\tIdeas for writing come from many places, some stranger than others. I should point out that everyone gets ideas, but unless you\u2019re a writer you\u2019re not likely to pay attention or even notice ideas that might make good articles or stories. How come? Because you don\u2019t need them. If you\u2019re a programmer and you need to solve a problem with a section of code in your program, then you\u2019ll only be interested in ideas that would work for that issue. Bakers will get ideas related to baking, homemakers will get ideas associated with helping their homes run smoother, and teachers will find ideas that will help them teach. Something that might solve a plumbing problem simply won\u2019t register unless you have a leak that needs fixing.<\/p>\n
\tSo as a writer, I\u2019m always needing to find ideas for my job and so those are the ideas that I notice. In fact, I generally wind up with more ideas than I have the time or energy to use. <\/p>\n
Where do they come from? I\u2019ll get ideas from reading a story in the newspaper. For instance, a few years ago, I read about a skull that was discovered in the desert by hikers. I got a picture in my head about it, and began wondering if it was a murder victim. Then I contemplated what an odd thing it would be to find a skull or, or worse, a corpse. What would be worse than that, I wondered. Then it hit me: what would you do if you found a body, rolled it over, and found yourself looking down at your own face? I heard Twilight Zone music. And from that came a science fiction tale. <\/p>\n
Ideas will come from a phrase someone speaks, from an incident in my life, maybe something minor at the grocery store–such as waiting in line too long or not finding an item I was looking for. They will arise from good things that happen to me and bad things. From my children. From their problems. Everything I experience, everything I hear–and sometimes how I mishear. Mistakes I make, even typos, will generate ideas. <\/p>\n
The difficulty in writing is not so much getting the ideas, but in the execution. For instance, with the thought of finding your own dead body, I had to then invent a solution to such a peculiar mystery that makes some sort of sense. Science fiction, like most genres of literature, has its own set of clich\u00e9s that should be avoided. I had to come up with how you could be alive and still find your own dead body that didn\u2019t involve time travel, cloning, robots or parallel universes. I also wanted the story to have a happy, rather than a tragic ending. It took awhile.<\/p>\n
\tIdeas sometimes arise from events in my own life, or the lives of people I know. After all, we writers really do write what we know. Thus, my characters will usually have jobs of a sort that I have had at one point or another in my life\u2014or a job that belongs to a friend or relative. I\u2019ll set the characters into locations where I have lived or visited\u2014or places where friends or relatives have gone. So for instance with my historical novel about the battle of Ain Jalut in Israel in 1260 between the army of the Mongol Hulagu Khan and the Egyptian Mamluks, I began the novel with Hulagu\u2019s destruction of Baghdad and his slaughter of its 800,000 inhabitants in 1258. I haven\u2019t been to Baghdad or Iraq, but I have a friend who was born there and lived there before his escape in 1980. And I have another friend who recently served a tour of duty in Iraq. So from the two of them, I got good descriptions of the landscape, weather, smells, plant life and the like. The other details specific to the Middle Ages involved research in books.<\/p>\n
\tMostly, however, when people ask me where I get my ideas from, I suspect that they are hoping to hear an answer more magical: that somehow ideas just pop into my head full grown. Or that perhaps that they come from dreams.<\/p>\n
\tAnd occasionally, dreams are where ideas comes from. Usually a dream will only provide a scene or an image in a larger story. For instance, I had a recurring dream of riding in an elevator that not only went up and down, but also side to side and diagonally. I used how that felt in my dream to describe a scene in a story.<\/p>\n
\tSamuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that he got his poem Kubla Khan in a dream\u2014and that it is incomplete because someone knocked on his door before he could write it all down.
\nI have gotten the ideas or plots of whole novels by way of a dream exactly twice. I once suffered three years of writer\u2019s block as a consequence of the SIDS death of our foster son (and subsequent wrongful death lawsuit). A few weeks after the lawsuit was dismissed a dream I had became the plunger that ended my writer\u2019s block and served as the basis for a new novel.<\/p>\n
\tThe other time was a recurring dream that I had not known was a recurring dream until I awakened in the middle of it and wrote it down one night. I realized, as I wrote it down that I had dreamed it before; in fact, I had dreamed it several times and had even had a vague conscious memory of it that I had dismissed as a movie half-remembered. It was only after having awakened from the dream that I realized that it was no movie, but was instead something my own sleep-addled brain had given me. <\/p>\n
\tAs to where a dream comes from, and why, very rarely, a dream will actually make for a good story, is something I can\u2019t answer. So far as an idea for a story is concerned, however, such dreams are no better or worse, or any easier or harder to transform into a written work, than an idea that comes from any other place.<\/p>\n
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