Where do ideas come from?
That has to be the number one questions published authors are asked by readers, non-readers, aspiring authors, and anyone who is not a creative and doesn’t understand the nature of the ether. Or of the power of headlines, of people-watching, of tidbits gleaned during research turning into monsters with lives of their own. Let me show you how to come up with a half dozen ideas simply by cruising the web or picking a story element with potential and going from there.
1) Seven Civil War stories your teacher never told you
I often scan CNN.com’s headlines just to see if I’m missing anything good. (Since I’m married to @cuppacafe, I miss little.) Anyhow, #7 on that list: The armies weren’t all-male.
Hundreds of women on both sides pulled a Mulan, assuming male identities and appearances so that they might fight for their respective nations.
Some of them did it for adventure, but many did it for monetary reasons: the pay for a male soldier was about $13 month, which was close to double what a woman could make in any profession at the time.
Also, being a man gave someone a lot more freedoms than just being able to wear pants. Remember, this was still more than half a century away from women’s suffrage and being a man meant that you could manage your monthly $13 wages independently.
So it should come as no surprise that many of these women kept up their aliases long after the war had ended, some even to the grave.
You don’t even have to be a history buff to think, whoa! What an amazing idea for a story. A woman in man’s clothing fighting in the Civil War. It could be a historical romance, or a history based novel focusing on the journey of a single woman who found herself in such a position. Why was she there? What were her goals? What drove her? Money to support her family? Patriotism? Was she a spy? Now your book is a historical thriller. See how easy that was?
2) Galveston seeks grants to buy damaged homes
I follow the Houston Chronicle on Twitter. They tweet headlines throughout the day, just enough of a tease to make their followers want to click on the link to the story (or not). Now that it’s hurricane season, and with our part of the Texas Gulf Coast still remembering the devastation of last year’s Hurricane Ike, a story on Galveston’s damaged homes easily perks up my storytelling ears. I’d embellish, sure, and have a heroine holding onto the home that’s been in her family since the 1900 hurricane descimated the city. Since conflict is two dogs with one bone, I’d then have a hero who wants the property for a park to memorialize those who lost their lives in 2008 on the Bolivar Peninsula during Ike. It’s the perfect character driven romance.
Our ship hadn’t quite left port when I handed my teenager a present: a lovely leather-bound notebook with lined pages and a variety of colorful pens. His mission was to keep a cruise journal, a tell-all, remember-the-moments account of his days (and nights) on the high seas.
In the story, the parent goes on to explain that the kid, of course, was too busy having fun to record anything . . . but what if he did? What if he found a hideaway on deck and watched an elegantly dressed man and woman toss a heavy bundle overboard in the middle of the night? Or what if he witnessed two cruise ship employees purposefully sabotage the ship’s lifeboats? Why would they have done that? What’s their story? And what did the kid do? How much danger was he in as a witness? See? A YA mystery right there.
Now, notice something about each of those quick examples? The one thing they have in common? Yep, characters at the root of the plot – but then doesn’t story always come back to character? It does. And it should. What would Star Wars be without Han Solo? Twilight without Edward Cullen? Casablanca without Rick Blaine? As PBW says, Who are you? What do you want? What’s the worst thing that I can do to you? So let’s go from there. What next?
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You’ve concocted a heinous crime and want to write a thriller. Okay, who would commit such a crime? Why? Who was the victim, and what is his story – because here’s another thing about character. Every person in a book has their own reason for being there. The security guard who gets taken hostage by the bank robber in a police stand off might’ve had the day off. His co-worker buddy needed to drive his mother to the doctor, or meet the a/c repairman and let him into his house. Having nothing better to do, the security guard decided to pick up a few overtime bucks. Or maybe the security guard gig is simply holding him over until the plant where he’s worked for twenty years starts production again. So, who is the perpetrator, who is the victim? What FBI agent will get the case and what will it mean to her career? Your main story is your crime story, but each character has his own goals and motivations for being there, too. You’re writing more than a thriller. You’re writing studies of all the characters involved. Like a solar system, where the characters are the planets circling the plot of the sun.
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You want to write for Silhouette Special Edition. You’ve read the works of Karen Templeton, Crystal Green, Christine Rimmer. You’ve read the SSE writing guidelines at eHarlequin and listened to the editors’ podcast. Now it’s time to put your idea together. You like ranchers. You like babies. You come up with one of each and figure out a way to get them together by playing What If? What if your rancher’s teenage sweetheart returned to town with a child he’d never known he fathered and now might lose if their blood types don’t match? What if your rancher returned to his truck after dinner at a local diner to find a baby left in his front seat? Just don’t forget the mothers of these children have stories, too. It’s not just about the rancher!
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You want to write a space opera a la Firefly. You loved Firefly and Serenity. You mourn the cancellation of the series, as do I. Since the best plots are based in character, who are your characters? Do you have a six-shooting spaceman, a pilot savant, a cosmic hooker, a girl in a box, a man named Jayne? Okay, you don’t have to have all those, but you do have to populate your story with characters who will take the wheel of the plot and put the pedal to the metal of the forward motion. What year is it? What technological advances allowed your characters to colonize space? What is their history? Much of this is backstory you won’t necessarily give to your readers, but developing it for yourself will give your book a true authenticity.
In answer to the question, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ most authors will tell you that ideas are everywhere. In the news, in day to day life, in research, in dreams. Once you realize there’s almost nothing that can’t be turned into a viable story idea, your eyes and ears will be constantly keeping watch, and you’ll be hunting down pens and used napkins to jot notes so you won’t forget. And then there’s New York Magazine, the only mag I subscribe to. I mean, who can read this recent headline (not to mention the story) and not have all sorts of ideas: Secrets of the Deep: What lies beneath the surface of New York Harbor? For starters, a 350-foot steamship, 1,600 bars of silver, a freight train, and four-foot-long cement-eating worms. And, yeah. Ugh on the worms.
