One of the questions I get asked often is 'where do you get your ideas?' and
to be honest it's one of the hardest questions to answer. Ideas are easy to
come by, they pop in when I'm least expecting them and can surprise me
sometimes, they're the easiest bit of writing - but know where they come from
is a whole other thing.
Ideas Can Come From Anywhere
News - When a report on the TV tells of a man being stabbed after an argument,
or a woman being attacked in the dead of night I wonder what happened and my
writer brain goes into overdrive. From one report I can have 5 or 6 new ideas.
TV Shows - I can be inspired by serial killer shows, one of my favourites is
Dexter, or just a show with a mystery, nothing to do with death. It's a bit of
a knife edge when you're inspired by shows though, you don't want to copy the
idea they came up with but your own has legs.
You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.
Neil Gaiman
Washing the dishes - Most of my ideas come to me when I'm doing something
mundane. My mind wanders, I glance to the side of the sink and spy a knife and
my writer mind goes 'aha!' and spins a tale. Or I'll be changing the bedding
wishing I could just hide away from the cleaning and BAM! Another idea.
Ideas can trickle in, little snippets or images come together to form a whole
story. They can hit me like freight train - BOOM! Or they just pop into my
head, sitting there nagging me until I put them down on paper.
Ideas are Easy
Some writers say an idea needs to be interesting, it needs to have appeal in
some why but I think it's not necessarily the idea that has to be interesting.
For example my short story Where To Hide came from the idea of standing in
front of the kitchen sink and hearing a boom. The story naturally grew from
there. There's nothing very interesting about standing in front of the kitchen
sink - but what the boom was, where it came from, and who caused it, can
inspire a whole range of new ideas. Even now as I write I'm hit with new ideas
from that same start.
I don't know where the ideas come from. I make them up, like Neil Gaiman says
"Out of my head." Whether it's imagination, creative brain, or something
inherent, I don't know but I'm going to utilise it as much as possible.
Writing is Hard
So yes, it's easy coming up with ideas - it's probably the easiest part of
writing. It's the next bit that's difficult.
Creating characters.
A storyline.
A believable plot.
Writing word after word...
...wishing I could just hide away from the cleaning and BAM! Another idea.
That's the hard bit.
Staring at a blank page is the scariest part of my day. Wondering whether the
inspiration will come to write word after word, wondering if the storyline
will be coherent, hoping beyond hope that that page doesn't stay blank.
And then there's tidying up a first draft - oh boy! This is the stage I'm at
now and it's terrifying but exciting at the same time. I get to work on my
writing and improve it, change it around and make the plot lines work
better.
Ideas come easily, it's the writing that's the hard bit.
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