I’m not even all that popular or well-known yet, and I’ve already had a few people ask me the question all authors dread…”Where do you get your ideas?”
I could steal a joke from an author (I wish I could remember who) that I read years ago and claim that I get my ideas from a P.O. Box in Schenectady, NY. “Only $19.95 will get you a dozen top-quality ideas that you can use to produce your very own stories! Checks, Money Orders and Paypal accepted, no credit cards.”
If only it were that easy. 😀
I could talk about how my ideas are drawn from experiences in real life. The plot ideas are drawn from news items and things I read online, the characters from people I’ve met, and so on. But since I’m writing urban fantasy, that’s a little bit of a cop-out. Sure, the plot of Alys helping track a kidnapper (for example) and the details of the kidnapping could have been drawn from something that I read about which really happened…but magic certainly wasn’t used to find them, and there weren’t real monsters involved.
Okay, there probably were…but human monsters, not supernatural ones. You know what I mean.
I could talk about my inspirations: The different authors I love to read, the TV shows, movies and anime I’ve consumed over the years. All of them helped shape my imagination, and I have no doubt that some of my ideas come from there.
The truth of the matter is, I don’t precisely know where my ideas come from. My subconscious is a minefield, and I never know what sort of mine I’m going to step on when I go poking through it. Sometimes it’s not even that clear cut. There have been times when I’ve woken up in the middle of the night with an idea that I absolutely have to get out of my head and onto paper. That’s why I kept a pad and pen by my bed for years, until my iPad took their place (thank you, Apple).
Sometimes, the next morning, I don’t even remember waking up and writing the idea down. A lot of the time they’re fragments, disjointed bits of imagery or pieces of a scene. Quite often, they have no bearing on whatever my current project is.
Fortunately, I’m a long-time fan of Stephen King, and remembered him saying (I believe it was in the forward to The Gunslinger, or possibly in Danse Macabre or On Writing) that the first line of The Gunslinger was written twenty years before the rest of the book. As I recall the story – I should have gone hunting for it before writing this – he pinned the scrap of paper it was written on to his bulletin board and swore that something would someday come out of it. That scrap of paper, the story went, travelled with him from home to home over the years, until one day the rest of the story started to take shape.
I have two bulletin boards today; one is a physical one, covered with pieces of paper with little scraps of ideas, some as small as a single sentence, some several pages long; the other is a digital one, stored in a Scrivener file and backed up religiously.
So…where do my ideas come from? The deepest, darkest corners of my mind. I don’t always understand them, I don’t always know what brought them about…but I know they’ll all come in handy. Sooner or later.
