“Where do you get ideas for books?”
I’ve been asked this question a lot, and I have to admit it bewilders me. I don’t know what actually spawns them, but the suckers are everywhere, like ants at a picnic, like wasps at a barbecue. They come to me in the night, born of dream fragments or of lying awake worrying about the state of the world and the creatures in it. They pop up out of books I’m reading. They lie in wait on pages of newspapers and magazines, on the TV screen, in snippets of casual conversation.
They love to present themselves when I’m on a writing deadline for another project. Those particular ideas emerge from the ether, floating around my head scattering fairy dust and singing a siren song of distraction.
I don’t know about your writer brain, but mine works like this:
I scan through Facebook, see a picture of an amazing underground cave that has plants growing in it, and I get an idea for a fantasy set in a subterranean world.
I see a story about a missing woman on the news, and I get a thriller idea about a woman who fakes her death and goes into hiding, probably to protect her family from the aliens who are blackmailing her.
I’m at work in the clinic and the doctor takes an extraordinarily long time in the room with a patient. I start wondering, “What if they’re both dead in there? If they were, how could it have been done?”
I walk outside and see icicles hanging from the eaves, beautiful but lethally sharp and pointy, and think they would make a fabulous murder weapon. Or we’re burning dead wood on a bonfire and I have the same thoughts about a sharp ended stick…
Oh, and the day we discovered new orders had been entered in the chart of a deceased patient? Clearly a zombie story with a humorous twist…
You get the idea. (Ha. See? Ideas lurk all over the place.)
The difficulty is not in finding ideas. What’s tricky is distinguishing a good idea from a bad idea.
In my younger days, if an idea hit me I used to just dive in and start writing, emerging from a creative frenzy only to realize that what seemed like sheer brilliance unrivaled in the history of mankind had fizzled out into nothing. Ah, youth. There was time for such foolishness then. I had a gazillion years in which to write every idea that came my way, and I wasn’t writing professionally. I had the hope of being published, but not the expectation. That is a very different sort of thing.
These days I need to be a little more selective.
Here are a few questions I use to decide whether a story idea is worth my time or not:
- If I write an idea down and leave it alone for a week, am I still excited about it when I look at it again?
- How much energy does the idea have? Is this an idea I’m going to want to spend the next year of my life writing, rewriting, editing, publishing, promoting – or if I commit will it start to feel like an ill-advised Vegas wedding?
- Are there actual plot possibilities? Can it support a story arc and a cast of characters? Or is it just a bit of fluff that might be fun to add into another idea?
- What are the odds that anybody else will want to read it? (Consider this one with caution. It’s impossible to predict what readers are going to latch onto, and trying to predict and follow trends is a quagmire.)
- How many times has it already been done? The truth is, most ideas have already been written in one way or another. If an idea burns in my writer soul like a little sun of inspiration, though, I’m going to write it anyway.
- Consider genre. If you’re writing purely for the sake of Art (which is a wonderful thing) discard this bit of advice. If you’re seeking publication, or are already published and want another contract, you’ve got to at least think about genre. Where does this idea fit in the grand scheme of things?
After you wisely consider all these things, if you’re like me at all you’ll still end up writing something like my Dead Before Dying – a weird, misfit paranormal-mystery-thriller-with-cozy- elements, born of a Twitter conversation and a joke about a geriatric vampire. And maybe, if it makes you happy, that’s okay.
Great post, Kerry! Can you take this farther? Which ideas do you jot down and why? How do you store them for retrieval later? Do you organize ideas into areas–ideas for titles, first lines, great characters, even greater plots? How do you move from “what if” to “here’s what’s happened?” Thanks for a creative start to my day.
This is so much like how my ideas come. I have a huge folder of ideas, some written on napkins or the back of envelopes so I won’t forget them. I’m trying to organize them better so I can decide which of those are stories, and which could fit in a story. I’m with you on all of it!
Fun post, Kerry! Loved this: … or if I commit will it start to feel like an ill-advised Vegas wedding? All I can say is, “Been there, done that.” I’m totally with you — if the excitement doesn’t inspire me to start writing notes in my night stand tablet, I let it rest until it does.
Awesome post, Kerry!! I’m playing with a new idea for a novel, so running it through your checklist is helpful!