The frequent question most published authors find themselves dealing with has to do with the origins of their stories. Being asked “Where do you get your ideas?” must be difficult because it doesn’t have an easy answer.
Stephen King tells a story in DANSE MACABRE about a girl who he calls Little Miss Nobody. After a fire broke out at a circus in 1944, a young girl’s body was found and, despite many attempts, she was never identified. Stephen King uses this story to describe an author’s creative method, saying:
“Someone else looks at that item about Little Miss Nobody … and says, ‘Jeez, you never can tell, can you?’ and goes on to something else. But the fantasist begins to play with it as a child would, speculating about children from other dimensions, about dopplegangers, about God knows what.”
In an essay on the subject, Neil Gaiman said:
“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.
…
Sometimes an idea is a person (‘There’s a boy who wants to know about magic’). Sometimes it’s a place (‘There’s a castle at the end of time, which is the only place there is…’). Sometimes it’s an image (‘A woman, sifting in a dark room filled with empty faces.’)”
If asked, I would say that I get my ideas in a similar manner to what is described by King and Gaiman. Sometimes I come across one sentence in a work of nonfiction, or have one spark of an idea and it’ll get me going down the road of What If into all kinds of new directions.
For example, I was reading THE RESURRECTION OF THE ROMANOVS, by Greg King and Penny Wilson, a month or two ago and came across the following quote about the fate of an imperial pretender:
“In 1606, Dimitri was overthrown and killed, his body burned, and his ashes fired from a cannon west, toward Poland [his country of origin].”
This single sentence gave me an idea for a worldbuilding detail for my WiP. It’s not important, no more than a brief mention in a single scene, but it helped to make the world come alive in my mind and it inspired other ideas. Looking at it now, I can think of a dozen ways it could have been used to create other stories. This is the way a writer thinks. On the other hand, a non-writer might’ve thought, “Wow, that’s harsh,” and gone no further.
In order to generate ideas, we have to train ourselves to think about What If and (as Gaiman adds) If Only and I Wonder. “Those questions, and others like them, and the questions they, in their turn, pose … are one of the places ideas come from.”
Or, at least, mine do. YMMV, and I’d love to hear more about how other people brainstorm ideas. I always love to try out new tricks!
