Many authors with a certain amount of success get asked the ancient question “Where do you get your ideas from?” at least once in their lives. It is a time-honoured and noble tradition which I shall now wreck.
There are all kinds of sarcastic and inventive responses to this question, from Harlan Ellison’s “a shop in Schenectady” to Neil Gaiman’s bizarre account of an attic ritual involving black coffee, but after much research (in which I am the guinea pig) I’ve narrowed the sources of ideas down to:
1) Dreams: where the unconscious and the sub-conscious do bizarre things without your waking self to rein them in. Here you can have a conversation with that bank manager you always hated whilst halfway up a mountain running a fresh fish stall and juggling overripe cantaloupes. Your brain takes a little bit of everything it’s ever experienced or dreamed up by itself during the course of a day and throws it all into a proverbial mixer so you don’t have to.
2) Daydreams: your fantasies are a powerful tool to help you churn out your best writing. After all, if it’s not something you can’t help thinking about, chances are the readers will smell the half-assed effort you put in! These can be positive or negative daydreams. If there’s something that scares you and preys on your mind, and you want to turn it into a horror or thriller story, go for it.
3) Overheard Conversations and Weird Stuff People Say: Speaks for itself.
4) Media (books, TV, films, music, articles, plays, poetry): A writer once said to read like a butterfly and write like a bee. (Or was it write like a butterfly and read like a bee?) You take “nectar” (details, different ideas, what-if scenarios) from things you’ve read, watched, or listened to, and you then produce your “honey” (your own work) from it after processing it or fermenting it or whatever it is that bees do. (This is not the same as plagiarism, mark you — the work produced has to be different enough from what inspired it to be recognised as your original work.)
5) Your Own Life Experiences: handy if you’re writing an autobiography, but you can also mine events, details, and settings from your own memories, or other people’s memories of what happened to you, which brings me to…
6) Other People’s Experiences: handy if you’re doing a biography, but can also be used for fiction or poetry if you are prepared to change personal names, various events, and maybe set the story in a different location to protect the “characters” in question.
7) Confluence: mixing one thing with another (E.g. what if I put the Swiss Family Robinson into a spaceship from Star Trek?)
8) Solving Other Problems: sometimes, when trying to fix a plot hole or a flat scene in another piece of writing, another story or book gets born. This is a curse that seems to be peculiar to writers, possibly because stories have a way of running around and breeding like headless randy chickens.
Nightwalks 