WW2 said he had an idea once which he thought to exploit at some time but never did: it was a dog's lead with a suction device where the end of the lead was held; this suction device could be pressed against a shop window so that the dog's owner could leave the dog attached, so to speak, to the window while he shopped inside.
However, someone suggested that it wouldn't be much use for something like a rottweiller which, seeing a cat across the street might in his effort to get to the cat, take the shop's window with him.
"For little dogs only," the pilot said.