Where do you get your ideas?

[DavidDvorkin]

It's a question that's always annoyed me. Maybe sf/f/h writers get it more than other kinds; I don't know.

I usually mutter something about ideas being everywhere, and what's lacking is the time to write the stories or books that come from them. I finally wrote my opinion out in slightly more detail on my blog:

http://eyeblister.blogspot.com/2007/03/where-do-you-get-your-ideas.html#links

[Neoma]

1. Well for me...

I sit down and relax as much as possible and let my imagination take over. I guess you'd call them daydreams. :P

[DavidDvorkin]

2. Same here

What I blogged about was the strange idea that one becomes a writer first and then goes looking for ideas second. I contend that you have ideas and become a writer because you want to express those ideas in writing.

[Neoma]

4. On the contrary.

Ideas aren't what I have, only slight glimpses at what could be.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. This is a good question......

And I don't have any good answers.......

Except to say that every so often, some emotion comes rumbling through...

And if I'm smart, I stop what I'm doing, and write down the key words I want to remember...

The view of a cloud, or the thought of a loved one......anything can trigger me.

I will use any form of paper to scribble on, too...

And then I take those words to my computer, to my Word program, and let 'er rip!

I have not been able to train myself to write on command, however.

[Adelante]

5. I don't get ideas, actually

I get kind of nerved up. If that tells you anything. It's like I just have to write it or go nuts. It's odd, because I'm pretty calm otherwise.

[DavidDvorkin]

6. That's interesting.

So, when you get that feeling and start writing, what do you write about? What is that comes out of you?

[Adelante]

7. One sentence after another

Sometimes it's a short story or a chapter or an essay, but I don't plan anything, I just build on that first sentence. Maybe that first sentence for me is the idea for you.

[petgoat]

8. I get my ideas from my boxes of notebooks, papers, and 3X5 cards.

:shrug: :)

[sybylla]

9. A combination of the past and my experiences

I'm big into genealogy and, consequently, history. I've come across amazing ideas for historical works based on historical events. I've also got an ancestor or two whose unique and sometimes tragic experiences I'd love to fictionalize.

As for personal experiences, I've witnessed a couple of things that would make fine short stories if I can decide on an angle.

But the historical I find much more intriguing and have several novel-lenght ideas already fleshed out. All I need is the time and experience.

[TechBear_Seattle]

10. From some of the darnest places

I picked up "City of Heroes" a while back. In creating my heroes, I try to come up with an interesting backstory that explains the character's origin and powers. One character has been the inspiration of a short story I've just finished, and the other was the inspiration for an urban fantasy novel now in development.

(City of Heroes is a "massive multi-player online roleplaying game" similar in concept to EverQuest, World of Warcraft and Dark Age of Camelot. Rather than the usual swords-and-sorcery world, CoH is set in a comic book universe, where players take the role of superheroes a la Superman, Wonder Woman, the X-Men, etc. A parallel game, City of Villains, is similar for supervillains.)

[DavidDvorkin]

11. I like the way this discussion is going

[Dogmudgeon]

12. I get my ideas when I'm miserable

When I'm depressed or in physical pain, they just pour out. Since I have chronic pain from damage to my ear and the results of a mugging, getting ideas is not difficult for me. My problem is being able to concentrate enough to tackle writing projects.

Since 1990, I have started at least 25 novels, 100 short stories, and hundreds af essays. And not just first-twenty-page efforts, either; some of them are 50k words long. A lot of the essays I edit down and otherwise mangle into DU posts. Every so often, I get accused of "talking down" to people in my posts; it's inevitably from some first-draft essay I abandoned and never edited.

I have the attitude that, regardless of whether I'm working my writing as a profession, I'm writing. It comes first. Naturally, I see my lack of concentration as a failing, but whatever else I may fail to accomplish, I am not failing to write.

I switched over to using the Dvorak Keyboard recently (February 8th) and it was very difficult at first. I had been able to type at 60 WPM and was immediately reduced to 10 WPM. I felt like Harrison Bergeron, and longed to toggle the keyboard setting back to Sholes (QWERTY), but resisted the temptation, and am now back to about 40 WPM. and hope to be back to 60 by the end of the summer.

Switching over to Linux was an order of magnitude easier.

Anyway, the point I'm coming to is that while I was miserably slogging along at 10 WPM and hunting for the correct key to press, I would get ideas for stories, essays, text, mots justes, and so on, by the long ton.

So I wrote 'em down. Maybe some day, they will be of use to me.

My BIG Project now is to finish a significant piece of fiction, a novel or novella, this year and submit it to publishers. That, and to learn how to bend metal with the naked power of my mind. (I'm starting with tinfoil.)

--p!

[DavidDvorkin]

13. If you are able to get that longer piece finished and sold

you'll have plenty of material available for finishing and submitting next.

[Starbucks Anarchist]

14. In chaos.

My mind will be full of so many other things not related to writing, and suddenly, I get an idea.

[HamdenRice]

15. Talking to strangers

I'm somewhat of an empiricist as a writer. When I was in college and graduate school, I was involved in a number of projects that involved oral history -- talking to old people with a tape recorder. Transcribing interviews taught me how to write the way people actually talk.

Those habits stayed with me. I tend to stop in unfamiliar pubs and strike up conversations with people. The combination of alcohol and bar culture means that people will freely tell you their life stories.

I keep a reporter's notepad and when I leave I scribble down notes and bits and pieces of dialogue.

I've learned that people are extremely good and quite natural at crafting narratives; they tend to understand their lives as stories, not random events. People tend to tell life stories by crafting a beginning, a middle and a climax and resolution. If you write down what you've been told by people about their lives you will be astonished at how well crafted the stories are. Most people just have difficulty putting their stories down on paper.

[valerief]

16. I decide I want to write something and then fixate on a single thing or idea.

For my first novel, a friend wanted me to provide her with some words for a writing exercise. I gave her pigeon and Velcro. She never completed the exercise, but I wrote a novel around it.

The second was a based on a home video mockumentary I made with friends about a fictional artist.

In the first two, I conjured up historically inaccurate plot devices: (1) a woman accidentally invented Velcro and (2) during the disco days, it was fashionable to have a foot fetish or to be a foot artist. I try to be as historically accurate as possible for most things, but I find it's fun to inject in the stories some cultural lie but make it sound believable.

For the third, I wanted to create another historically inaccurate fad, so I created an "old men are sexy" fetish during the Vietnam War. Improbable? Duh! But I found a way to explain how it came into vogue and pass right out of vogue, too.

I think some glossy old movies inspired me for the novel I'm working on now. Small-town ingenue comes to Manhattan in 1962. Illusions are shattered. I've fixated on a particular Manhattan element (not a fetish this time) to use as a plot device.

I'd written a few short stories, but I wanted to write an easy collection of short stories with said friend who never finished her exercise. I figured we could have fun with the romance genre. Well, I wrote my share of the stories set in the early sixties, but she only wrote two and lost interest. I decided to patch my set of romance stories with a few horror stories and make that the collection.

The bigger question is why did I decide to respond to your post?

[WCGreen]

17. I just look back on my life and pick a story I heard as a youngster

and try to make it my own...

I was blessed to have been born into a family that was long on tails and short on shame so there is a lot of good material to work with...