Roots of ideas

It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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Writers are often asked: where do we get our ideas? The answer is: we get them everywhere. Here is one example. I was visiting my daughter in Toronto, and she took me for a day on the town. We rode subway. We dined at a restaurant. We went to a theater to see a show. And everywhere, we had to go up and down the stairs. Long stairs. Short stairs. Several steep flights of stairs.

Toronto is an old city. Not every subway station has an escalator (or only one escalator up, with the stairs parallel to it going down). And you had to search for an elevator, so we took the stairs. On one station, the stairs had 6 or more flights (an equivalent to a 3- or 4-storey house). The restaurant was in an old building. There was an elevator, but we didn’t find it, so we took the stairs. The theater was over 100 years old. There was an elevator, we saw it, but with a full house, there were too many people in the audience waiting for the elevator to the balcony. So we took the stairs.   

Eventually, I told her: “Today is the day of the stairs.” She laughed, but that was how I felt. And then I thought: what a wonderful title for a story: The Day of the Stairs. In my mind, the story started unfolding. It should be fantasy. It should be about an older woman, and magic, and of course, lots and lots of stairs. I’m going to write that story. And that’s where the idea came from: from the stairs in the old buildings I had to climb all around downtown Toronto.

Where do you get your ideas?