David Healey's Blog, page 18

More mystery in historic Chesapeake City

In case you missed it, the Cecil Whig newspaper and website published another Chesapeake City mystery featuring the characters from “Delmarva Renovators.” Tom and Mac first appeared in “The House that Went Down with the Ship,” which is an old house … Continue reading →

Upcoming talks for Fall 2014

Upcoming talks Great Storms of the Chesapeake talk, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, St. Michaels, Md., October 30, 2014 at 5:00 pm  Keepers of the Light talk, Chesapeake City Branch Library, Chesapeake City, Md., November 17, 2014 at 6:30 pm

Beach Bodies gets a headline: Making the cut for beach reading

By Ken Mammarella The News Journal   To the list of potentially fatal risks at the beach – such as riptides, lighting and sunstroke – add being kidnapped for your kidneys. That’s the premise of “Beach Bodies ($14.99 on Amazon), … Continue reading →

D-Day memories 70 years later

Back in July 1998 I went to see the new Tom Hanks’ film “Saving Private Ryan” with a group of Cecil County (Maryland) veterans who had been at D-Day. The idea was to get a reaction to the film from … Continue reading →

Hooking Your Readers with Some Help from Jaws

Originally posted on Kaplan University Writing Center Faculty Blog:
David Healey, Kaplan University Composition Faculty © 2014 Clipart.com Hooking your readers turns out to have a lot in common with pretending to be a shark. One of my favorite childhood…

Behind the Badge: An interview with BEACH BODIES detective Nick Logan

Behind the Badge An interview with Nick Logan, one half of the detective team in Beach Bodies: A Rehoboth Beach thriller.  By Jorge Alvarez, staff reporter What’s your favorite beach food? That’s a tough call. There are so many great … Continue reading →

Big GHOST SNIPER giveaway kicks off!

GHOST SNIPER is set during the Normandy invasion that began on D-Day, June 6, 1944. To mark the 70th commemoration of D-Day, there is going to be a fairly big giveaway over at Goodreads. Ten copies of the book will … Continue reading →

Giving in to the siren song of researching a novel

One of my favorite aspects of writing is actually reading about the time period in which a story is set. By reading I mean “research” or learning as much as I can about whatever I happen to be writing about. … Continue reading →

Tips on hosting a Facebook chat for authors

The weather forecasts were calling for the most snow we’d had in years here in Maryland. It was just possible that the “snow band” through the I-95 corridor ranging from just west of Baltimore up toward Philadelphia could see 2 … Continue reading →

Where do writers get their ideas?

Someone asked me the other day where writers get their ideas. That’s a popular question, and one I have the hardest time answering because ideas come from everywhere at once and nowhere in particular!

It’s kind of a lame answer to a sincere question and I usually don’t admit in public that I don’t know, or I’ll give a vague answer. Most people don’t want to hear, “I don’t know!” And most writers are in the business of making people happy, so we come up with some kind of response.

Another pat answer might be that writers don’t find ideas—they find me. I’ve heard some writers say that, but it’s not true in my case. Also, that explanation sounds supercilious.

So where do ideas come from?

It probably helps to do lots of things that don’t involve writing to come up with good ideas. Vacuum the living room. Walk the dog. Make a pot of gumbo. Zap! You’ll get an idea, and you can tell a good one because it’s like getting Creole spice in that little slice where you nicked yourself chopping onions. Not exactly painful, but insistent.

I had a really good idea recently while watching a really bad movie. I mean, it was really an awful action movie without a hint of character development or humanity (but the explosions and special effects were pretty cool). So my mind was wandering … and Zap!

Exercise is always great for ideas. Walking and bike riding are good, but it helps to do them in a way where you are pretty much alone so that your mind churns away like the gears on a bike.

Sometimes I get great ideas when I’m driving, but I really try not to do that too much because, well, I’m driving.

The trouble is that writers don’t need one good idea, or even two or three. They need twenty, thirty, two hundred or three hundred good ideas. Some fizzle pretty quickly, while others go the distance.

One of my favorite writers, William Styron, once said something along the lines of, “Any idea that survives the hangover is a good one.”

I can honestly say I’ve never had a good idea as a result of alcohol. Of course, I’m not William Styron, who wrote “Sophie’s Choice,” so it may have worked for him.

Caffeine, on the other hand, sends thoughts bouncing around like a ping pong ball.

Agatha Christie one said that she got her best ideas while doing the dishes. There’s something charming about the thought of Dame Agatha thinking up the plot for “Death on the Nile” while rinsing out the tea cups.

Sometimes I’ll just sit with a blank notebook and a pen, just to see what develops on the page. In my writing classes I often talk with students about brainstorming or pre-writing techniques such as clustering, listing and free writing. Sometimes my “brainstorming” uses all three techniques on the same page like an ultimate fighter mixing boxing and karate in the ring.

That’s OK. There is no right way or wrong way to figure out what to write.

In the end, I suppose it’s hard to explain to someone how it all works because it’s trying to explain a creative process that’s beyond explaining. You might as well ask electricity how it turns on a light bulb.

Have you ever tried to explain—really explain—to a child how electricity works? Now imagine trying to explain this concept to a time traveler from the Dark Ages. In either case, you’ll probably give up after a while and tell them it’s magic.

Exactly!

So where do ideas come from? Magic! That’s not exactly true, but it’s close enough.