Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Joe Hill

croatoa — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:43:45 +0000

“Schenectady. They have them on a shelf in a Mom & Pop on Route 147. ”

– Joe Hill
(from an FAQ, 2009)

The son of Stephen King, thumbs his nose at nepotism and became a writer on his own right with 2oth Century Ghosts and Heart-Shaped Box. Not content with just the written word, Hill delved into comic books with Locke and Key.

Expect him try his hand at poetry (dirty limericks?) in the near future with success.

Of Note…

croatoa — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 08:38:38 +0000

The original idea for this blog was to ask favorite authors / artists / musicians / directors of mine where their wellspring of creativity… well, sprung from. I had some humorous answers, in-depth ones and curt replies.

The most common answer is that ideas come from anywhere. I, myself, am of this camp. The mystery is solved but I’m always waiting for that answer, that out-of-left-field insight in creativity.

Alas, I’m finding it harder and harder to keep this blog updated regularly. The entries will still come but I need to tend to more pertinent things like… learning how to write properly.

I thank you gentle readers and if you like to be updated sporadically, please sign up with our feedburner.

Anon, anon.

Neil Gaiman

croatoa — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 06:08:45 +0000

“Every profession has its pitfalls. Doctors, for example, are always being asked for free medical advice, lawyers are asked for legal information, morticians are told how interesting a profession that must be and then people change the subject fast. And writers are asked where we get our ideas from.

In the beginning, I used to tell people the not very funny answers, the flip ones: ‘From the Idea-of-the-Month Club,’ I’d say, or ‘From a little ideas shop in Bognor Regis,’ ‘From a dusty old book full of ideas in my basement,’ or even ‘From Pete Atkins.’ (The last is slightly esoteric, and may need a little explanation. Pete Atkins is a screenwriter and novelist friend of mine, and we decided a while ago that when asked, I would say that I got them from him, and he’d say he got them from me. It seemed to make sense at the time.)

Then I got tired of the not very funny answers, and these days I tell people the truth:

‘I make them up,’ I tell them. ‘Out of my head.’

People don’t like this answer. I don’t know why not. They look unhappy, as if I’m trying to slip a fast one past them. As if there’s a huge secret, and, for reasons of my own, I’m not telling them how it’s done.

And of course I’m not. Firstly, I don’t know myself where the ideas really come from, what makes them come, or whether one day they’ll stop. Secondly, I doubt anyone who asks really wants a three hour lecture on the creative process. And thirdly, the ideas aren’t that important. Really they aren’t. Everyone’s got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.

Every published writer has had it – the people who come up to you and tell you that they’ve Got An Idea. And boy, is it a Doozy. It’s such a Doozy that they want to Cut You In On It. The proposal is always the same – they’ll tell you the Idea (the hard bit), you write it down and turn it into a novel (the easy bit), the two of you can split the money fifty-fifty.

I’m reasonably gracious with these people. I tell them, truly, that I have far too many ideas for things as it is, and far too little time. And I wish them the best of luck.

The Ideas aren’t the hard bit. They’re a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you’re trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.

But still, it’s the question people want to know. In my case, they also want to know if I get them from my dreams. (Answer: no. Dream logic isn’t story logic. Transcribe a dream, and you’ll see. Or better yet, tell someone an important dream – ‘Well, I was in this house that was also my old school, and there was this nurse and she was really an old witch and then she went away but there was a leaf and I couldn’t look at it and I knew if I touched it then something dreadful would happen…’ – and watch their eyes glaze over.) And I don’t give straight answers. Until recently.

My daughter Holly, who is seven years of age, persuaded me to come in to give a talk to her class. Her teacher was really enthusiastic (‘The children have all been making their own books recently, so perhaps you could come along and tell them about being a professional writer. And lots of little stories. They like the stories.’) and in I came.

They sat on the floor, I had a chair, fifty seven-year-old-eyes gazed up at me. ‘When I was your age, people told me not to make things up,’ I told them. ‘These days, they give me money for it.’ For twenty minutes I talked, then they asked questions.

And eventually one of them asked it.

‘Where do you get your ideas?’

And I realized I owed them an answer. They weren’t old enough to know any better. And it’s a perfectly reasonable question, if you aren’t asked it weekly.

This is what I told them:

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.

You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if…?

(What if you woke up with wings? What if your sister turned into a mouse? What if you all found out that your teacher was planning to eat one of you at the end of term – but you didn’t know who?)

Another important question is, If only…

(If only real life was like it is in Hollywood musicals. If only I could shrink myself small as a button. If only a ghost would do my homework.)

And then there are the others: I wonder… (‘I wonder what she does when she’s alone…’) and If This Goes On… (‘If this goes on telephones are going to start talking to each other, and cut out the middleman…’) and Wouldn’t it be interesting if… (‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if the world used to be ruled by cats?’)…

Those questions, and others like them, and the questions they, in their turn, pose (‘Well, if cats used to rule the world, why don’t they any more? And how do they feel about that?’) are one of the places ideas come from.

An idea doesn’t have to be a plot notion, just a place to begin creating. Plots often generate themselves when one begins to ask oneself questions about whatever the starting point is.

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.’)

Often ideas come from two things coming together that haven’t come together before. (‘If a person bitten by a werewolf turns into a wolf what would happen if a goldfish was bitten by a werewolf? What would happen if a chair was bitten by a werewolf?’)

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

And when you’ve an idea – which is, after all, merely something to hold on to as you begin – what then?

Well, then you write. You put one word after another until it’s finished – whatever it is.

Sometimes it won’t work, or not in the way you first imagined. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Sometimes you throw it out and start again.

I remember, some years ago, coming up with a perfect idea for a Sandman story. It was about a succubus who gave writers and artists and songwriters ideas in exchange for some of their lives. I called it Sex and Violets.

It seemed a straightforward story, and it was only when I came to write it I discovered it was like trying to hold fine sand: every time I thought I’d got hold of it, it would trickle through my fingers and vanish.

I wrote at the time:

I’ve started this story twice, now, and got about half-way through it each time, only to watch it die on the screen.

Sandman is, occasionally, a horror comic. But nothing I’ve written for it has ever gotten under my skin like this story I’m now going to have to wind up abandoning (with the deadline already a thing of the past). Probably because it cuts so close to home. It’s the ideas – and the ability to put them down on paper, and turn them into stories – that make me a writer. That mean I don’t have to get up early in the morning and sit on a train with people I don’t know, going to a job I despise.

My idea of hell is a blank sheet of paper. Or a blank screen. And me, staring at it, unable to think of a single thing worth saying, a single character that people could believe in, a single story that hasn’t been told before.

Staring at a blank sheet of paper.

Forever.

I wrote my way out of it, though. I got desperate (that’s another flip and true answer I give to the where-do-you-get-your-ideas question. ‘Desperation.’ It’s up there with ‘Boredom’ and ‘Deadlines’. All these answers are true to a point.) and took my own terror, and the core idea, and crafted a story called Calliope, which explains, I think pretty definitively, where writers get their ideas from. It’s in a book called DREAM COUNTRY. You can read it if you like. And, somewhere in the writing of that story, I stopped being scared of the ideas going away.

Where do I get my ideas from?

I make them up.

Out of my head. ”

– Neil Gaiman
(from the author’s essay, 1997)

This blog was inspired by the essay, you’ve just read. I was got to know Neil Gaiman through his Sandman series, which in my opinion, is still the best thing to set your eyes upon.

Gaiman writes like he’s weaving dreams from the collective minds of the sleeping. Reading his stuff is like hearing music. Synesthesia. That’s right. His work is on a higher plateau that normal senses cannot comprehend.

David Lynch

croatoa — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 08:22:03 +0000

– David Lynch
(from some Youtube video)

You want something that’s out of the world? Watch any David Lynch film. His work is hard to classify. His style of film making is so distinctive, so utterly his own, it’s easily recognizable as his own.

They termed it “lynchian.”

His art is pure. They are shot and cut to the beat of his own drum. Many of his DVDs are without chapter breaks as he believe all movies should be seen from beginning to the end with nary an interruption. He’s also a believer in transcendental meditation, where he attributes the origins of his ideas.

He describes his work, INLAND EMPIRE, as “a woman in trouble, and it’s a mystery…”

And the mystery of the man that his work endureth.

Marv Wolfman

croatoa — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 06:53:34 +0000

“That’s the first question every writer is asked and the one they most dread. My friend, Harlan Ellison, usually answers, ‘Poughkeepsie.’ He elaborates by saying he subscribes to a service, a sort of an Idea-Of-The-Month that periodically mails him new ideas and stories which he then filters through his typewriter (Harlan does not use a computer or even an electric typewriter – he still hunkers over his old manual which proves technology alone does not give one talent). He goes on, as only Harlan can, elaborating on this concept service, and by the time he’s done, the poor sap asking the question usually believes every ridiculous thing he’s said.

“There are a few things to know about ideas. Ideas are, as they say in Hollywood, a dime a million. There are more ideas in the wold than there are recovering celebrities at the Betty Ford clinic. It’s not the idea that matters. It’s the execution. It’s the way a writer filters that idea through their unique mind that is important. The same idea given to a dozen writers will elicit ten dozen stories as each writer will probably come up a number of approaches before settling on one.

“But, you’re still asking the question, so I will give the tried, true and always constant answer: ideas come from everywhere and everything. You read a news story. You read a book and it kindles a thought completely unrelated to what you read. You second guess the ending of a movie you’re watching and you’re wrong, but that wrong guess leads you into a fascinating new territory you can mine. You mishear something. You miss-see something.

“That actually happened to me. I was working on Tomb of Dracula for Marvel at the time. I knew the character story I wanted to tell but not the plot in which I’d tell it (I’ll get to the very important difference between plot and story and how most new writers screw that up in a future column).

“When I need to think I usually make an effort to stop thinking. That is, I start doing something else, knowing the ideas which have been percolating in my mind, need to get away from any new input and sort through what is already there. So, to get away from thinking, I picked up an issue of some Superman comic (I don’t mean it the way that came out). It was late. I was tired. I’ve got what doctors call ‘wandering eyes,’ an eye condition where my eyes, when tired, go out of focus. Doctors gave me eye exercises as a kid so it doesn’t affect me all the time, but when I’m tired, well, that’s a different story. So, here I am reading an issue of Superman. My eyes start to wander. One eye moves left, one moves right. The features on Superman face leave the outline of his head. I’m seeing Superman’s eyes, nose and mouth move away from his face and float in mid space.

“I rushed back to the typewriter and wrote a story where, one by one, our villain is stealing the features of his targets. He’d pluck the right eye from one man, the left from another. Etc. It was one of the more successful and eerie issues of Tomb Of Dracula.

“Bad vision. That’s where you get an idea.

“But, I still hear you saying (this internet column has a sound card interface which sends your voice through your computer’s microphone, over the net to my computer where the program ‘Eavesdrop 2.6’ catalogues them on my hard drive) you’re always told you need to be original, so why do I keep saying ideas aren’t important?

“Well, first, I haven’t said that, but what I have said is it’s what you do with that ideas that separates the people who can’t from the people who can.

“So, how do you develop your ideas? That’s the real trick of writing, isn’t it? The first thing to remember is generally, stories aren’t about ideas, they are about people. They are about people going through life trying to keep things together, and then, to create conflict and make the story interesting, they come running smack into the ‘idea’ that stops them in their tracks.

“The idea is something that forces the character to think about themselves and their world. It’s what allows the character to grow and change. In television and movies they talk about a character’s arc, that is, how a character changes from the beginning to the end of the story. In real life people don’t change that quickly but it does make for a good story with a satisfactory resolution. Note, by saying satisfactory, I don’t mean a happy resolution where everyone hugs and sings camp songs. Character can not get what they want but that is still the resolution that works the best. Romeo and Juliet. They die. Casablanca. They part. Gone with the Wind. They don’t give a damn. Any Adam Sandler movie. He still lives. But that’s what we don’t want, not him, so maybe I’m wrong on this one.

“On occasion, I’m asked to give a talk about writing and editing and I always bring up my big notion – the idea of internal stories versus external stories. As an example, I always use Spider-Man versus Fantastic Four. When you strip things down to their basics, the Fantastic Four is an external book. Although we certainly like the characters, especially The Thing, the series, at its best, is about the stories and not our heroes. If you’re old enough to have read them you think of the Galactic Trilogy. The Silver Surfer stories. The Doctor Doom stories. The Inhumans. The Black Panther. You think of the grand plots that Stan and Jack came up with.

“With rare exceptions you don’t think about character stories. That’s because the Fantastic Four has been best when the creators come up with great, new stuff we hadn’t seen before. Which, with time, gets very hard to do. In short, the series is more about the ideas than the characters. Which is why the FFs popularity changes so drastically depending on the creativity of whoever is working on it at the time. External stories: more about who they fight and less about the characters.

“On the other hand, when you think of Spider-Man, you think of Peter Parker’s (alliterative) plights. You think of him struggling to save Aunt May or Gwen Stacy, or suffering at the hands of JJJ, or his other personal trials and tribulations. The core idea of Spider-Man is internal. You care about Spidey and his pals more than about the individual stories. That’s why Spidey has almost always sold no matter who works on it. Sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s worse, but as long as the creators don’t forget to tell Spidey’s stories first and the external plot second, you find yourself invested in our hero. Internal stories. More about the characters and less about who they fight.

“I like to think my best work has always been on internal stories. Spider-Man. Dracula. Teen Titans. Etc. I even tried to turn Superman into a more internal book when I wrote it, making the stories about him and not about the plot of the month. External books can be brilliant but I always found it difficult to write, for example, Batman, because it is an external book and not internal in design. His villains and the crimes they commit are more important than Batman himself. I also don’t have any warm and fuzzys about almost all the Fantastic Four stories I wrote with the exceptions of issue 200 – which was an internal story, the ‘final’ confrontation between Reed Richards and Dr. Doom.

“It’s always been my belief that after you’ve read maybe a hundred comics or stories, you’ve seen almost every Big Idea there is. From watching millions of hours of TV and movies we instinctively know where a story is going to go. That’s why, to my way of thinking, when you get your idea try to wrap it around a story about people. Make your ideas internal. Make it important to the characters. Make it less of a puzzle story and more of a personal quest. That’s how to take an idea and turn it into a story someone else may be interested in reading.”

– Marv Wolfman
(transcribed from a writing column in What Th–? Exclamations from the Wolf Manor)

The creator of Blade and the writer for the Tomb Of Dracula, Marv Wolfman still continues his contribution today on Nightwing.

Wolfman was responsible for Crisis on Infinite Earths, which dealt with a lot of deaths and the tweaking of 50 years of DC Comics history to streamline it.

Which, of course, gave us the convoluted Countdown to Final Crisis, something that I’m still figuring out for myself.

Tami Hoag

croatoa — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 07:21:33 +0000

“Writing about crime, ideas are everywhere. Some part of a news story might catch my interest, or something on an A&E documentary, or something I come across in a reference book. All it takes is a topic or a crime or a character to catch my interest and spark the question: What if…? Characters sort of come to me and shape themselves as I learn more about them. That’s one of my favorite parts of the process—the characters…”

– Tami Hoag
(taken from the author’s FAQ)

I can’t wrap around my head that Tami Hoag started her literary career in romance novels and it’s such a smooth transition.

One minute you’re reading, “As Lucinda sensually slides down and wrapped her quivering waifish hand around the throbbing purple-headed rod…” and the next, “… the killer deftly cuts across the appendage, blood poured out in torrents.” It’s just fascinating.

Meg Cabot

croatoa — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 06:40:48 +0000

“Much of what is in my books is taken directly from my own diaries that I kept when I was in high school…I still have them, though I am the only one who will ever be allowed to read them. I am only using the selective bits that won’t incriminate me.”

– Meg Cabot
(from the author’s FAQ)

Meg Cabot writes what is commonly termed as “chick lit.” Her more famous work, The Princess Diaries, was made into a movie by Disney. Part of her work was lifted, this time in a sad act of plagiarism perpetrated by one Kaavya Viswanathan.

So, what of it? I enjoyed reading The Princess Diaries.

…

Don’t judge me.

Harlan Ellison

croatoa — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 05:59:57 +0000

“Preparatory note on process: How it happens, where it comes from, why it speaks in that particular tongue, always the same damned unanswerable question. But they never give it a rest, the endless interrogation. Their cadre is never depleted. We sit under the broiling lights turned into our eyes, and they ask and ask, always the same damned question, and we plead ignorance; and when one of their number tires, she or he is replaced by another. And the question is asked again and again, without change, without compassion. We would tell if we knew, honestly we would. We would give up every secret possess, if only they would turn off the lights for fifteen minutes, let us curl onto the cold stone floor and catch forty winks. We would tell all, divulge every tiny code number and Mercator track, drop the dime on even the dearest and closest friend or lover, spill the beans, tell the tale, five it all up if only they’d knock off for fifteen minutes, let it go dark, let us sleep.

“But they won’t, they’re merciless; and they never wise up, because their cadre is never depleted. There’s always another one warming up in the bullpen as the one on the mound begins to tire and keeps missing the strike zone. And here comes the new one, still moist from the academy, eyes bright as a Borneo Green Broadbill’s, smiling ingratiatingly, plopping into the well-worn interrogator’s chair, and here comes that same stupid, damned unanswerable question. Again.

“Where do you get your ideas?

“In a letter dated 10 July 1991, Jeremy G. Byrne of the Editorial Committee of Eidolon, an extremely elegant and smart literary journal emanating from Perth (which is on the coast of Western Australia), wrote to me, in part: ‘…the genesis of Eiodolon was a long process. You might well have guessed that it was your own ANGRY CANDY piece, ‘Eiodolons’ — with its Australian connection — that gave us the idea; and when we discovered the alternate definitions for the word, it seemed stunningly appropriate, or at least amusingly pretentious.’

“Where do you get your ideas?

“In the liner notes I wrote for the recorded reading I did of my story ‘Jeffty is Five’ I said:

“My friends Walter and Judy Koenig invited me to a party. I don’t like parties. I do like Walter and Judy. I also like their kids. I went to the party.

“Mostly I sat near the fireplace, friendly but not ebullient. Mostly I talked to Walter and Judy’s son, josh, who is remarkable beyond the telling. And then I overheard a snatch of conversation. An actor named Jack Danon said — I thought he said — something like this — ‘Jeff is five, he’s always five.’ No, not really. He didn’t say anything like that at all. What he probably said was, ‘Jeff is fine, he’s always fine.’ Or perhaps it was something completely different.

“But I had been awed and delighted by josh Koenig, and I instantly thought of just such a child who was arrested in time at the age of five. Jeffty, in no small measure, is josh: the sweetness of josh, the intelligence of josh, the questioning nature of josh.

“Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered.

“Where do you get your ideas?

“I purposely mishear things. The excellent novelist and critic Geoffrey Wolff has written, ‘Every fictioneer re-invents the world because the facts, things of people of the received world are unacceptable.’ So I purposely mishear things that are said. It mortars up the gaps in boring conversation. It assists in doing honor to the late architect Robert Smithson’s dictum: Establish enigmas. Not explanations. ‘Jeffty is five, he’s always five.’

“Speak to me of a Chinese hand laundry, and I visualize a large wicker basket filled with Chinese hands that need laundering. Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear. Tearalong, the Dotted Lion

“Where do you get your ideas?

“My story ‘Eidolons’ came from the assemblage of a congeries of misheard remarks, altered to form brief allegories or tone-poems. I did one each week as introduction to my stint as the host of a radio show. Now, like Ouroboros, we come full circle: kindly note process, and let me sleep:

“Mishearing purposely; translative adaptation of misheard remark to fictional state; assemblage of misheard adaptations to story; story as impetus for Eidolon magazine; request from magazine for contribution; assemblage of misheard adaptations submitted to magazine born of effects of mishearing.

“The process. Where do you get your ideas? First, the stories. Then revelation of what was said; and what was heard. The process. At last, to sleep, the answer.”

– Harlan Ellison
(an excerpt from Where I Shall Dwell in The Next World by the author)

From his legal suits to his criticism of Gene Roddenberry, Ellison remains, according to one of his dust jacket, “possibly the most contentious person on Earth.”

But can the man write.

He has written numerous stories all from his manual Olympia typewriter (he spits upon technology), my all time-favorite being Chatting With Anubis, which won the Bram Stoker Award for best short story in 1995.

His collection of stories interpreted in the comic book form is now released as Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor: Volume 2.

Lemony Snicket

croatoa — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:50:29 +0000

“From eavesdropping and from reading other books.

“Writers are, pretty much thieves, stealing ideas from other people who didn’t have the foresight to write them down, and then from the people who did have the foresight to write them down.”

– Lemony Snicket
(from a CBBC interview, 2006)

It’s not known whether it’s the Lemony Snicket personae that answered or the author (real name: Daniel Handler).

Snicket, of course, wrote A Series of Unfortunate Events, chronicling the exploits of the Baudelaire children and despite the author’s warnings never to read these woeful pages, we go against caution and share in the grief, and brief joy, of the Baudelaires.

Since the end of The End, Snicket has released another book, this time a holiday fare, The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story.

Lemony Snicket is still at large.

Philip Pullman

croatoa — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 05:01:37 +0000

“This is the question that every author gets asked, and none of us know, so we all have to make up something that sounds as if it’s helpful. People are genuinely interested, I know, and it isn’t polite to be facetious about it. For one thing, people don’t always know you’re making a joke. I once said in answer to this that I subscribed to Ideas ‘R’ Us, and someone wrote in and asked for the address.

But what interests me is why people ask. I can’t believe that everyone isn’t having ideas all the time. I think they are, actually, and they just don’t recognise them as potential stories. Because the important thing is not just having the idea; it’s writing the book. That’s the difficult thing, the thing that takes the time and the energy and the discipline. The initial is much less important, actually, than what you do with it.”

– Philip Pullman
(from the author’s FAQ)

Conservative British columnist, Peter Hitchens, wrote that Philip Pullman is, whom “atheists prayed for, if atheists prayed.”

But look beyond the controversies, the hullabaloo and read His Dark Material Trilogy and you can see the value in its words as Pullman weaved worlds where children seek to be free of their authoritative stranglehold.

Some see his books as the antithesis to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, while others see it as interesting reading.

The film version of Pullman’s first book of the trilogy, The Golden Compass was released.