The question every writer gets asked the most--I'm told--is, "Where do you get your ideas?" It's so common that many writers just make up a rote answer to tell people. They trade answers with each other when they get together in their secret writers society meetings that you're not invited to, in which they talk about you, the fans, and make some seriously snarky comments about you all, let me tell you. But in general they have no good answer to this question because to them, there IS no answer. The ideas are all around them, all the time. Hounding them. Gnawing at them with tiny idea teeth. Keeping them awake. A better question might be: how do you get away from the ideas? I know that a number of writers distinctly believe that there is nothing special about them whatsoever: that everyone has ideas for writing all the time, and they just don't know to recognize them as ideas. They're unconscious notions, your brain toying with the world around you as you pass through it: questioning it, tilting it, testing it, and all of these are story ideas. You just have to learn to recognize it.
This could be true, I suppose, but I've never seen it in my life, despite trying. Ideas are very hard to come by: they must be scrabbled after and then defended with tooth and nail, as though they were gold and precious gems. It's been my experience that people who have an aptitude for a thing often don't recognize their aptitude as real talent. Because a thing is easy for them, it must be easy for everyone. To me, whistling a pleasant tune is as simple as breathing. I cannot fathom how someone else couldn't do it, and yet many people cannot whistle. So, too, I think some people's minds do not catch creatively on their worlds. I think they do not know how to say, "what if?" and "wouldn't it be strange?" and then follow those thoughts to anything approaching a story idea. So I envy and mildly resent people who have to beat these story ideas away with a kind of mental broom so they can focus on the ones they want. I'm lucky if I get two a year.
That said, right now I have three story ideas knocking around inside my head, and they all seem pretty good. And they're a bit insistent. When they start coming, it seems, they come in groups, hunting me like a pack of hyenas, like they're living things on the other side of reality that have sensed that maybe they can use me to get through to this side. Ideas attract ideas.
So maybe that's what it is with writers. Maybe it only takes having a few at a time, paying attention to them, using them, before the other ideas out there notice what you're doing and begin clamoring for their turn. I mentioned on Twitter that it's a little scary, and that's why I decided to write this post, because I felt like that needed a bit of followup. Why would it be scary? How is it scary?
Well, it's scary in the way that falling in love is scary. In fact, it feels kind of similar. Something from inside you is working, making you feel things and want things whether you feel like it or not. It's bigger than you, and you can't say no to it--well, maybe you could, but the idea of it is just awful, like the thought of turning down a million dollars. And you know it's going to change you in some way, take you somewhere. You don't know who you'll be or where you'll be afterward. And it's fantastic.
Come on, ideas. Let's do this thing.
