Quote:
Originally Posted by jbcohen
I have been wondering for many years - how do you come up with ideas for your tales? And don't reveal any proprietary secrects.
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I don't think there are any secrets. To be honest, this is probably the question authors get the most, and it's actually the hardest to answer. I like what Orson Scott Card said, that the ideas for stories are all around us, but we're not paying attention. There are probably ideas for a hundred stories in a walk to the post office, and a good author might notice three or four of them.
As for me, I think the question is best answered with one of it's own: What if?
That, for me is the genesis of a lot of my ideas. What if God developed amnesia, what if Darwin's theories became the foundation for a new religion, what if evil always won... these are the roots of several idea I've had.
Other times I might get an idea from another author by reading their book, or from a movie. A lot of these ideas won't be worth anything, though they sound really great at the time.
I think it's important to have a method for capturing those ideas when they occur, because often they happen and then something distracts us, and then we forget. I carry a notebook with me wherever I go, and when an idea does occur, I write it down. It makes me a rude dinner companion, but my friends and family have grown accustomed to my eccentricities.
Other times things just pop into my head. It may be something as simple as an idea for a story, or nothing more than a title that suggests possibilities. Regardless, one of the most important elements of being a writer is curiosity, always asking questions, and always learning.
Many ideas come from some new fact in history that I didn't know about that connects with another point of history or science and, voila, story idea. Without that constant probing curiosity it's hard to come up with ideas, but if you can plant that seed, and nurture it, you'll have more ideas than you know what to do with. Writers are, above all else, readers and questioners. We probe, poke, and prod things that most other people take for granted.
Try to find something different, something unique in everything you look at, or as Lewis Caroll once said, "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Hope this helps.
JDG