The Cafe is a busy place. There are only a few tables in the small space and all of them have at least one writer at them, working in different ways on different things. Literary Dr. Frankensteins assembling their creatures out of surreptitiously collected parts and amalgamated into something new, hopefully something better. Occasionally you’ll hear one of us shout “IT’S ALIVE” and you’ll see the others look up from their work and smile. We’ve all been there.
This week the Confabulators offer another behind the scenes look into how their brains work on developing ideas, including when they need to be abandoned. This a rare glimpse into the deeper processes of how a writer goes about writing. Each of us is different and thinks so differently you might be hard-pressed to say that any of us is really talking about the same thing. Take a closer look though. A close read will reward you with deep insights.
As always, let us know what you think in the comments. Come on in, have a latte, grab a scone.
Harlan Ellison tells people who ask him where he gets his ideas from that there’s a company in Schenectady, NY, that sends him a six-pack of the things for $25 a week. I’ve always loved that answer because it reveals the ignorance of the questioner and allows the answerer the opportunity to pontificate.
And, being honest, a lot of writers like to talk. It’s part of why we’re writers: we have something to say.
Big ideas and plotting have always been a struggle in my writing. I envision worlds and characters and interactions with ease; sentences and paragraphs come naturally from my fingertips. But climax and plot and sequence? These emerge slowly if at all.
For years, alas, I thought that I was condemned to writing only of my own limited experiences, using my quotidian existence as source material. But rarely are happy lives the stuff of good novels (see: Tolstoy), and I am blessed with a happy life.
Eventually I figured out that if source materials are good enough for Shakespeare, they’re good enough for me! So now I mine ideas from the wealth of the texts around me. I love newspapers, especially the tiny columns of human interest stories that run down the margins, giving two or three sentences of a story–a kernel big enough to build around, but small enough to prevent imprisoning the story in reality. A few years ago, I read about a young man taking the bibles out of a church before burning it to the ground, as a form of protest against who knows what. Despite numerous google searches, that story has never resurfaced, but it lives on at the core of two of my three NaNoWriMo novels.
I also find ideas in the biblical, Old Testament book of Judges. Now, my dad is a pastor and my origins are deeply religious, even fundamentalist. In response to this, I strive to embrace the good parts of my heritage of piety and reverence for holy texts, and bring that into my writing. And the book of Judges is as good as it gets for source tales–sex, lies, and videotape (metaphorical, anyway). It portrays an anarchic society, or very nearly anarchic, a society making up the rules as it goes along. A society dependent on deeply flawed leaders with limited authority to help them discern justice from injustice. The most interesting society possible, in other words. I find ideas in those lives of sinning saints and saintly sinners. Eventually, once the stories of the judges are exhausted, perhaps I’ll find another holy text to mine–but for now, I draw storied guidance from their faith and follies.
I always thought the idea thing was a silly question. Worse, I thought it was a cliché, and that nobody ever really asked it. Then a hair stylist (not my regular lady, mind you, somebody new who, apparently, wasn’t sure what to talk about with me while she screwed up my hair) came right out and asked me where I get my ideas.
I have to admit, I was surprised. In all the dream scenarios where I imagined I was a successful writer, this never came up. I was unprepared. I stammered for a second, then I spit out the first thing that came to my mind.
“Well, you know,” I said in a conspiratorial whisper, “we’re all insane.”
It wasn’t at all surprising this answer didn’t satisfy her a bit.
“I’m just so fascinated with you creative types,” she said. “I guess I don’t have that much imagination.”
This was made clear once I saw her finished product in the mirror. Somehow my telling her that my hair should look “like I just had sex” translated in her mind to “like I’m on my way to an ‘80s reunion and want to look like a French poodle.”
I think my problem is I didn’t quite understand the question. I always assumed everyone was picking out pieces of conversation at the next table in a restaurant. I thought everybody was making up a story in their head about the guy walking his dog in the middle of a downpour. I figured everyone remembered snippets of their dreams in the morning and used the pieces to create other worlds.
Apparently, not everyone is. And that’s okay. If everybody’s brain functioned the same way, it would be a boring world. So, to all the people genuinely curious about where a weirdo like me gets her ideas, I will answer as honestly as I can.
Ideas come from everywhere. They come from childhood fears nurtured far into adulthood. They come from broken bits of dialogue overheard in the grocery store. They come from dreams, television shows, movies, games, and books.
But most of all, they come from you. When you talk to me, there’s always at least a tiny part of my brain listening to how you breathe, watching how your fingers twitch when you talk, and examining that splotch of gravy on your collar.
Collecting ideas is easy. The tricky part is figuring out which one out of 1000 is worth closer examination.
If I ever get stumped in a story, or need to come with an idea, I head straight for the shower. It’s about the only place I can go in my apartment where I won’t be interrupted by my adorable cat demanding to be petted and cuddled. It’s a retreat. But that isn’t the only thing that makes it so ideal for writing. Something about the hot steam and water beating down on my scalp helps clear my head and chase away all the stress of the real world, giving me time to figure out where I need to go in my story from there. Maybe it’s because showering is such a necessary part of the real world that I don’t feel guilty for sitting around and doing nothing. Maybe steam is magical. I’m tempted to believe it is a mixture of the two.
Once I’ve stepped into the shower, there are usually two ways I gather ideas. In the first way, I draw from situations that happened in my life and left such an impact on me that I still remember them with startling clarity years later. These usually have a tendency to be moments of grief or embarrassment. These ideas tend to come to me unplanned and then float around in my head for months until I finally come up with a way to manipulate them into something interesting and find characters who want to tell that story and make it their own. This is how my latest NaNo novel got started back in May.
Sometimes as writers, we don’t have the luxury of thinking about an idea for months on end, nor any sudden bursts of inspiration at precisely the right moment. As a Creative Writing major with writing classes every semester, I developed a second way of gathering ideas. I learned how to force myself to come up with stories. Once again, I returned to what I knew. Rather than taking from personal experiences, I turned to my other classes for inspiration. When I took a course on Cleopatra, I wrote poetry about her life. When I was completely uninspired in one of my fiction writing classes, I turned to a play I had written years earlier and found a way to convert it into another format. The story took on new dimensions and allowed me to explore the characters in ways the play formatting had not allowed me to do. (more…)
To quote the Zen Master Lucas in the 1995 movie Empire Records: “Who knows where thoughts come from? They just appear.”
Ok, so he wasn’t really a Zen Master, but he makes a valid point. It’s hard for writers to answer the “where do your ideas come from” question because they are like any ideas. We get them from everywhere.
Some of my ideas come from life experiences, in attempt to follow that old adage to write what you know. Most of what I know is boring, so I have to add monsters to all of my stories, but I make my characters as real as I can by infusing them with organic feelings. Any sorrow, any joy, any outrage can be magnified to create a vivid character.
What I read and watch and see and hear influences my writing a great deal. While I sleep, or even while I daydream, my brain will come up with strange mash-ups from different sources which result in some of my best story ideas. My subconscious mind will work overtime to take a news story combined with a fantasy novel then weave in something I overheard at work, and the finished product will surface in that surreal place between sleep and awake where you have control over your dreams.
Sometimes instead of a plot unfolding, a character will bubble up from the depths of my mind and demand I tell his or her story, or a setting will beg for a story to be told within it.
For writers, anything can become a story. I probably announce on a daily basis that something I’ve seen or heard would make a good story. Just the other day I was walking through a crowded mall full of Christmas shoppers and a horror story emerged from my social phobia-induced panic.
Nothing is safe from writers. If you know any, be very careful not to do or say anything interesting around them, because it will inevitably find its way into one of their stories. We very rarely credit our sources and tend to over-exaggerate every detail. You never know where our ideas are going to come from, and we steal whatever we can.
There’s a voice I hear whenever a door opens. It tells me that this time I won’t see what I expect.
Every door is another possibility
Instead of seeing the second floor and the hallway leading to my office, I’ll see a park. Instead of shopping mall, I’ll be in a prison. Instead of a bathroom, I’ll find myself in a waiting room with people from the future.
People ask writers where they get their ideas. And I wonder what people who aren’t writers think about all day.
I’m constantly imagining other people and places. I think about names for stories, titles for novels. I pick up words the way a numismatist picks up coins, turning them over and examining them from every side.
Everything is a potential story, a character, or a setting. The problem is not in finding ideas, but in wading through the overwhelming possibilities to find ideas that are worth exploring.
But the best ideas come to me when I let my imagination cut loose. For me, this comes easiest when my editor is shut off — or shut out — so I can’t second guess myself. It shouldn’t be surprising that I get my best ideas when I’m dreaming.
A few months ago, I awoke from a dream about a female superhero. She was new to the business and she didn’t know her teammates very well. She kept referring to one of them as “the blue guy.” They worked together to save a large group of children from the evil rat king. It was all very odd.
It became the foundation for the novel I’m currently writing. Most of the details have changed, but the dream was still the starting point. Without the dream, I might never have considered writing in the superhero genre.
It doesn’t matter where you get your ideas from — whether you get inspired by long, hot showers or digging through trash. Inspiration comes to each person differently. The important thing is that you allow yourself a chance to be inspired.
Robert Penn Warren once said, “You must cultivate leisure.”
This is essential to being a writer. To be open to the story ideas around you, your mind must be ready to accept them. If you don’t allow your mind to relax, you’ll never be able to hear the still, small voice of your muse.
All right, so let’s sit down and think about this for a minute: where do story ideas come from?
Short answer: magic. But that seems like kind of an unfulfilling blog post, so in the interest of keeping you reading, let’s dive a bit deeper.
I’ve been on this personal journey lately, trying to “up my game” in the mindfulness category. Basically, I’m trying to be more aware of the moment I’m experiencing, trying to live in the immediate, while pushing aside the regrets of the past and worries about the future. That’s not to say that I’ve pledged to live an entirely unplanned existence bobbing through space taking whatever may come and figuring it out as I go along (although I’d be lying if I didn’t say there was a bit of that going on in my life). What I’m really working on is my focus. On what’s in front of me. On what’s important. On what’s now.
I think it’s a good philosophy for life and writing.
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course…” – Robert Fagles translation of Homer’s Odyssey
I am not the sort of man who waits for his muse to sing. I put a quarter in the jukebox, and if the music doesn’t start, I kick it like a roid-raged Fonzie.
I keep my muse on her toes. I don’t give her time to rest. I keep a constant stream of input flowing to her from any source available, about anything I can find. Each new string of thought strikes her, like a whip upon a plow horse, driving my muse through the muddied earth of imagination, in hopes that something new might grow from the shattered pieces of inspiration surrounding me.
Whether it is real life or art, I expose her to anything. But I also have several tricks I use when that fails. Here is one of my favorite techniques to try when story prompts, current events, and plain old creativity fail.
I love stealing phrases from poetry. Poets are forced by their medium to make every word matter. Every phrase is an image. I use poetry that mirrors the tone of my writing and steal favorite phrases. I have certain poets I read most often. Plath, Poe, and Dickinson are some of my favorites. The Homer quote was no accident. My inspiration sometimes goes back to the ancient tragedies.
There is a line in the film As Good as it Gets when Greg Kinnear talks about a light coming over people that tells him that is when he needs to paint them. That is how I feel when I find the right phrase. I take the phrase totally out of context. Sometimes, I will read the poem backwards to make sure I don’t get distracted by the meaning of the poem. I don’t want the writer’s meaning of the phrase, I want my own.
The next step is stolen from Ray Bradbury. Type the phrase at the top of the first page. Then, just write. I am a seat of the pants writer. If a story comes to mind, I’ll write it. If I have nothing, I will write about the phrase. When the story shows up, I’ll run with it.
I will never wait for ideas. I don’t have time for that. I take a blue collar approach to writing. Clock in, work, and clock out. Ideas, be damned.
You don’t have to be a poet to try this technique. I don’t write poetry, and I rarely read it for pleasure. Yet, I have found poetry to be a gold mine of inspiration. Give it a try. Go pick up a couple of poetry anthologies. Get big, thick ones, and bludgeon your muse with them.
This is the one question that everyone who is creative gets asked the most often. We thought we’d head off the obvious questions first so we asked our bloggers directly: Where Do You Get Your Ideas? Where Do They Come From?
The variety of answers is telling and as individual as each blogger who took the time to let you into their head. You may find some answers satisfying, some not. That’s the way it goes. However, the insight is valuable for each of us in the Cafe. We need to know that we’re not alone, that what’s happening in the dark recesses of our minds isn’t cause for concern. Or maybe it is.
Judge for yourself and let us know what you think in the comments.
