Ideas are the easy part of writing. Figuring out how to develop an idea into a compelling story that many total strangers will spend their valuable time and money to read... that's the hard part.

However, "Where do you get your ideas?" is perhaps the single question that writers are asked most often. I usually give a brief, flip response, along the lines of, "I buy them from a dealer at the corner of 12th and Vine." But some of the emails I receive ask questions so specific that I've realized some people would like to see a real answer now and then.

So on this page, I'll explain where I got those crazy ideas. And to make it more interesting than just me talking about where I get my ideas, since every writer is different, I'll bring in some guest writers to talk about where they got their ideas, too.

I lived in Sicily for a year in the late 1980s. It's an extraordinary place full of amazing true stories, as well as a place that suggests many possible stories to a fiction writer's imagination.

If you haven't found it already, there's "A Note About" In Legend Born elsewhere on this site that explains the origins of my idea for Josarian and his role in Sileria's fate. Namely, a real figure in Sicilian 20th century history, the outlaw or freedom fighter (depending on your point of view), Salvatore Giuliano.

Spoiler warning!

Over the course of his career, Giuliano joined forces with Sicily's most powerful Mafia don, then later fell out violently with the same man—which marked him for certain death. Giuliano, who never married, was betrayed at the end of his young life, in 1950, by the man who was his cousin and co-chieftain.

So if you've read the book, it's probably obvious now where I got the ideas for Josarian's cousin, Zimran, and also the ruthless waterlord Kiloran (whose name I got from an internet handle that a cousin of mine used to use). The idea for the waterlords and their power over that crucial substance comes from the same source Kiloran does: for much of the 20th century, the Mafia controlled most of Sicily's water supply. The idea for the Guardians came from the importance of mystical Catholicism in Sicilian culture, as well as the diminished position of the Church under Fascist and Nazi domination in Sicily for most of Giuliano's short life.

Giuliano is a famous folk hero in Sicily, and I found his tale fascinating for years before I realized I wanted to explore some of its elements in a fantasy novel. When developing my story, I needed a protagonist who could enter Josarian's world and make his role effective in Sileria's fate in a way that Giuliano's role had ultimately not been in Sicily. So Tansen was born. Because in fantasy, a tale shouldn't fizzle out in withered futility; people turn to heroic fiction for a satisfying conclusion. Salvatore Giuliano accomplished relatively little for Sicily, and he spent the final two years of his life just trying not to die. So his story was a starting place for me, not a road map. Additionally, although various events in Josarian's life are a clear echo of Giuliano's, there are also many differences—including the characters and personalities of the two men.

Anyhow, now that I had some of the cornerstones in place, I noticed the main characters of my story were all guys. So I developed female characters to fill the major story roles that I had not yet cast. Mirabar represents the role of the Church, and Elelar represents the role of the latifondisti, the traditional landowners and aristocrats of Sicily; but both women are far more involved and more important in my fictional tale than these elements were in Giuliano's career.

Sicilian culture has for centuries been rich with secret societies, including one called the Beati Paoli, whose members supposedly dwelled beneath the streets of the capital city, Palermo, in the 18th and 19th centuries; hence the idea for the Beyah Olvari. The active volcano of snow-capped Mount Etna has been a prominent feature of Sicilian life since the first inhabitants invaded the island millennia ago, and so an active volcano became a prominent feature of Sileria—and I moved a demanding goddess into it. And the Valdani, like the other international players around the Middle Sea, represent an amalgamation of the various peoples that have, over the centuries, conquered and ruled Sicily: Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Normans, Arabs, Bourbons, Italians, and Germans.
                                                                                                                                     

I had reached the end of the real-life history that had been the genesis of In Legend Born, so the rest of Sileria's story now came out of developing and playing out the alliances, conflicts, enmities, and obsessions I had created in this fantasy world and among these fictional characters.

One aspect of the new material, however, was loosely inspired by another Sicilian legend. See "A Note About" The White Dragon elsewhere on this site. As explained in the "Note," I believe the popular folk legend about gangster Lucky Luciano traveling secretly to Sicily during WWII to convince the Mafia there to cooperate with the Allied invasion is just a legend; but I knew people in Sicily who believed it was true. Either way, I found the idea compelling enough to write a short story inspired by it: "Under A Sky More Fiercely Blue." It's a story, set in wartime Sicily, about a village boy whose typically romantic notions about the Mafia in general, and Luciano in particular, are shattered by actual contact with them. The ideas I explored in that short story gathered steam and eventually became Tansen's complex, loving, and horribly guilt-ridden relationship with his adoptive father, Armian, which is mentioned in In Legend Born, and then explored in detail in White Dragon and Destroyer Goddess as it becomes central to the theme of the books.

One of the characters briefly mentioned in In Legend Born who then becomes a crucial player in these next two books is the waterlord Baran. I found this the most difficult characterization I had ever yet tackled, and it took me a long time to figure him out. The solution for me—which I arrived at by accident, in desperation, after months of struggling, hair-tearing, and perpetual rewriting—was to base him on a dog we'd had when I was a child, a tri-color collie named Elf. She was a delightful, charming, beautiful dog... who was also patently insane. Elf's mad behavior was bizarre beyond belief, frequently comical, occasionally cute, sometimes quite alarming, and often very, very annoying. One of Elf's most memorable gifts was that she regularly agitated our other dogs into fighting with each other even though, in her absence, they got along just fine. Against all odds, though, Elf lived to a ripe old age. Anyhow, once I latched onto Elf as the basis for Baran's characterization, I wrote his scenes in WD and DG by asking myself, "What would Elf do?"

By the way, although I've occasionally adapted some specific characteristics or experiences of people I've known and incorporated them into fictional characters, this makes Baran the only character I've ever actually based on someone I've known in real life.
                                                                                                                                    

One night I watched a much-lauded French-Canadian film called Being At Home With Claude, starring Roy Dupuis (best known to Americans as "Michael" in the 1990s TV series La Femme Nikita). Dupuis plays a street hustler in Montreal who's being interrogated by the cops after killing his lover, a regular middle-class, law-abiding gay man. I didn't care for the film, which I found sluggish and pretentious; but I was very intrigued by one question it touched on briefly: What was it like to be a regular person in love with a male prostitute?

Not being a gay man, I wondered about this from a heterosexual woman's perspective. Then I found myself wondering how a regular, sensible, law-abiding, middle-class woman would even meet a male prostitute, let alone get to know him well enough to fall in love with him. And one day I finally realized that what I was thinking about was a possible story. (I often mull something over for quite a while, in the endless maze of bizarre musings that float in and out of my head all the time, before realizing that I'm actually starting to work on a story idea.)

So I started researching male prostitutes. The first upscale heterosexual male escort I asked for a research interview said he'd agree, but only if I paid his usual hourly rate. (I couldn't afford it!) The next one I queried never responded. I also contacted an upscale male escort agency that refused to give me an inteview; but their website gave me a lot of ideas for how Catherine, the owner of the agency in my novel, runs her business and what kind of prices she charges. (I was flabbergasted!)

After these failed attempts, I settled for doing my research strictly via non-fiction books and websites. (Some old friends, seeing the books I brought on our vacation that summer, were pretty worried about me until I explained why I was reading a "how to" guide for hustlers.) And I learned a remarkable amount this way. After a while, I decided there was indeed a story for me to tell. But I also realized, based on the consistent personality types I was finding in my research, that there had to be something unusual about the character I created, or there was no way that any woman I was interested in writing about could fall in love with him; because all my research led me repeatedly to the inescapable conclusion that men who are in "the life" by choice are not appealing people (in terms of love and relationships). This gradually led me to research, explore, and develop the kind of shattered childhood and street-life background by which Ryan, the male protagonist of FFG, winds up in prostitution, as well as the specific loyalties, circumstances, and insecurities that ensure he's still stuck in that life when he meets Sarah.

Having gotten that far, I felt that Sarah's character had to be someone who was around the house all the time, so that she'd see Ryan often, and also so that she'd notice (without actually being nosy) all the odd bits and pieces of his daily routine. I also thought she should be in the middle of a crisis of her own, perhaps a professional one that cut her to the quick. On all counts, I thought making her a writer was the best solution. But I resisted for a while, because I was afraid people would think I was pulling a "Mary Sue," a phrase applied derisively when people believe an author's story is a wish-fulfillment fantasy about herself.

However, I recalled one of my basic beliefs about writing fiction: I don't matter, and what you think of me doesn't matter; only the story matters. So I got over myself, and I made Sarah a writer, which is what the character by then desperately wanted to be. (And, yes, online gossip among readers suggested that I had based Sarah on myself. My discomfort over that is a good example of why I do my best to avoid knowing what BBs, chat lists, and reader reviews say about me or my work.)