“Where Do You Get Your Ideas?” Silly Question, or Not — continued
A couple of days ago, I posted a bloggery about the question that so many writers hate to be asked: where do you get your ideas? I always thought it was a perfectly sensible question, and now that I am a writer, I know that it’s a perfectly sensible question. Sure, ideas come from our heads, but how? And why does one particular idea take hold when others don’t?
For me, a story usually begins with a series of ideas or a combination of events, but that initial idea is only the first of many. A nove
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Irma, Blogs are forever, so it's never too late! Especially not for a response as interesting as yours. It is fascinating the stories we think we are telling, and the stories we are really telling. I thought my current work was about freedom vs. security, but it's really about change -- probably because of changes in my own life.
Good question. I know I'm a bit late, but still would like to weigh in on this topic. I'm very interested in history and world events and often get ideas from what I read in the newspapers or online. I'm currently working on a book of short stories. Ideas for those have come from such varied sources as the subprime lending mess and the earthquake of L'Aquila in Italy. The inspiration for my published novel, IRRETRIEVABLY BROKEN, ultimately came from a newspaper clipping from my hometown in Germany. A neighboring property had been torn down and a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath, was unearthed. Experts speculated that a synagogue would most likely be situated beneath the foundations of the house I had lived in as a child. I read the clipping and promptly forgot about it. Or so I thought! But this discovery must have been burned into my subconscious. After I finished the novel, I rediscovered the clipping and realized how these facts had informed my writing. There, at the heart of a story of adventure and travel, of love and loss, was a Holocaust story, come to light after years of concealment, very much like the mikvah that had been unearthed so many years later under our former neighbor's house in a small town where no one in post-WWII Germany ever spoke about such things.
Pat, thanks for your provocative questions. Keep it up!