Where do Ideas Come From?
It’s always interesting to me that whenever I am sitting in the audience of a book panel, or listening to a podcast, someone inevitably gets up and asks the author – “where do you get your ideas?” This is always fascinating to me. Neil Gaiman once answered that question with this gem:
“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.”
I believe that’s completely and utterly true. I get most of my ideas from one of two places – dreams or playing a game I like to call “what if.”
I have strange and vivid dreams, sometimes I remember them in exquisite detail, sometimes I only remember impressions or a few scattered images. The project I’m working on now is entirely dream based, I don’t remember all the details but there was one powerful image at the end that I carried with me into daylight. I wrote it down, I contemplated it, wrote more, watched as the fragment evolved into something more. I’m still optimistic that one day I’ll be able to share more about this particular project with you.
Of all of the dreams that I have, maybe one in a hundred is really worth holding on to, the rest just serve as amusements for friends, family, and coworkers. (Like the one where my Boss was leading our company through an outbreak of the zombie plague.) I confess that sometimes I’ve spent more time on one of the ones that’s not worth holding on to than I should.
The “what if” game always starts the same way, I look at something and I wonder “what if” – the first “what if” scenario I remember having that turned into a “story” was when I was in grade school. I loved climbing trees and while I was sitting in a tree I watched a squirrel chattering at me for getting too close to its nest and I thought “what if” that squirrel was really my friend, and it was talking to me. I filled many pages of a black marbled composition book with the story of me and “my secret pal.”
“What if’s” can strike at any minute, sometimes driving down the street, I’ll look at a house and imagine – what if it was haunted, what if the people who live there are building a rocket, what if… Usually these ideas are laughable – there is a house where I “what if’d” the people into building a rocket, but there wasn’t really anywhere for that to go in my head so even if they were building a rocket, I’ll leave that story for someone else.
Perhaps “other” people think “what if the neighbors are building a rocket” and they laugh it off and the thought never goes anywhere else. As Neil Gaiman says, perhaps that’s the difference – writers ride out that what if to the bitter end. I sure do!
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