Where do you get your ideas?

For a long time I would laugh whenever I heard a writer complain of a reader asking this question. I stopped laughing the day it happened to me. I was on holiday in Tuscany in a hotel largely taken over by British visitors. I avoided the conversations involving work and questions of what everyone did for a living as long as I could. After all, when on holiday why talk about work? I also strongly feel that a person isn’t necessarily shaped by what they do for a living. If a person is lucky enough to make their hobby their career, then perhaps there’s some truth to be found in how a person earns their income. However, many people work in jobs they detest. They do what they need to do to pay the bills, and have to regulate what they love to do to hours outside of the office. This applies to most writers, but that’s another subject.

So, when a woman asked me what I ‘do’, sheer devilment took hold of me and I said “I’m a writer.” This is the truth and it’s closer to who I am than anything I’ve had to do keep a roof over my head or put food on the table. Her eyes positively lit up.

“I’ve never met a writer before,” she said. “Where DO you get your ideas?”

And right there I found myself speechless. Totally unprepared, I had no idea how to answer her. In truth, there is no definitive answer to this question. The truth is that ideas come from anywhere and everywhere. You will get an idea from something someone said, something you read, or something you saw. You might file an event away and it won’t be until days, weeks, months, sometimes years later, when something else occurs, and then your mind makes a connection so that suddenly you have a story.

I don’t know if everyone has this ability to make seemingly random connections or if writers are simply people who are aware of this skill and choose to use it. In any case, writers appear to see the world a little differently. People often accuse writers of living in a fantasy world, and yet many writers appear to see the world as a stark reality. Writers see all the good and bad in the world for without conflict there is no story. They are always cataloging information in their minds or on paper to use at some undefined time. Writers also play the ‘What If’ game.

Perhaps the easiest way is to show by example. Take my m/m contemporary book “Snow Angel.” Check out this page at Loose-Id to read the prologue that the publisher chose as an excerpt. The prologue was primarily the whole basis of my story. I saw someone walking along a road and mistaking a person’s identity. I thought ‘what if’ I created a brother and sister with similar features and this guy grabbed the wrong person?

With “Uly’s Comet”, which was the start of my Swithin Chronicles trilogy -- the third book scheduled for the beginning of April -- I simply saw a man sitting on a bench in open parkland and a thief about to creep up on him. I had no idea as to the identity of these characters, or the thief’s sex, let alone their sexuality. Then a few weeks later, I was looking through a baby-naming book in search of a name for another completely unrelated project, and I came across a word: Shavar (meaning Comet). At once, I knew the identity of the man sitting on the bench as well as why he sat there. I then asked myself questions as to what could be different about his race. I created the Swithin who freely take lovers of either sex. That idea filled in the missing pieces. I would set a few rules that the Swithin prince had to live by then lay temptation in his path. One reader remarked that the comet books are a cross between Prince and the Pauper meets Arabian Nights. The comparison hadn’t occurred to me until someone brought it to my attention, but it makes me smile and laugh.

There’s a school of thought that you can write a story from someone just giving you a few unrelated words. Maybe even a single word. The flash fiction pieces the Loose-Id authors write here proves the theory. You can also write from a title only. My very first published short story came from a five-word title.

So, the simple answer to where writers get their ideas from is anywhere and everywhere. However, there’s nothing simple about it. There’s a reason they call life stranger than fiction. Ideas bombard us every day. A writer is someone with the ability to see where worlds collide and people or events connect in new, interesting, and unpredictable ways. Happy Reading!

Sharon Maria Bidwell
aonia - where the muses live
http://www.sharonbidwell.co.uk
http://www.myspace.com/aonia