Post #146 November 26, 2018

“Where Do You Get Those Crazy Ideas?”

In answer to the question above, I have a one-word answer: everywhere.  Ideas are the lifeblood of any storyteller and memorable ideas are particularly valuable.  Even a cursory look at the mechanics of storytelling should convince you that the basics haven’t changed since Og and Grog grunted at each other across a campfire in 1 million BC.  Have a memorable hero, give him a problem or put him in danger, twist the screws so that the danger gets worse, then our hero either overcomes the problem with heroic efforts or fails magnificently.  That hasn’t changed since humans became humans and started talking to each other.

What has changed are the ideas, the subject matter and some tweaks to technique.  Oh, and the media have changed as well, what with printing, radio, movies, TV, Facebook, Twitter, the coming of the ebook, etc.  But the basics of good storytelling really haven’t changed.  Why?  ‘Cause people haven’t changed that much.  Culture and technology change.  People…not so much.

I gave the title question some thought recently and came up with these answers to where do I get my crazy ideas.

1. Ideas come from life.  By this, I mean life as it is experienced or lived.  Say, you develop a close relationship with the bag guy at the grocery store.  You know he wants to get into the Army and you both have a great interest in military history.  Pretty soon, some of his life becomes material for a story.  Or he becomes a character in a story.  It’s happened to me.  All you need to gather ideas and material for a story from life is something that anyone has: curiosity and the ability to ask questions.  More specifically, you need the ability to look at a situation or a person and see the story possibilities in it.  Not every incident has story potential but many do and some can be expanded into a story.  I know someone in my Sunday school class who was born in Prague at the start of WWII and whose first memory as a child was being snatched off the cobblestone streets of Prague right in front of a Nazi tank.  Tell me there’s no story possibilities in that.  Be alert, be curious, and ask questions. 
2. Ideas come from other writers and their stories.   How many stories have the Star Trek and Star Wars universes spawned? Probably beyond count.  It’s okay to read another writer’s story, and see additional story possibilities in it.  Most writers don’t mind that, though some may be a little protective of their fictional universes.   This year, I had a game designer in California contact me about collaborating on a gamified version of my series Quantum Troopers.  I don’t believe anything will actually come of this but it is interesting. Often, you read a story you like and it gives you inspiration to take an off-ramp from that story to a world the writer left unexplored.  Other stories can often spark your imagination into flights of fancy, asking what if this happened?  What if so and so did this instead of that?  What if Roosevelt and Churchill had been kidnapped by aliens collaborating with Nazis…I actually considered that as a story once…fortunately, not for long.  Which leads me to…
3. Ideas can come from systematic imagination…extrapolation.  This is a further case of asking what if?  A good example is my series The Farpool Stories.  Way back in the early 1980s. I wrote a story called The Shores of Seome.  It had an oceanic world with a marine civilization of intelligent fish-like beings.  I was never able to place it so it was shelved for several decades.  But I was always intrigued with the setting and the question: how would intelligent fish live and what would their culture and technology be like?  Then I asked what if: what if far-flung descendants of humanity operating a military weapon on this ocean world created a whirlpool deep enough to be a sort of wormhole?  What if the fish people could use it to travel back and forth to Earth?  What if two teenagers saw this whirlpool off the coast of Florida and wound up being sucked into it and catapulted across six thousand light years to this ocean world?  What would happen? How would they react?  Thus: The Farpool.  And it ultimately evolved into five novels set in the same universe.
    
   That little two-word question what if? can be a powerful motivator for your imagination, if you pursue it far enough.  I want to explore the details of what I’m calling systematic imagination more in my next post to The Word Shed.
    
   That post comes on December 3, 2018.
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.