Quote:
Originally Posted by Anna Drake
Kennyc, now that's funny. But I'm also serious. Where do your ideas come from? I always seem to start with a first scene, first chapter. Then I have to flesh it our from there. Ugh.
Anybody else?
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Sometimes it comes from the challenge to do the impossible.
I'm a cheerful amateur, and don't want to be anything else.
A person on a thread here, wrote about going fossil hunting and finding some fossilized dinosaur poop. Coprolite, it's officially called.
Another amateur writer writes long windy, relatively plotless stories here to much popularity, (But I love his work...).
So I decided to write a story about dinosaur poop. (Hey, the late Warren Zevon used
Brucesellosis in a song, why not dinosaur poop?) And since plotless stories make me grumpy, I wanted the story to be tightly plotted. What are the most tightly plotted stories around? Mysteries! So I would write a mystery. The people I was writing for liked completely silly stories. So it had to be a silly mystery. That was Ok, a story about dinosaur poop was inherently silly. And since I'm a proud Texan, the main character had to be a Texan. And I could include all sort of Texas in-jokes and slang, with a concordance at the end for all the non-Texans (MobileRead's clientele is world wide) to understand the jokes.
Lest you think this is totally weird, Issac Asimov wrote
The Gods Themselves because Robert Silverberg gave a speech at a convention where Asimov was at, referring to Plutonium-186. It was a typo, the most common isotope of Plutonium was 286. Asimov chided Silverberg about his sloppy science, and told him that since he was great science-fiction writer, he would write a story about Plutonium-186. It won him a Hugo and Nebula award for best novel for that year. What was good enough for Asimov was good enough for me...
If you want an excursion into Bad Taste and worse jokes...See
The Case of the Golden Coprolite here on MR. Keep a wastebasket handy...