Where Ideas Come From
As an author, the question I get asked most by friends, family and readers is “Where do you get your ideas?”. Often the question is asked as though it’s a deep secret, expecting that I have a mystery vault where I hide away story ideas stolen illegally or that I sit down for hours on end willing something to pop out. But the truth is, ideas are natural thoughts that start with the smallest seed. Here is an example:
For my upcoming novel This Strange Hell, the story begins with a suited man running from a burning building. I was driving to work with a horizon of skyscrapers and I just pondered how devastating it would be to flee a burning building of that magnitude. Over the next 8 or so hours at work, the image of a man wearing a crisp navy suit running with a backdrop of falling bodies on fire became vivid, almost lifelike, as though I had seen this happen three years ago. But I’ve never been anywhere near a burning building. I typed that opening sentence when I got home and when I stood up 3,000 words later, a story outside of that scene had blossomed. I found myself asking the simple questions as the words filled the screen:
Why is he running?
What does he look like?
Is it night or day?
Some writers will map out a story in documents before they begin writing. I can’t do that, as I believe it would dampen the excitement of watching your characters go to work. On those days where the writing clicks, you can see the scene unfold in your mind. You know what’s to the left, what’s to the right and what’s about to happen next. The process is a surreal experience that churns out a story, and every author is different in their approach to a new tale.
I once read a quote that said every person passes 100 story ideas on their way to work, and a strong writer notices 5. With This Strange Hell, only 1 story idea was triggered that day and it was the only aspect needed to craft the 88,000 word story.
Ideas are natural, not forced. If I was put on the spot at random and asked to tell an original story, I would struggle. But when the mind wanders in the shower, or late at night in bed, or on the commute to work, solitude sees the cogs move.
My debut novel Dortmund Hibernate had a unique process. I deliberately wanted to tell a story about an asylum full of the criminally insane. I didn’t start writing until about three years later, and by then the nine inmates had grown in my mind like a baby in the wound. Their stories prior to incarceration were fairly formed, and while they did change when the writing began I still felt like these people existed before me. My protagonist was discovering an animal-obsessed murderer, an accountant serial killer, a sadistic drug lord and the like for the first time, and I had a grasp of the world and their crimes. But not even I knew the two major twists when I started writing the book. I was as shocked as the reader, and this is why I love writing fiction.
My general response to “Where do you get your ideas?” is that I have a dark mind that can picture mayhem, but in all honesty I don’t have an answer. They just appear. The seed might be planted by a stray word in a conversation or an image I pass on the street, and that makes any task a possible story thread.
