Philip Mann's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"
The Idea
A common question writers get is, where do the ideas come from. Another question is, gee, you must make a lot of money from this, but that's another post.
The ideas come from what we know; the people we know, the events we hear about, the education we have, our experiences, or from some mythology, such as vampires and the other stories.
Writers have the same background everybody else has, more or less. Stephen King was working in a hospital laundry, yet he writes these stories that are a combination of the human and the weird. J.K. Rowling worked as a waitress. Both, by the way, have left those modes of employment.
They, and other writers, saw something, or experienced something that simply grabbed their imagination and set it afire. And then they ran with it.
You do need to have an imagination, although drive and persistence both play vital roles. Working on the idea is key.
My own ideas came from the news. The first scene in Dark Muse came from an local event in Montreal, 2010, when a man stepped out of a bar and was never seen alive again.
The characters are modeled after people in my own family, although Vi is a fantasy, more or less.
The climax of the second book, The Gatekeeper, was also straight out of the news, an all too common clash between the police and a deranged person.
So, ideas are all around you. Writers live in the same world as anybody else.
Or maybe it's the water.
The ideas come from what we know; the people we know, the events we hear about, the education we have, our experiences, or from some mythology, such as vampires and the other stories.
Writers have the same background everybody else has, more or less. Stephen King was working in a hospital laundry, yet he writes these stories that are a combination of the human and the weird. J.K. Rowling worked as a waitress. Both, by the way, have left those modes of employment.
They, and other writers, saw something, or experienced something that simply grabbed their imagination and set it afire. And then they ran with it.
You do need to have an imagination, although drive and persistence both play vital roles. Working on the idea is key.
My own ideas came from the news. The first scene in Dark Muse came from an local event in Montreal, 2010, when a man stepped out of a bar and was never seen alive again.
The characters are modeled after people in my own family, although Vi is a fantasy, more or less.
The climax of the second book, The Gatekeeper, was also straight out of the news, an all too common clash between the police and a deranged person.
So, ideas are all around you. Writers live in the same world as anybody else.
Or maybe it's the water.
