Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

I haven't been asked this question much, in truth. Most writers, both advanced and beginners seem to intellectually grasp the truth that ideas don't grow on trees. (Well, they don't grow on trees unless you happen to pass by a dead oak stretching skeletal fingers towards the frigid winter sky and imagine that the vulture hunched against the winter chill isn't actually a bird at all, but a man…) You can't find them under cabbage leaves (unless, of course, you happen upon something while digging in the garden that sends you off on a fantastical adventure…) and you can't buy them at the mall (unless, of course, you're shopping at your favorite shoe store and discover a pair of shoes not quite like any others, and when you try them on, you can't stop dancing...)

If you're hurting for ideas (perish the thought!) and can't find anything to write about, there are certain steps you can take to get the words flowing again that don't involve candles, spells, or charms at all. (Of course, if you prefer candles, spells, and charms, that's all well and good, and you should always use what works best for you.) One of the games you can play with yourself is called the "What If" game.

Where are you sitting right now? Look around. Pick something mundane; something completely boring, like that pen on your desk or the speakers on your computer. Your desk lamp, perhaps. A blank notebook.

I'm going to choose this:

 

 

It's a perfectly normal, woven basket I used to keep handkerchiefs in. Nowadays, it's my spare battery holder, a decidedly humble calling. But what if it wasn't just a basket? What if…

What if I opened the basket and found, not batteries, but a piece of wrapped candy from an unfamiliar maker. What if I ate that piece of candy, went to bed tonight, and woke up tomorrow morning somewhere else?

What if I dropped the basket and it broke (it is rather old and all.) What if while picking up the pieces, I cut my finger in a sharp piece of whatever it's woven from and the spit wood began to grow?

What if my basket started to bleed?

What if I heard something moving around inside the basket, and when I opened it up I found a snake?

What if when I put something inside the basket, it multiplied? (This would be nice, considering the price of batteries these days.) What if I experimented with putting in a live animal and something horrible went wrong?

What if I opened the basket and could see into another world?

From one mundane and slightly boring object, I got the possibilities for seven stories, without even having to think very hard. If you choose something interesting, think of the ideas you could get from it!

Where did those ideas come from? My imagination. By being observant to the world around me, and by considering anything. In speculative fiction, anything could be possible. I could open up a hidden drawer in the back of my desk and find stacks of gold coins. I could find an elf-stone in the creek, and discover that the folklore is true; that if you look through one you can see the fairies dancing.

My ideas come from dreams. My ideas come from the news, and the people I interact with in every day life. My ideas come from nature, and technology alike.

If you've read the article about creating an Idea Jar, think about this:

What if you reached inside your Idea Jar for something to work on next and found a folded letter that you didn't write? What if you read the letter and discovered that it was a plea for help from a prisoner, written in blood. What if you discovered that the prisoner was hanged as a witch two hundred years ago? What if, after you began to investigate, you discovered that the prisoner was, in fact, an ancestor of yours, and had been pardoned after she/he died?

What if you solved a two-hundred year old mystery, and what if you found a way to travel in time to save your ancestor? What if…

The possibilities are endless.

 

The Idea Trap

Too often, beginning writers make the mistake of writing exactly what they like to read. If they read heroic fantasy exclusively, their books and stories are filled with tales about Rings, Bracelets, or Necklaces of Power, Evil Warlords or Witches, Battles that Have No End, or Quests across Enemy Territory to destroy something/find something/hide something that the other side cannot have.

I don't know about you, but I'm awfully tired of reading about quests. The endless copying of the tried-and-true is one thing, but why don't you get a little creative? Instead of copying the plot of your favorite books, make up your own.

What if there's an object of power, but it's not quite what everyone expects it to be?

What if the quest fails? What if evil wins? What if the heroes die?

What if the Evil Warlord/Wicked Queen/Sorceress of Darkness does not, in fact, wish to cover the world in darkness and melt the flesh from the bones of his or her enemies? What if the good guys have kept the feud going for thousands of years because of the way being good makes them look?

Try to modernize a bit. What if in this day and age, a quest is formed to save the world from a horrible fate, but the object of power is something everyone loves to hate?

What if your good guys are really bad guys, and your bad guys are good guys?

What if the general of your good guys' army decided to retire and raise chickens--right before the major battle?

What if your hero has a body odor problem? What if your heroine is blind without her glasses, or couldn't hit the broadside of a barn with an arrow?

 

But Everything's Been Done Before, hasn't it?

You'll hear this a lot. "It's been done before." On occasion, the great idea you came up with in the shower has been done before more than once by authors who probably wouldn't stoop to give you the time of day. But if it's been done before, what should you do about that great idea? You certainly don't want to waste the time you took to write it down, do you? Not to mention the fact that the bathroom floor is soaked, and you forgot to wash the shampoo from your hair…

A boy and a girl from warring families meet and fall in love. They both end up dead, after a plot to run away together ends in tragedy.

Sound familiar? It's been done before, by more than one person and with more than one ending. Shakespeare certainly didn't do it first, but Romeo and Juliet is the one everyone thinks of.

It's been done before. Can such an old, exhausted idea have any chance of resurrection?

Of course it can. The next time someone starts to tell a story in which you have a part, listen to their version of it and see how it matches up with yours. Odds are, they will have a different take on almost everything, save the bare bones of the facts.

Here's a case in point: The Princess and the Pea. We all know the plot. A prince is looking for a bride. His mother wants him to marry a real princess, and when a drenched girl appears at the door, she is brought in and fed supper. When she goes to bed, she finds her bed to be twenty or so mattresses, which should be quite soft. Only, the Queen secretly poked a dried pea in between the bottom two mattresses, because if the girl is a true princess, she will be able to feel the pea and not sleep well all night. Well, it turns out that the girl is truly a princess, and she doesn't sleep at all, and the prince ends up marrying her. And, of course, they live happily ever after. The End.

That's an old exhausted plot if I ever saw one. And yet, it still has some room for experimentation. Once upon a time, I wrote a children's story based on The Princess and the Pea--told from the viewpoint of the pea. It was quite fun to try and make that idea work.

So, Really. Enough of the suggestions. Where do you really get your ideas?

Where don't I get my ideas?

1/26/03