Where Do You Get Your Ideas

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

One of my former co-workers liked to tell anecdotes about colorful characters he's known. Since he knew I'm a writer, every so often he'd turn to me and say, "You should write a story about that." I just smiled and said I have plenty of ideas of my own, which is true. I have more ideas than I have time to write them all into stories.

When you're just starting out as a writer, it's hard to think of ideas. You may read other books and wonder, "How did the author ever come up with that?" Even if you've got an initial idea for a story, you may not know what else to do with it.

The one thing you shouldn't do is let that discourage you. Like the actual art of writing itself, creating and working with ideas is a skill that you can develop with practice. At the same time, though, it's also an attitude, a way of looking at things differently or changing them until they're uniquely yours. Experienced writers are always observing people and things around them for ideas to either start a story or to enrich a story they're working on. I've learned to do this as I've grown as a writer; so can you. Since this is an essay, I'll condense what I've learned about creating/working with ideas into a handy-dandy thesis statement: start by looking at what you know/are familiar with, twist it into something different, and combine it with another idea for extra impact. I'll illustrate with examples from my own experiences as I've worked on various stories.

Your everyday life is a breeding ground for story ideas and characters to live those stories. At the same time, your own interests and skills might give you ideas as well. For example, I'm a lab technician, so when I wrote "Move Over Ms. L.," a story with a lab technician as the main character, I drew on my own observations to add details that made her work and environment feel real. Your borrowing doesn't always have to be so direct: I'm an avid Beatles fan, and one day when I was reading about their four-fold synergy, I thought to myself that it would be neat to write about a group of people with magical powers who were also so close. Thus, my Season Lords Trilogy was born. If you look closely at what interests you, you may find it has a story idea or two waiting for you to give it life.

Once you have an idea, you have to do something with it. An idea isn't actually a story; it's a story idea that can develop into a story if properly nurtured. One way to develop a story idea is to ask yourself questions about it. This is how I came up with "Move Over Ms. L." A friend of mine showed me a story she'd written about the Beatles that was set in the era when they were still playing in the Cavern in Liverpool. I thought that was a great setting and decided to use it myself. (My friend had no problem with that, since I wrote a completely different kind of story than she did.) Since science fiction and fantasy are my favorite genres, I knew I wanted to make my story science fiction or fantasy. To add a science fiction element, I decided to send a time traveler to the Cavern to listen to the Beatles play. Then I had to start asking questions and keep on asking questions based on how I answered the other questions. Why would a time traveler go to that time and place? When I decided the traveler was there to steal cell samples from John Lennon to clone him, I had to ask other questions: Why would someone want to clone John Lennon? How would it be possible for the time traveler to travel to 1961 Liverpool? What skills and/or traits would the traveler need to be successful in his/her mission? These and other questions allowed me to create Joanna Lennon, the great-granddaughter of John with the face that would let her get close to him, the scientific skills to sample his cells successfully, and the personality that made her a match for her great-granddad. I didn't address all these questions at once: it took me at least a year of thinking about this story before I was ready to write it. Nor did I answer all the questions beforehand; the story took a major plot twist as I was writing it. But I wouldn't have been able to write this story without asking these questions first.

At the same time, you may need to change your idea to make it unique instead of just another love story or quest story or whatever-genre-you-write story. That's what I did with the Season Lords. I knew from the beginning that I wanted them to be a quartet like the Beatles but female (to be different from the Beatles). I also wanted them to have linked magical powers that would force them to work together closely. Now, if you're familiar with fantasy, you may have noticed that many magical systems are based on the ancient "elements" of earth, air, fire, and water. This is such a common motif that I was determined to do something different. So I looked around for other things that are grouped by fours and immediately thought of the four seasons. Voilà, each of my magicians had a type of magic loosely linked to a particular season that they gained from the God or Goddess of that season.

Although by now you may have found a good story idea, you may find that you still can't write it into a story. Sometimes you need two half-ideas to create a story. This is what I did in The Movement You Need, the first Beatles fan fiction I wrote for Rooftop Sessions. I had two incomplete story ideas: Paul in an Orpheus myth and John vs. creatures who wanted to steal his creativity. By combining them, I came up with a story with two distinct elements that complemented each other. I did something similar with another short story I'm trying to get published. If you've got an idea for a way to develop a story problem, sometimes you need another idea to solve that problem.

Another way you can combine ideas is to have one idea spark off another idea. My best examples of this come from my Season Lord Trilogy. I decided to give Ysabel, one of the Season Lords, a different background from the other Season Lords to increase diversity. Ysabel's father therefore is a merchant originally from another country. Although he married a woman from Challen (the quasi-Victorian country that is the setting of my trilogy) and settled there, his attitude towards magic is quite different from that of native Challens. This conflict forms a subplot in Day of All Seasons and returns later on in the trilogy. Another example of how ideas can cascade from each other has to do with the Four Gods and Goddesses I mentioned earlier. In figuring out why Challen had four deities, I developed an explanation for Their origin that's at the heart of the trilogy. Unfortunately, I can't go into further detail here. Suffice it to say that without these ideas, I wouldn't have been able to turn what I had originally planned as a single book into a trilogy -- and possibly a saga, if there's enough interest.

Now that you've seen some examples of how to create and work with ideas, I hope you're inspired to do something with your own ideas. Don't be afraid to write your ideas down for future reference; ideas can fade away if they're not used. But if you're willing to look for ideas, shape them into something unique, and follow their lead, you too will find yourself writing multi-volume, multi-generation sagas -- and enjoying every minute of it.