Where do you get your ideas?
That’s probably the number-one question asked of all writers. In response to that question, author Agatha Christie once had this to say:
“The temptation is great to reply: ‘I always go to Harrods,’ or ‘I get them mostly at the Army & Navy Stores,’ or, snappily, ‘Try Marks and Spencer.’â€
This is often a writer’s viewpoint—for the simple reason that authors’ heads are invariably stuffed so full of ideas that could be turned into stories that it’s difficult for them to imagine that other people’s heads aren’t equally brimming with characters and plots longing to escape into the real world.
Christie went on to declare:
“The universal opinion seems firmly established that there is a magic source of ideas which authors have discovered how to tap.â€
There is, in fact, just such a source—and although it may seem magic and even mysterious to those who aren’t writers, the truth is that it’s not, because the real Idea Store is simply, as Christie herself observed, nothing more than one’s “own head.†What sets authors apart is just that they tend to think differently from other people.
If a non-writer were to see an elderly gentleman sitting on a park bench somewhere, mumbling to himself, she might think: Poor old man…he must be lonely or perhaps not all there anymore…how sad. And then she would walk on, now thinking about running late for an appointment at her doctor’s office or whether her son Johnnie had made the football team at today’s tryouts.
An author, however, seeing the same elderly gentlemen on the park bench, might think: Poor old man, he must be lonely or perhaps not all there anymore. But what if neither of those things were true? What if he turned out to be some eccentric scientist who had been missing for years? Maybe he was working on something really important—a top-secret formula—and enemies of our government were after it. In order to try and get it, they broke into his house one night, scuffled with him, conked him on the head, and left him for dead. They ransacked the place, broke into his computer and safe, stole all his notes, and decamped. But he wasn’t actually dead, merely knocked unconscious. But still, when he came to, he had amnesia, couldn’t remember a thing, not even his own name. Stunned and disoriented, he wandered out of his house and disappeared. A search ensued, but he was never found. Now, suddenly, today, he was mugged in the park and conked on the head again. As a result, his memory has abruptly returned. He’s mumbling his formula to himself. He was previously something of a rebel, and our government had had difficulty controlling him, getting him to do all his work at the office or laboratory or wherever it is that scientists invent their formulas. I’ll worry about all the details later. But no matter what our government thought, he was still careful. Fearing he was being spied on before, he had written nothing but gibberish on his computer and put false documents in his safe. His real research was in his head. But no one knew that. It was his little joke on our government. He was brilliant, had a photographic memory, and had destroyed all his genuine notes after he had read them and committed them to memory. I could write half the story as a flashback, showing his past, what led up to the night his house was broken into, make him younger, give him a girlfriend who has never married, because she’s still in love with him—readers always love a good romance. Or maybe she is married now, so she has to make a choice…yes, that’s even better, because it will create more conflict, but of course, he’ll wind up with her at the end, or maybe he won’t. No, he will, because I really don’t want to write a downer (I’ll have to make her husband a brute or something, so she has a good reason to leave him). And the formula, although important previously, will be vital now, and it’s yet to be developed, because he’s still the only person who knows what it is…. Good grief! Is it really ten till three? I was supposed to be at the doctor’s office twenty minutes ago, and I’ve got to pick Johnnie up after the tryouts today…I hope he made the football team…he’s worked so hard. Wouldn’t it be bizarre if that elderly gentleman on the park bench really did turn out to be an eccentric scientist who had disappeared…?
Seeing an elderly gentleman on a park bench has sent the writer to the “Idea Store.†Did s/he tap into some magic source? That’s what readers will decide if and when the author actually writes the story.
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Dead on!
So true. I was on vacation with my kids last week and we were approaching a restaurant and had this thought of what would happen if there was a madman camped outside picking off people as they came out of the place. And what if it was a horribly stormy night and the power had been cut by a falling tree. So now these people are trapped in the restaurant, the back door is blocked and they have to find a way out. The police can’t get there because this place is in a secluded spot and the road was washed out from the storm. There’s this guy on the inside of the place who wants to help but his wife won’t let him. He tells her that she can’t stop him and he helps. Then there’s this woman who goes into labor. A child who wants to go home and get his dog and a couple who is fighting all the time. The hero ends up being the dish washer who is earning money because he wants to travel to Europe to visit his grandfather who hasn’t talked to his father in years.
Then the waiter came and took our order and my kids started asking questions. Maybe I’ll write it at some point.
Perfect! It’s what I call “what-if” thinking. We writers have license to look at anything and everything and think, “What if…..”
When I was a kid my father could tell by looking at my face that I’d gone off somewhere on an imagination journey in my head after seeing something.
Oh, so completely true!
And it’s next to impossible to explain to a “normal” person why you have entire village’s-worth of characters living in your head, talking to you and each other in such a way that you can tune out the real world entirely.
This goes hand in hand when my husband looks over my shoulder to read something I’m working on, only to ask, “How in the world do you come up with this stuff? You aren’t a world champion ski instructor!”
LOL! OMG–I do EXACTLY that! My mom used to think I was insane. I’d see some girl looking out a house window and say something like, “What if she’s being held hostage in there? Because some crazy man kidnapped her in Australia, but her parents didn’t care because she’s insane. And she killed the man but can’t get out of the house because he locked it from the inside, and now she’s starving and forced to eat his–”
“Larissa! Knock it off. You’re scaring your brother.”
Yeah, that’s about how seeing a man on a park bench went in my house…:wink:
I’m SO there.
Even as a child, I used to watch people and make up stories about who they were and what they were doing.
Definitely a people watcher.
Excellent post, Rebecca! You nailed it
A few weeks ago I was driving home really late on a weeknight and I had to go through some quiet country roads. And I stopped at a light and a man crossed the street in front of me.
Now, what is a man doing out walking at 11:00 on a Tuesday when it isn’t even nice out? He didn’t have a dog. He was by himself. There was nothing around, no coffee shops, no houses. What – WHAT was he doing, I ask you??
I was up for hours with that one. I’ll come up with the answer one day.
That is SO how I think when I come up with my ideas. Only with aliens and vampires and werewolves, oh my! I started cracking up when I read this post, thinking, “Great. It’s not just me who’s wired funny.”
lol!
Perfect!
Ecxept the voice in my head while I think like that resembles Goo from Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.
You mean not everyone has people clamoring around in their minds? No stories needing to be told?
I’ve always had charcters running roughshod through my mind. Can’t imagine any other way. Scary. And lonely. So what do “normal” people think about?
All…thanks! I’m glad you enjoyed this post. As you can no doubt imagine, I had a lot of fun writing it.
For me, it has always been places alive with history. Museums are particularly dangerous, plotbunnies lurking in every corner.
A letter of marque, issued by the magistrate of Wismar in the late 14th century, for ‘all men, noble or peasant, willing to fight for the Duke of Mecklenburg’. Memories of the Störtebekker legend (a famous German pirate who got turned into some sort of Robin Hood – which he wasn’t).
On the way home to my hotel, I had a novel. A younger nobleman, let’s call him Ansgar, who doesn’t get along with his brother, accepts such a letter. He has ideals, does really want to support the duke, but gets more and more involved in pirate life until he one day sees his name on a Wanted list and is shocked about what he’s gotten into. But he has friends among the pirates, and he can’t just leave them and get back to normal. The Teutonic Knights have been employed to deal with the pirate nests around the Baltic Sea for good, and one of their leaders is Ansgar’s friend…
It’s in my Future Project files.
One of my current projects has been triggered by an exhibition as well, another by a History Channel report and an attractive looking Gothic warrior.
Larissa,
write that book about the locked in girl eating body parts, please.
It’s funny, I never really thought of it that way, but this is exactly what I do as well. I don’t always connect it to writing, but the littlest event will send me thinking ‘what would happen if.’ And it’s so hard to believe that other people don’t have this clutter in their head!
My ideas tend to stalk me, lol. Can’t stop them from coming. Which is a good thing. But yeah, I agree, that question is too common. Where don’t I get my ideas?