“Where Do You Get All Those Crazy Ideas?”

Every writer has been asked this question from time to time.  Usually, the asker expects something like “Oh, I have a big idea machine in my closet.  When I need a new idea, I just spin it up and it spits out what I need.” Would that it was so.

Ideas for stories come from everywhere…that’s what I tell people.  In fact, when thinking about this, I was able to identify several broad categories of sources for story ideas. 

1. Ideas can come from living, from life itself.   We all watch the news, email and blog and talk with each other, observe what’s going in and are daily bombarded by life.  Our senses are flooded with sensations from waking up to drifting off to sleep.  Mix in some sensory inputs, stir in a few memories and add a spice of cogitation and thought, and voila!  Ideas.  Many times, if your mind has been wrestling with a story for a while, the idea will pop out unbidden, while you’re washing the dishes, posting to Facebook, taking out the trash, or in my case, swimming laps in the local pool.  Louis Pasteur once said ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’  To prepare your mind to receive ideas that are relevant to what you’re interested in, immerse yourself in the subject or the details.   Live with it.  Dream about it.  Wrestle with it.  Ideas will come.
2. Ideas can come from other stories.  In my short fiction collection Colliding Galaxies (available from Smashwords.com), there is a story entitled Designs.  I originally wrote this story in summer of 1979.  I had submitted the story around to a variety of markets and then I got one refusal that was interesting…it was from the old Omni magazine.  The editor said the piece wasn’t quite right for them but he liked the writing and suggested I had the makings of a pretty good novel.  Eventually the story wound up in my collection cited above but now I am seriously planning to expand this story into a full-length novel in the next few years.  The idea has stayed with me for all this time and it still won’t go away.  The story is about a far-future architect.  What would architects of the 24^th century build? Not just buildings and cities, but whole worlds.  This idea came from a story I did a long time ago and it still intrigues me enough to do some basic story planning for the not-too-distant future. 
    
   Just to belabor the point, British sf author Stephen Baxter has just published a novel entitled The Massacre of Mankind.  In this story, as I understand the reviews, Baxter has taken H.G. Wells’ story War of the Worlds and done a sequel, set maybe ten years later, with more characters, a more involved story and some surprising plot twists. 
    
   Writers beg, borrow, steal, filch, purloin and appropriate each other’s ideas all the time.  It goes with the territory.   Don’t think twice about it.  But do check the copywrite dates. 
    
3. Ideas can come from questions.   My most recent sf novels, The Farpool and The Farpool: Marauders of Seome, both come from a novel I wrote in the early 80’s called The Shores of Seome.  I was intrigued from the beginning with what kind of intelligent civilization might develop as a completely marine, underwater civilization.  I asked questions:  What would their lives be like?  What kind of technology would they develop?  What would they believe in?  What would they enjoy and what would they dislike?  I asked a million questions, played years of what-if? And out of these questions came two novels and plans for more, in a series.  The world of science fiction is the what-if genre beyond all others. 
    
   What if an intelligent monolith appeared before a tribe of ancient hominids?  Sir Arthur C. Clarke asked this and produced 2001: A Space Odyssey as one answer (from his original short story The Sentinel).   
    
   What if a mentally challenged man were given an unproven drug that could enhance his mind and boost his IQ?  Daniel Keyes asked this and gave us Flowers for Algernon.
    
   What if young men were trained as soldiers and sent off to war against some kind of malevolent alien enemy?  Robert Heinlein asked this and gave us Starship Troopers. 
    
   Ideas for stories are like molecules of oxygen in the atmosphere.  They’re everywhere, all around us, available to be breathed in and converted into tales that can ennoble and entertain us.  You just have to keep breathing and take everything in, then sift and sort until the right one comes out.
    
   Live your life, read a lot, ask questions and observe and note everything.  That’s how you get ideas for stories. 
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on October 16.  In this post, I’ll tackle the art of writing book descriptions, encapsulating the story in a few well-chosen sentences. 
    
   See you then.
    
   Phil B.