“Where do you get your ideas?” is probably the most-asked question writers get, and one of the reasons writers hate getting it is because it can actually be fairly hard to answer. Oh, not if the person asking the question is a semi-interested reader who’s more interested in making conversation than in any kind of realistic answer – those folks are usually satisfied with throwaways like “From a post office box in Schenectady.” But when an actual would-be writer asks in all seriousness…then it gets hard.
It’s hard partly because not only is every writer different, both in their general process and in the specifics of how-they-do-it, but nearly every story is different. It’d be a lot easier if I could hand the eager or desperate young writers a card with a post office box number on it, but I can’t. So here are some other things to look at.
In the long term, getting ideas is a matter of how you look at the world. I’ve posted about this before, so I won’t go into great detail here, but basically it’s a matter of not taking the ordinary for granted. You can find stories in commonplace things, from grocery lists to car repairs, if you look at them slantwise and ask yourself the right questions. (“Right” in this case being whatever sorts of questions make your backbrain start giving off little sparks. For some writers, those are character-related questions, like “where does the alien embassy get its groceries, anyway?” or “what is a dark dwarf doing fixing people’s cars?”; for others, the questions are plot-related, or theme-related, or…whatever. You have to figure out for yourself what angle you approach things from, but once you do, it’s usually not too much trouble to keep doing it. In fact, once you learn how, it’s hard to turn the dratted thing off.)
In the short term, though, people are impatient. Also, a lot of folks haven’t ever learned how to brainstorm, or even how to just poke around looking for possible ideas. Heck, a lot of folks haven’t the first idea where to go to start poking. So here are some suggestions.
A lot of writers are very verbal (big surprise), so one of the logical places to start looking for ideas is with words. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of places on the web and elsewhere that will provide “writing prompts” – short suggestions to get you going. Or you can make up your own; a really popular one used to be to open a dictionary twice at random, take the first word at the top of the first page and the last word at the bottom of the second page, and see what you could come up with to link them all together. Another is to take several of your favorite poems and pull out six or eight phrases (three to four words each) that really appeal to you, write them on cards and dump them in a jar, pull two, and come up with something that ties them together.
For writers who are more aural than verbal, songs and music can be a similar sort of idea-trigger. One can get even more direct and take one of the many songs (modern or traditional) that tells a story in six dense verses, and expand it into ten pages of prose, or even into a novel. (Fairy tales work fine for that, too, but that’s back to words.) Quite a few writers I know have gone so far as to assemble play lists of songs that “fit” whatever story they’re currently writing, to keep them in the right mood while they work.
Pictures and photos can trigger a writer’s imagination, too, whether they’re ones you took yourself, or things you’ve found on the web or in an old shoebox at a garage sale. Objects, too – “Why on earth would anyone buy that?” can be a perfectly good story-trigger, and so can “The people who put together this garage sale must be aliens…wait a minute…”
Everybody has thoughts like that; the trick is to slow them down so that you notice whenever you think “That is so weird” or “I don’t understand why anyone would…” or “What were they thinking?” And then, once you’ve noticed, to come up with a possible explanation or answer, or even just a mental picture of the sort of person who is that weird, who would do that, and who was thinking…something interesting.
Fanfiction aside, other people’s stories can actually be a pretty good place to look for ideas, too. Nottaking someone else’s background or plot or characters and redoing them, but looking at the things you’d put in, or do differently, and then dropping all of their characters and background and plot and riffing off just those missing/different bits that appeal to you. Change the characters and setting, and you have a brand-new story, even if the source material is recognizable. It worked for West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet), and for Working Girl (Cinderella), and for countless other things.
And one of my favorite methods is to take two characters from completely different stories – Prince Hamlet, say, and Darth Vader – change their names, and throw them into the setting from a third story (Lord of the Rings, maybe, or Oz) and see what happens.
That’s the first half of the answer to the “where do you get your ideas?” question, and it’s what most people want to know when they ask it. It is not, however, all that they need to know…that’s for the next post, on Sunday. 🙂
One I’ve used for settings in game worlds is to take a historical event that you don’t know the background reasons on and riff on the why.
I’ve used the Boston molasses tank failure, various crimes, etc. I think I got the idea originally from one of the various fantasy books that tie into alternate histories. Influenze of 1917, I think.
Dropping characters from alternate realities into your background is fun. Especially if you have a mythology background and riff an aspect of something – free motivation and background!
Terry Pratchett came up with a whole novel from wondering, “What does the tooth fairy do with all those teeth?”
Scrubbing the serial numbers off an idea in another story, and whittling it down to the essence of what you are inspired by, is a trick and a half in itself.
If it’s ok with you, I would love to hear about the specific origins of your novels in a future post(s) – plus any other “director’s cut”-type information you’d care to include. I enjoy all your writing-mechanics explanations even though I don’t write myself, but the post I liked best was probably the one about _Daughter of Witches_ as a learning exercise in tight third-person viewpoint, because it gave background information on the book.
Thanks for writing the blog and the books!
My personal favorite is, “What would happen if…..”
I’ve had days where I play with ideas, coming up with a whole seen length (about 30 lines) of workable story ideas. I got this exercise from Jane Espenson of Buffy/Battlestar Galactica/Torchwood fame.
I also never write down any of my ideas as they occur to me because I know I’d overwhelm myself with them so take it nice and slow, asking my muse for an idea only when I need it. She’s very prompt at replying fortunately.
LyraJane – There’s an old saying that there are only two stories: 1) Someone Leaves Home and 2) A Stranger Comes To Town. For fantasy and science fiction, #2 is really common, because it gives you a good reason for the main character not to know things that everybody else does, so you can fill the reader in on the background at the same time.
David – Really looking at things everyone else takes for granted and asking “why” or “how does this work, really” is a way of generating stories that a lot of writers get so in the habit of using that they don’t even think about it any more.
Mary – Yes, but there are some tricks to it. I’ll get around to that part eventually, I promise!
Kate – I’ll try to remember that. There’s a fine line between giving my blog readers insight into how I wrote my books, and bragging and puffing them off constantly. And not only do I find the latter irritating when other writers do it, I was raised in typical Midwestern fashion, which means that a high complement is “Well, I guess this isn’t too bad” and “bragging” is defined as saying “I think this came out fairly decent.”
Alex – I kept a mental to-write list for a long time; when it got past about ten stories I wanted to do, I started writing them down. But they have to be more than floating proto-ideas to get on the list; they have to be things that really truly look like they’re going to grow up to be stories one day. I have a separate list of things that set off little sparkles in my backbrain – not the sparkles themselves, but the instigators. Titles of poems, phrases, music, names of pictures (or snaps of the pictures themselves, if they’re available on the Internet), jokes, news headlines…just anything that made me think “Hmm, there’s a story there.” It’s not usually obvious to anyone else why something is on the list, but it works for me.
Hey, I just finished The Seven Towers, it was a joy to read but it seemed kind of unfinished. Do you have any plans to pick up that story again? I am also very excited for your new book this August. Effie is such a great character.
Thanks,
Sarah
I’ve been thinking about what I wrote and realized that I’m wrong. I have a list of my next seven story ideas noted down in my business planning file and with each of those ideas I have a very clear idea of the story and even how I’ll go about getting the story down (for example, one is to spend a month in the foothills of the Pyrenees “interviewing” the trees, streams and hidden corners). So, yeah, I do write things down but not in detail. 😉
I was looking for something to read last week, and had just finished a book that depressed me immensely, went to Amazon, and looked you up and Caroline Stevermer. I realized there was a novel (Mislaid Magician) that I had missed, after I sorted through the omnibus/portmanteau editions.
I do love those collections of letters, and I recall once you talked about the HOW of that particular method “alternating letters from each author’s characters”, (FIDONet SF Echo?, Armadillocon? WorldCon, 1997, San Antonio?). But how do you bring it to a close, or put in a particular plot point, or is that JUST NOT DONE?
More Lyran novels would get my dollars, too. Not that ’13th Child’ is not a neat idea, was just hoping for “more, faster, more of the same but different”.
Nice how retiring frees up more time to read, huh?