Letters to Kel: THAT IDEA STORE

Anyone who has been published -- and anyone who proclaims themselves to be writers, whether they actually write or not -- always get hit with this question:

WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?

For a little while, I had a smart-alec answer: There's this little shop in the French Quarter in New Orleans ...  Because honestly, there was a shop with the name of "Imagination" or something like that, which I saw while walking through the French Quarter back before Katrina.

But no, you really can't "buy" ideas. You have to harvest them. Scavenge them. Make yourself open to being "attacked" by them. Even "steal" or "borrow" them from other writers and then perform surgery until they become identifiably yours. That means you often toss away everything from the original idea, sculpting and cutting and grafting in (yes, I'm mixing my metaphors -- it's my blog, I can do what I darn well want!) until it becomes a new creature. And if you do your work right, it won't rebel and turn on you like Frankenstein's monster ... Then again, sometimes the most fun I've had while writing has been when my characters became so real that they did what they darn well wanted to, and not what was on the road map of my sketchy plot. (Which is why my plots and synopses and whatever are very, very sketchy at the beginning -- to give lots of wiggle room and opportunity to go off on tangents.) Setting up your characters and situations and sitting back and watching them perform is the best fun!

Ideas are -- after all this time, I am thoroughly convinced -- living things.
They latch onto you and nag you and invade your dreams and like spoiled children, insist on pulling you away from your current work-in-progress to listen to them NOW!

You have to tame them -- that means letting them nag and interrupt your sleep and your social time, but only enough to write down what they're saying. Do not let your ideas drag you over to the computer or notepad or whatever you use for your first draft to sit down NOW and start writing their story. Because here's the secret: The ideas aren't sure what their story is, either. Not when they're first born. They need to grow up and figure out what they are supposed to do in your head. You have to let them keep talking, keep nagging, keep playing in the back of your mind. Let them bring friends along -- in fact, you should wait and even pretend to ignore them, until they bring friends to make more noise and really catch hold of your attention. Because that's when the story starts taking on multiple layers, adds complications, goes from black-and-white to color, and gets a soundtrack. So to speak. If you start telling your idea's story too soon, you'll stall out, and your idea might even abandon you just after the big explosive, "Hey, look at me!" start. Why? Because you gave the idea what it wanted -- your attention -- too soon in the process. You have to make it wait and grow and learn what most of the story is (no, you don't have to have the whole thing, just enough to know what some of the barriers and complications and supporting actors are) before you start writing. Make the idea fight for your time and attention, and it won't abandon you. It's worked too darn hard to walk away now!

Let's see a store-bought idea, something you borrowed from another writer and didn't make entirely your own, have that kind of stubborn, stick-to-it-iveness and loyalty.