The Random Musings of a Turbulent Mind.

[The Legendary Shark]

Where do you get your ideas from?

Many people ask me that when I tell them I'm a writer. (An amateur writer, yes, but still a writer.) The answer, for me at least, is everywhere. This doesn't seem to suit them as an answer. It's as if they believe I was born with a finite number of fully formed ideas hidden in my brains and all I have to do is reach in and pluck one out. Like pre-programming or a gift from God. Like a woman born with all the eggs she'll ever need. As if an idea is a single, isolated entity within itself. A singularity, if you will. But to me, an idea is a nexus - crossing the streams and seeing what happens. An idea is not a static thing, it's a process. Sometimes that process takes years, sometimes it happens almost instantaneously.

My new puppy (aww, bless) is asleep on a folded blanket on my desk, next to my right elbow, head resting on a Star Wars stormtrooper mouse-mat next to this very keyboard. When was Star Wars? 1977? That's, what, 34 years ago. The puppy's four months old, he'll live ten to fifteen years, if he's lucky. From the puppy's point of view, Star Wars came out two to three lifetimes ago. Two to three lifetimes ago from my birth takes me back to around the time of the French Revolution.

This got me thinking about how dogs perceive time. Do they know there was time before they were born, that there will be time after? Or is all eternity just in their lifetimes? I can learn of the French Revolution through books, but the dog can never learn about the original theatrical release of Star Wars and how it changed things, even if it could understand what Star Wars was. The dog cannot learn from history, cannot access information from before its birth. (Well, indirectly it can - through genetics, "species memory" or me teaching it things I learned before even it's great, great grandparents were born.) Free of these constraints, what must it be like inside the mind of a dog? Does it only really concentrate on about twenty minutes? Ten minutes past and ten minutes to come? Does the rest just devolve to instinct?

And this train of thought leads me to think how an alien might perceive time if its two to three lifetimes ago takes us back to the birth of Rome or mankind's discovery of fire. How much patience would such a race have? How much foresight? This is an idea, but not necessarily an idea for a story. If ever I do need to write about ten thousand year old aliens, though, this idea at least gives me a handle on them. So this idea gets filed with the rest, waiting for the right place to be in a story.

Then I looked at the sleeping puppy on the Star Wars stormtrooper mouse-pad again and thought, wouldn't it be cool if, under all that futuristic armour, those stormtroopers were actually werewolves. Well, now we're getting somewhere...

So I get my ideas from the random musings of a turbulent mind. How about you?

[Emperor]

Well to avoid people rolling their eyes about "everywhere" (but yes, you have to turn "don't have such an open mind that anything can fall in" into a positive, throw everything in there and see if two random nuggets start making mucky idealove and produce weird three-headed offspring). I usually say random misunderstandings and synchronicities. You then get to tell a story that you can eventually bend around to present the important moral: you can get your ideas from anywhere and everywhere.

I created a sub-genre of porn that the adult film industry then stole from me, all through the power of creative befuddlement. It is not only a good example to throw in (otherwise you could end up discussing how all the bits of a story came together, which is tricky without the work to hand and starts getting a little... lecturey) but it also means people tend to stop asking you silly questions soon after, because they might not like the answers you give.

[IAMTHESYSTEM]

From my Brain though where they actually come from I couldn't say. Some Neurons either connect or more likely give up in despair and release some half formed thought  pattern which hits some other half formed thought pattern and the idea takes shape.

[Hoagy]

I'd say my mind is a bit like Mek-quake. My way  to describe my musings is to act like Mek-quake and those descriptives are robots already running around the place of which I pick at random and mulch into my filthy oil stained mind. Eventually I will poop out, after lots of churning, grunting and spasmodic flailing, a cuboid of a homunculus of an idea.

[SmallBlueThing]

All my ideas come from my largely mean-spirited fantasies of what i'd like to do to people i know. This is why i write exclusively horror and porn.
SBT

[The Legendary Shark]

Well now, there's a can of worms.

[exilewood]

I think a large number of people imagine that the act of writing (or 'getting an idea') consists of lounging about, wistfully smoking cigarettes waiting for the 'eureka' moment of inspiration to strike like lightning from a clear blue sky.

Now, while that is quite true to a large extent - my writing process does indeed usually involve a vast amount of smoking, drinking, drug-taking & stumbling from room to room swearing, what they don't get is the 'work' element - to write anything any good, I find, you have to work - and by that I mean writing constantly, writing total shit that no-one will ever see.

It's interesting that you mentioned your puppy. I find that (I write songs you see, not comics, but I imagine it's the same) songs are like dogs - some are delightful puppies that bound up to you excitedly & jump into your lap (Lord love them), others are like flea-bitten strays that you have to take in & clean up & feed & they eventually become strong. Others are bitch-hounds from the pits of hell, that you have to fight with much rending of flesh, snapping of teeth, snarling, screaming, blood & tears - those ones though are usually the ones that make the most loyal & fiercest companions.

Anyway, I digest. What were we saying?

[Simud]

I agree, Legendary Shark, that you can get ideas from everywhere. Still, I'd differentiate inspiration (when ideas simply come to you) from something that I may call creative search, namely when you're consciously looking for ideas. There's a beautiful book by Italian author Gianni Rodari, 'The Grammar of Fantasy' (which I think has an English translation), in which Rodari identifies different strategies used to generate stories for children. That book moved me to start analysing my own strategies as a writer, and I was able to identify more that ten different paths used to get to ideas. However, I also realised that from all those possibilities, I usually resort to just two or three strategies in most of the cases, and usually combined:

1) the narrative binomial (the core of Rodari's 'fantastic binomial'), in which you get  two elements together and start exploring their narrative possibilities.
2) the 'idea taken to the extreme' strategy (which I found underlying most of Borges' plots), in which you take an idea and try to explore its more extreme or paradoxical consequences.
3) the trigger element (obvious, but always useful): you get a character, a phrase, a mental image, whatever, and start exploring its narrative implications.

Nowadays I usually write down or reflect upon the way I use to get to an idea after I get it. I know it's like theorising too much, but it really allows me to identify and isolate mental strategies that make my task of creating faster and easier.

Of course, we're talking about getting ideas only. Building up a whole plot is a totally different issue.

[The Legendary Shark]

Oh absolutely, the plotting is probably the only part of writing you can actually learn how to do. Beginning, middle, end - stasis, trigger, dream phase, nightmare phase, crisis, resolution and so forth. I think plotting is also the hardest part, too. Stories, just like sentences, need a recognisable structure or they just don't work.

[Zarjazzer]

I get mine from Satan. Or is it from Guinness? I'm re-writing my tragic doomed love story amongst angst ridden rebels fighting an authoritarian evil empire  "Sexy Swedish sadistic stablegirls" even as I  decide to stop drinking.

[clavell]

So I get my ideas from the random musings of a turbulent mind. How about you?

Same here, except I just say I get them out of my head. If you put enough information in there, leave to settle, then stir occasionally, all kinds of things rise to the surface. The trick is picking out what's ready to serve, and what needs more cooking.

I think a large number of people imagine that the act of writing (or 'getting an idea') consists of lounging about, wistfully smoking cigarettes waiting for the 'eureka' moment of inspiration to strike like lightning from a clear blue sky.

You don't have to wait for it. Just get a foil kite up into the billowing clouds and dare the elements to do their worst.

I also get those "discovery" moments, where I find things in my head fully formed as if they've been put there by someone else.

- C

[Lady Festina]

Simud - really interesting post - thank you for going theoretical on our ass. (OK, now I know that sounded sarcastic, but it was actually genuinely interesting....)

Inspiration / ideas - I was bemoaning my lack of ideas for stories a few weeks ago. So I set myself a wee challenge: to come up with 50 ideas for stories between getting up and going to bed. Note that it was a work day. And 50 seemed an utterly ridiculous number.

Now, I'll confess that they weren't necessarily stories - more scenarios - but once I got over the initial hump of "WTF", they just started to flow. Everything I saw from the train window on the way to work went into the notebook; everything bit of gossip and news; everything on the way home - 34 ideas before I got home and the rest topped up during the course of the evening.

What I know for sure is that the majority of those ideas will not go anywhere. And those that do, well, some will turn into so much horseshit. But there are kernels and nuggets in there (in the ideas, not in the horseshit) that will gestate (mixed metaphors) and eventually arrive in the world as something worth turning into a story.

Then the next level of insecurity kicks in. So I have a load of ideas, but can I write a freaking story??

(In fairness, the Plotting Paranoia has gone. I like plotting. And sketching stick figures on a page. NOW I have Dialogue Demons..... But that's another thread....)

PS. If anyone wants some Story Ideas, I've got a bagful. The one about the nunnery is particularly fine....

[Lady Festina]

PS. To demonstrate the humble-ness of the beginning of the 50, the first one was "Jaws with a cat".

They got better.

[locustsofdeath!]

I make it a point never to tell anyone anything about my writing process. That way, I seem more mysterious and girls really dig that.

[Richmond Clements]

PS. To demonstrate the humble-ness of the beginning of the 50, the first one was "Jaws with a cat".

They got better.

But not much, I'd wager!

To be clear- I'm saying that this is a brilliant idea, not that you're a shite writer!

As for me... it depends.
I talk about how the idea for Turning Tiger came about in the afterword to the book (which is out at the start of September folks [apologies for the plug]).
Others- like the Slaine story I did a while back or the recent text tale in Dogbreath - are the result of either needing something quickly to fill five pages (Slaine), or Bolt sending me a picture (DB story, the name of which I cannot remember at the moment) and asking me to write a story around it.

Others still come from the same direction Lady F is talking about. I'll sit myself down with the goal of writing a script from scratch, which can often be the most fun.