The single most common question people ask writers — especially SF/F writers — is “Where do you get your ideas?” The assumption always seems to be that ideas are hard to come by.
But it’s not really the ideas themselves that are hard. For instance, anyone can sit down and come up with a grocery list. The trouble is that “broccoli, milk, hamburger buns, toilet paper” is not normally perceived as story material. But as soon as you ditch that perception and start looking at the possibilities, it changes. So a normal grocery list doesn’t seem much like story material…what sort of list could be story material? “Broccoli, vardun swela, skim milk, flies-in-amber, eggs.” OK–what’s vardun swela? Why are flies-in-amber on the list — is that some new weird food, or does it really mean amber with flies in it? Who (or what) is eating that amber and vardun-whatever-it-is: is it company (long-term house guests, or dinner party?), or does this person have a housemate/significant other/family member/pet who isn’t human, or is the list-writer the one who’s not human and it’s the company/SO/etc. who needs the “special” (normal) food? How did the list-writer get into whatever situation requires buying this odd mix of foods? How important is it? Is he going to have a hard time finding vardun swela, or is it carried everywhere now? Is it an expensive import, or the equivalent of cat food? Why does he want it? Who did this list, anyway?
And the next thing you know, you’ve got a story about a college boy at Roswell University whose dorm room is haunted by the ghost of an alien that won’t leave until it gets a proper meal…or a harried woman planning her first dinner party with her daughter’s prospective in-laws, who happen to be elves…or a future diplomat engaged in touchy negotiations with some aliens, who is trying to get his stomach used to their food (which tastes and smells like rotten eggs) before the big banquet tomorrow night…or whatever else strikes your fancy. From contemplating a grocery list.
The trick is teaching yourself to look at everyday things this way (it doesn’t come naturally to everyone, not even to all writers). Creative brainstorming is one way of training it, and it’s the most fun if you get a group together, though you can do it alone. You pick a topic, or open a dictionary and pick two random words, or have everyone in the room write down a one-sentence character description, a one-sentence description of an object, and an action on separate pieces of paper. Mix the words or sentences or topics in a bowl and draw two or three; then set a timer for ten minutes and begin writing a list of ideas and associations and possible plots.
What you’re trying to do here is stir things up. If you focus too hard on “getting an idea,” you probably won’t come up with anything — like those times when somebody says “Where shall we go for dinner?” and you suddenly cannot for the life of you think of the name of a single restaurant, not even McDonalds. If you just look slantwise at normal, everyday things, it becomes a habit after a while, and pretty soon you have more ideas than you know what to do with.
Anything can be the start of a story, if you look at it right…but you have to be looking at it, not at “I want a story.” It’s how you look at things, not what things you look at.
There are the times that one isn’t even intending to look slant-wise, but does so anyway. When, for example, one imagines a person crouched on a roof, but the reasons the person is crouched on the roof cannot possibly be ordinary.
Elfish inlaws over for dinner. Now that is a great idea. 🙂 I love you observations in this post. I know exactly what you mean about the way a person’s mind goes blank when they try to think too hard about something.
For me, the difficult part isn’t coming up with an idea to start with, it is continually coming up with idealettes that keep the story interesting, i.e. Ok, so you’ve got a diplomat trying to get his stomach accustomed to stuff…now what? You have to come up with ideas for things like what sort of aliens these are, why he decided to be an extra-terrestrial diplomat, what he has to avoid doing lest he terribly offend these aliens, plus things like how they react when he does offend them and then, of course, the idea for how to tie this whole mess into a coherent story, that either has a point or is gosh-darned entertaining or both.
I’m with Ilse – the big idea is great and I have great internal ideas, but my biggest current challenge is getting enough action going through idealettes (love the term!) without getting melodramatic or cliche.
Not worrying too much about it right now, however – getting it right will happen in the edit.
Idealetts! Ilse that’s a great word. I’ll have to remember it.
I’m having trouble just getting my head around the concept that action in a book is made up of idealettes. I think that after diligent pondering, I can sort of maybe grasp it. In which case, I can only say that I go shopping for plot development ideas very differently than I do starting story ideas.
It’s like my starting ideas I don’t actually shop for at all. I’m wandering down the street and I see something in a store window, and I can’t resist it, so I buy it even though I have no clue what I’m going to use it for yet.
But then one day I’m strolling along and I see something that would go just perfectly with one of the other things I own, if only I had x, y and z to go with them both, so then I head out looking for x, y and z. Finding x, y and z is both harder and easier. Easier, because you know what you are looking for, and harder because, well, you know what you are looking for — it’s no longer a case where any random cool item will do. So you have to diligently hunt for x, y and z, where you merely had to recognize as something worth having the initial starting ideas.
So I guess I see three potential weak points a writer could have that might need work. There’s recognizing good ideas when they wander across them, there’s realizing what else is needed to make those starting ideas work as actual stories, and then there is hunting up the missing elements.
Except that this isn’t how I usually think about it at all.
I usually think of developing a plot as building the story proper out of the story stuff I already have in my starting idea. I know I end up with a lot more than what I started with, but it hardly ever feels to me like I’m going out and getting something new. It’s more like when I need something more, I just look deeper into what I have, and the deeper I look, the more stuff is already there just waiting for me to find.