On Writing #2 - Where to get ideas

[bladespark]

Another of my old series aimed at beginning writers.



I once read a quote, and I wish I could find it again, where an author said that every time she gets asked how she comes up with so many ideas she just kind of laughs because she can't not have ideas. Ideas are constantly happening, and anyone who's any sort of creative person will have no shortage of them. She may have even said, or at least implied, that if you're really meant to be an author, you'll have a constant stream of ideas popping into your head. (I wish I could find the original quote since I can't quite remember how she said it.)

But anyway, I both agree and disagree with this. Ideas do sometimes just happen, and any creative person does tend to get a lot of them, but ideas can also be found. Mined for, if you like. Acquired. Deliberately sought after, even.

There's a show filmed by the BBC back in the 80s or so, called "Connections" that talks about the history of human invention, and how one invention leads to another invention. The theme of the show is that discoveries and inventions multiply by forming connections, and the more things there are, the more connections form and the more new things happen.

Creative ideas are like that too. I mean, I went a couple of years without writing any pony stories. I didn't have any pony ideas. But that's not because somehow the magic fountain of ideas dried up. It was because I was spending my time elsewhere on the internet, and not really involving myself in pony fandom. I wasn't getting any input, I had no pony-related thoughts to make connections with in my mind, so nothing was happening. Now that I'm doing a lot of fic reading and talking about ponies and involving myself in fandom again, I have dozens of ideas bubbling away, some of which are turning into actual stories.

That means that you can help yourself get more ideas by reaching out and looking for more input, putting more things in your head that can spark together and create new ideas, and deliberately noticing the kinds of ideas other people use and thinking about how you could re-combine them to make your own new ides. Many of my stories have been spawned by "This person wrote about X thing with Y pony, but I kind of want to see X with Z pony" and then suddenly I've got a story. I mean, part of why I wrote First and Last, which some people actually seem to like, is because I read a different fic where Discord destroys the world, and I did like the idea, but I didn't like a few of the things the author did, so I decided to do my own thing with that idea, and ta-da, new story, just like that. (Well, that and a few hours hammering it out, because the actual writing has to happen to, ideas are only as good as what you do with them.)

So what about you folks, how do you get your ideas?

Comments

[polyfrazzlemented]

we're in the "too many ideas, ideas are cheap and execution is the hard part" camp. we aren't really sure how to explain how we get our ideas... they're just there.

but we have far too little follow-up to make anything out of them 99.9% of the time.

renny

[bladespark]

I don't write anything much with the vast majority of my ideas either. I do write them down, in case I need them later. Sorting through the Ideas File is a good way to spark something when I have an anthology I want to submit to or something else that's vague but I'd like to participate in, also.

[polyfrazzlemented]

You have a lot more ability to get writing out than we do; we really admire that about you.

Robin

[bladespark]

Aww, thanks! Some days it goes better than others, admittedly. Today I lacked the attention span to do anything serious, so I did Twitter microfic for the Furry Writer's Guilt twitter. Took longer to re-arrange it to fit the character limits than it did to write.

[silveradept]

Connections is a really good way of describing my idea process, because someone else's prompt is usually a good spark for me to get going. I don't feel like I have a while lot of ideas on my own, but I will happily let someone else set an idea in front of me and then go working on it. *shrug*

[duskpeterson]

This is all excellent advice! I do find that I'm more likely to write when I'm around other people who are writing.

In general, I find initial world-building difficult, so I have two story universes I stick with. Therefore, my new stories often arise from my old stories: me wanting to find out what happened to a character at another time in their life, me finding out what happened in a scene I didn't write about, or me exploring the life of a minor character.

Story challenges are also fun to work from ("Write a story about disabled characters in an apocalypse, in which the disabled characters *don't* end up getting killed"), though challenges don't often come my way these days.

Much harder - but very rewarding - is exploring the real-life history underlying my story universes. I once went through a bunch of old Maryland History Magazine issues, seeking a real-life event that would spark a story idea. I ended up with this story.

[bladespark]

Pulling real things into fantasy is just SO FUN. :D You get to twist the details however suit you, but you also get to feel satisfied (maybe even smug?) that yes, this is realistic and a thing humans do, okay?