Current Project: Shadows, Inc. (working title)Status: Chapter One
Where do you get your ideas? That's perhaps the most common question a writer is asked by readers. I've read/heard other writers respond to that question in various ways and my favorite responses are always humorous, because really, how do you answer that question?
I think I've said before that I can usually remember what prompted certain stories -- trace a story's genesis, so to speak. But sometimes, it isn't so cut and dried. Sometimes things just spring unexpectedly out of seeming nowhere. That's when the answer to the question of where ideas come from sounds particularly inane to the person asking -- "They just come to me."
My mother would know the answer. She'd tell you that they come from my "overactive imagination" (and she'd mean that in a good way). As a child I was always making up worlds and people and living their stories. I remember one summer when I was about 8 when my backyard became the encroaching Ice Age and I hunted the Woolly Mammoth on my trusty steed. You see, I'd just read a children's book called "First to Ride" and not even the heat of summer in Sacramento could melt the ice and cold I could see in my head.
I think my imagination needs to be fed and nurtured on a regular basis in order to produce those wonderful ideas that seem to spring from nowhere. At least, that's what I'm telling myself after this last week while my husband was out of town and I was alone in the house with the cats.
For the most part I was fine; I enjoy being on my own. I had a few odd things happen, though, that raised the hair on the back of my neck and caused my heart to jump. Every once in a while, when the house was quiet and I was in just the right spot, I thought I heard people talking. It was just a susurration, like the whisper of the wind through the trees, but I could swear I heard voices. Each time it happened, I opened windows and looked outside, but there was no one around. The weirdest was late one night when I was in the bottom of the stairwell that leads down to the garage--the enclosed stairwell that's in the middle of the house--and definitely heard several very faint voices. I couldn't make out words, but I know what I heard. Rationally, I know that what I was hearing had to have a reasonable explanation, but where's the fun in that? This house isn't old enough to be haunted and, besides, that's not where I wanted my imagination to go while I was alone. There was another direction, though, that not only was less...spooky...but also dovetailed nicely with my WIP. The book I'm currently working on has to do with quantum dimensions (alternate dimensions). My trusty imagination sped into overdrive. What if the locations where I heard the "voices" were spots where the walls between dimensions were thin (or, worse, breaking down)? What if what I was hearing was "bleed-through" from other dimensions? What implications would that have for my WIP? I hadn't specifically considered this possibility before, but I'm guessing that it was percolating somewhere in the primordial soup of my imagination all this time.
In fact, I'm considering adopting that as my answer for the "where do you get your ideas" question. My answer: "From the primordial soup of my imagination." LOL
What about you? What surprise has your imagination cooked up for you lately?
7 comments:
Great blog, Deborah, and something to ponder. I often ask myself the same question. My ideas come from all over the place. Sometimes they're based on an actual news story, or a spin off of something else I've read, or just an exploration of something that made me curious.
I like certain "kinds" of stories, so that will often set me off imagining a plot or character to write about. For example, I loved The Big Chill and wanted to write a reunion of friends story ala King's IT, so I wrote a story about 4 friends who reunite after the 5th friend dies. Each friend has a psychic gift and are stalked by the same killer. It was a fun book to write, though it's still languishing on my hard drive.
Knight's Curse was one of those stories where I explored the character first, then created a plot based on her past. I wanted a strong heroine who was different, who came from an unknown culture in the far past, and that's how I developed a modern day knight who's descended from The Order of the Hatchet, an order of female knights the Crusades. There really was such an order way back then, I just augmented it using my imagination.
My stories develop in a variety of ways, sometimes pure fiction, sometimes based in fact, sometimes a conglomeration of many things. That's what makes storytelling so fun.
So if someone asks me where I get my ideas, I can tell them specifically where the idea for each book came from, but they're not all from the same place.
I like Karen's answers. MY books come from the same sorts of places and like you, Debbie, when I'm working on a book, all sorts of new ideas influence the direction it will take and everything seems to get viewed through the lens of that particular story.
I would rather answer the question of where my ideas come from than I would the next question that usually pops up: What's your book about?
Oh, ack, I never know how to say what my book is about. I hate that question, it's just painful. If you get all esoteric it sounds off putting and if you try to say something about the plot it gets all complicated. I used to try to come up with a single word like, Revenge. Trust. Sisters. Kidnapping, running the gambit from ideas to hard fact, and it still never seemed good.
I think I digressed...
Fun, thought provoking blog!
LOL, Debbie! I think you're onto something with your response to the often asked question of where do you get your ideas. Much more polite than blurting out, where don't you get ideas?
It's interesting about you hearing voices in your house when you were alone. Perhaps they just wanted to reassure you that you weren't really alone. And perhaps the separation of "dimensions" isn't really physical but only in our minds. So nice that your experience triggered ideas for your current story. :)
Oh, yikes, Debbie, I got so caught up in my own angst that I forgot to mention those voices you heard! I wonder where they were coming from.
Debbie -- you probably already thought of this, but I was just outside and I heard voices -- the neighbors had a TV or radio turned up very high but only snippets of it came through.
Maybe? (Not as good as thinning dimension walls -- and now that you mention those walls, what if their collapsing signaled a huge problem for the worlds that would collide? Sorry, but you were talking about imagination and your story line has captured me!)
"From the primordian soup of my imagination."
I LOVE THAT!!!!!!
I loathe this question as well, because I never seem to have a "good" answer. But like Alice, I loathe the "what's your book about?" question more. Ack...whenever I start describing one of my books, it sounds so...convoluted, I wonder how the heck it ever sold.
But that's not what you wanted to know. You wanted to know where I got my ideas. And the simple answer is...I have no flippin' clue. Sometimes it's from watching the Discovery Channel, or National Geographic...as is the case with the proposal I just sent my agent. I got the idea from a show DH and I watched about the 2012 upcoming galactic alignment. Sometimes it's from a news snippet...as is the case with STOLEN HEAT. I saw a short news segment about Egyptian treasures being ransacked. Sometimes it's one teeny tiny comment someone makes in passing that spurs an idea...as in the case of my new paranormal series. I was reading blog comments at the Bradford Bunch one day, and they were talking about heroes. One girl said, "Man, I wish someone would write a book about the heroes from Greek mythology. That would be hot." And voila...an idea was born.
More and more though...I don't really know. Ideas are always popping. And unless I sit down and really think about it (like I did here), I'd have no idea what one thing stimulated a book. (As is the case with STOLEN SEDUCTION. I still have no clue where that book came from.)
And on the topic of your voices...that would totally wig me out! But I love your alternate dimensions explanation. LOLOL. That is a GREAT one.
I'm back from the boonies and I have internet!!!!!! For those that care, my wonderful antenna I took out there didn't work and the weather was so nasty (I'm on the edge of the frequency zone) I couldn't get a connection where I usually do. Anyway the mainline burst last night and the dh told me since it was raining and snowing to just come home. Which I did without being asked twice through a whiteout snow storm!
Anyway, Great post Debbie! And I loved your voices and how you used it in your WIP. I hear voices every once in a while and I never thought it could be a thin barrier between dimensions... Mostly because my brain doesn't think that way, I think of the past and that someone is trying to tell me their story- like a ghost.
As for where I get my ideas- from every where! Books, magazines, TV, newspapers, my research, songs, people, and the radio. I've gleaned a story idea from everything around me at one point or another. One story cropped up form what an old person told me about their adolescent life. I think when you are a writer you are always open to images and ideas that can congeal in your mind and form into a story.
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