I is for Ideas #atozchallenge
Where do you get your ideas?
People ask that question of writers so frequently, some writers hate to hear it. Some hate it enough to respond with sarcasm when it comes up.
Perhaps I’m weird, but I love answering that question. Thought processes have always fascinated me, so when an idea for a story pops out of the ether, I enjoy picking apart how I got it.
Every one of my stories started as an idea, and the germ started from a series of thoughts.
For example, Storm Lake, my short horror story, came out of thoughts I had when I saw trees up at our cottage with huge burls. I had no idea what a burl was at the time (about twenty years ago, which tells you how long that idea sat purcolating in my brain). I didn’t learn anything about burls until I sat down to write the story. So, of course, my writer’s brain made shit up about what those enourmous bulges on the trees were.
Me being me, the first thought was that they looked like something was gestating in there. That’s it. Once that seed dropped, it expanded from there, and I thought it would make a great basis for a story.
What happens when I get that little idea seed, you see, is that I then expand on it by asking “what if?” So, what if those trees were gestating something inside them? What’s in there? How did it get in there? What happens when they mature? Probably nothing good, right?
And so Storm Lake was born.
If you’re unfamiliar with the story, this is the one-sentence summary for it: A girl and her little brother struggle to save themselves when trapped in an isolated marina by flesh-eating creatures.
The romantic suspense story Injury also has an interesting origin.
Injury‘s one-sentence summary: A young actress at the height of her career has her personal life turned upside down when a horrifying family secret makes front-page news.
The idea for Injury came to me years ago, but the seed for it came even before that. When my daughter was in elementary school, she had to write a biography of a famous person. She chose Marilyn Monroe.
Part of the assignment was to create a list of interview questions for the person. In the list my daughter compiled was this: If you could ask your father anything right now, what would it be?
That question lingered in my psyche for years. What would Marilyn have said? How did it feel for her to have grown up without a father? Did she wonder if he saw her in her movies and think about her? If you examine her life and relationships, her lack of a father impacted her tremendously.
My writer’s brain took over, and I what iffed the hell out of it.
What if a young woman who thought her father had abandoned her persued a career in movies to try to get his attention via her fame? What if these abandonment issues haunted her throughout her life, molded who she was, formed the person she became? Then what if she found out he’d never abandoned her? How traumatic would that be? How would that change her life and how she viewed herself?
From that, I created Daniella Grayson.
Every story has a story.
