How I Write Fiction: Ideas (Beltane 2016)

Cat on a Hot Tile Roof

So you want to be a writer? Many are called, few are chosen. But even if you’re not touched by some strange muse, there things you can do to prepare should that dark fairy never tap your shoulder.

One of the first questions most writers get is: where do you come up with your ideas? Many beginning writers find this to be the hardest part, uncovering interesting or intriguing subjects to write about. For me, this is one of the easiest parts and always has been. Other aspects of the writing process plague me to no end but I always have more ideas than I could ever use.

I can’t say exactly where they come from. The Greeks had a different grammatical construction than English. Instead of saying I had an idea as we tend to in American English, they said, an idea occurred to me. That small syntactic change captures more of how the creative process really works.

If that’s all the advice I have to offer, this will be a very short and not particularly useful essay. Lucky for you, I do have a few more practical lessons I’ve learned.

First, for me, ideas come from exposure to new ideas, whether they are about people, places, situations or strange details. Different people get inspirations from different sources, but mostly, it seems to me, it comes down to a willingness to explore. Read omnivorously, from books to articles to poetry, science to literature to pop culture. If you’re more visual, watch documentaries, TED Talks and YouTube. Listen to anyone, trying to understand their point of view even if you disagree with them. Write down what your internal monologue has say. Take notes on your dreams. Pay attention to song lyrics. Reflect on experiences from your past. Be open to it all.

I have several wells I constantly draw from for ideas. PBS is a good one for me, mostly Nature and Nova. National Geographic used to be another before they began changing their style and focus. The New York Times because of the way they bring stories to life. But many other news sources will do, especially if you can tailor stories to your tastes and interests like on My Yahoo (don’t judge), Feedly or Google News, even Apple News. Ideas come to me in anything from philosophy lectures to snippets of overheard conversations to word origins in the dictionary to old gaming scenarios I’ve run. Sometimes just weird observations and extrapolations. If you get a thrill of excitement or a little chill down your back as you think about it, you know you are on the right track.

The key isn’t necessarily where you get your ideas. You will learn where, when and what rituals and sources best generate them for you over time. The important part is being in a position to capture the inspiration when it comes. And it will almost always come in the most inconvenient place at the most inconvenient time. Trust me. Sometimes it’s when your mind is quiet, like just before you drop off to sleep or just after you wake up from a dream. Other times when your mind is half asleep moving through a well-worn routine, like when you’re in the shower or brushing your teeth. Other times when it’s distracted and slightly bored, like driving back and forth to work. And yet other times it’s in the middle of something stimulating, like a movie, a concert, a party or an intense conversation over dinner.

That means in each of those situations, you have to have a way to capture the idea as it comes. It doesn’t have to be fancy or even long but it does have to happen right then. You will think, of course I’ll remember this. It’s so striking. It raised the hair on the back of my neck. It resonated so deeply I could never forget.

And nine out of ten times, you’ll be wrong. The idea will vanish before you know it, usually in a puff of greasy green smoke, laughing as it goes, never to be seen or heard from again except to taunt you from the shadows of regret.

I run pretty old school in how I capture ideas, using pencil and paper. My personal belief is that no writer should be without a pad and writing implement at all times. Like a doctor’s little black bag of old, it should be there when you need it. In fact, I have several. I have a 3 x 5 pad in a black leather case that fits comfortably in either a shirt or back pants pocket that I carry anytime I leave the house (with a mechanical pencil clipped in a pocket or on my collar). I have a larger 5 x 7 notebook in a suede case with a loop that holds a mechanical pencil just inside. I have a lighted index card clipboard by the bed with an attached pen. I have a note cube by the computer, along with more mechanical pencils than any sane person could ever need in a coffee cup. I have a notepad and pencil in the car. Then, of course, I have a number of 8.5 x 11 notebooks that I use for specific projects or stories as I work my way through them.

What you use doesn’t matter as long as you always have it. Karen takes notes on her smart phone when she needs to. A former college roommate uses a digital mini-recorder he carries everywhere and transcribes at the end of the day. I’ve heard of writers hanging waterproof whiteboards in the shower because that’s where they get their best ideas. It’s like a photographer always carrying a camera, or an artist with a sketch pad. You get the picture.

But I would strongly advocate carrying an actual pad and pen/pencil as a backup. Something that doesn’t need batteries or charging or even much light to use. Legal pads, post-it notes, free promo notepads you get in the mail or from hotels, anything will do. The dullest pencil has a better memory than the sharpest mind, or the most expensive drained device.

Capturing ideas doesn’t end the process for me. Next I organize them. I used to keep a hodge-podge of notes paper-clipped together (I still do in a letter slot on my desk for things other than writing). A few years ago when I was running low on inspiration and had some time to kill, I created the magic box. Probably one of the best things I’ve ever done for my writing.

The magic box is an inlaid wood storage box for index cards I received as a present years ago. It sits within easy reach on my desk, right by the monitor. Inside, I created tabs for sets of different index cards, including: Story Ideas, Background, Details, Aliens, Names, and Lines (separate from but similar to the lines I discussed in How I Write Poetry), plus some unique tabs for larger projects. I recently added another tab for cards I’d already used in stories to I could keep track.

Next, I went through all my carry-around notebooks and Dragon*Con lectures, all my big notebooks, all my memo pad and all my miscellaneous scraps of notes. I circled each idea and checked it off once I’d transferred it to a white index card with as much information as I could remember along with its source if I had one (many didn’t). On each card I wrote the header for one of the tabs and whether it was science fiction, fantasy or something else. Sometimes there was a title, sometimes not. Sometimes I didn’t even remember writing them. Yet some of those ideas still gave me chills when I reread them which is a pretty spooky feeling.

If an idea spanned more than an inspiration (more than an index card), I typed it up on the computer and stored it in a separate folder system under Writing. There I have folders for working poetry, drafts for essays, drafts for short stories, and tree structures for various novels. All that is backed up, sometimes in two different places (I almost lost a prime drive and a backup to the same lightning hit in 2010).

Now when I get an idea, I just run into the office, pull out a card, jot it down and file it away. No fuss, no muss.

Of course, there are many other ways to organize your ideas. Some writers keep dedicated idea notebooks they occasionally peruse when they’re low on inspiration. Others use iPad apps or computer software that create digital index cards capable of being linked together (just like I did for term papers back in school). Some people rely on physical or computer file folders and old-fashioned wetware memory. Still others use pushpins and cork boards, or magnetic white boards, or post-it notes and walls. Or three ring binders and five-subject school notebooks with pocket folders. I’m sure there’s more. It’s all about what works for you.

The final piece to this puzzle is using your ideas. When I sit down to write a story, I start with the magic box. If I’m uncertain what to work on next, I pick out the story ideas that most excite me at the moment then cull them down until I finally settle on one. Then I go through the other categories to see if any other background, details, names or lines seem to layer in. Those are the first things I type in when I open a new working document for a story. Often as I’m writing, I reference the source (if I noted it). I research more of it as necessary. But I’ll go over more of that in the next essay on World Building.

To give you some examples, when we were watching PBS’s Nature regularly (back when we had cable and a DVR), I kept a notebook by my chair. I filled it with ideas for aliens just based on the weird, fantastic creatures on this planet and their behaviors we don’t often see. That netted about fifty cards over 2-3 years.

Glancing through the magic box, I find one idea from a philosophy lecture on the ship of Theseus (among others), two from a set of physics lectures on the nature of time, one from a Black Sabbath song title, one from a military history book on the ancient Greeks, one from Machiavelli, one from an American Experience on TB, one from a one-a-day cat calendar, one from the meaning of a chemical symbol on the periodic table, one from a New York Times article on the Bosnian Civil War, one from a human interest piece on the Romanian soccer coach during a World Cup, one from a book on modern agriculture, one from a Nat Geo article on viruses and immunity, one from an info box at an Egyptian museum exhibit, one from a Nova called Magnetic Storm (among others), one from a Nature on Botswana (among others), one from a word history in the American Heritage Dictionary, one from an experience of driving in Puerto Rico, another from a language experience aboard ship, one from an article on US strategic reserves on Native American lands, one from a PBS series on India, and two what-if tangents from popular movies. And that’s just a fraction of the cards therein.

As far as using them, I incorporated three cards in TimeVirus, one in the Memory Block series, one in Underground Science, one in Mindwipe, one in Time Lock, one in Pearl, two in Battalion 4-P, and one in The Ritual. And those are only after I started keeping track. Almost every story I’ve written has an idea or detail from one of my old notebooks, or some distantly remembered piece of information I read in a book or magazine.

One of the best exercises I’ve run across for inspiration uses something like Flickr (or really any photo sharing site, or search engine, or even a book if you’re truly old school). On My Yahoo (again, don’t judge), there is a module for Flickr that has two settings, one called Featured, the other called Explore. The second is the one I like better. It gives you six usually pretty striking photographs with rollover titles if you want them. (Or you can find it on Flickr’s main page). You can click on the photo for a larger version. One of those six photos is likely to speak to you in some way.

Regardless, every day (or whenever you feel you need it), choose one of those photos to start making up a story. Photos are just a snapshot in time. Ask yourself: What came before? What came after? What is that person or creature thinking? How did they get there? What are they really doing?

Or you can play the classic writer’s game of what if. Take the picture with this essay. What if that cat is as intelligent as you are? What if it could talk to you? What if it’s an alien observer? What if it’s a spy? What if it is the prophet of its goddess? What if it was the only witness to a murder? What if it’s secretly a little girl’s familiar? Keep asking as you dig deeper into each scenario. Before you know it, you’ll outline the contours of something special.

I have this recurring fantasy that one day I’ll clear out the magic box by writing a story for everything inside. And a recurring nightmare that I’ll never get another worthwhile idea. That fear and fantasy are just opposite sides of the same coin. The ideas will keep coming if you let them. You’ll never catch up and they’ll never go away.

The only key is to make sure that you remember them so you can find them when you need them. Even if you never use them all, they keep your creative machinery well-oiled. And that’s not an inconsequential step in calling yourself a writer.


© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III