When asked where he got the ideas for his stories, Harlan Ellison said Schenectady.
About as good an answer as any, I’d say.
Last week we said, following Mr. Ellison, that writers write. Just like plumbers plumb, and carpenters carpenter, and mechanics mechanic.
However, in order to write, writers have to come up with ideas for their stories. Just like comedians must come up with jokes or funny stories. Now, take my wife… Please! Ahem.
So where do writers get the ideas for their stories?
My answer to that question is: ideas are everywhere. Take anything. A scene. A person. A story. A comment someone makes. A situation. Everything that exists in the world or the mind is grist for the writer’s mill.
Way back in 11th grade, my speech teacher told the class one day (when I wasn’t there) that I was the only person he knew who could talk on any subject, for any length of time, and say absolutely nothing. Thank you, Mr. Kline.
So the next time I was in class, my classmates wanted a demonstration. The subject decided upon was what does a rainstorm feel like to a horse.
I had all of 15 seconds to prepare. I spoke for 5 minutes or so, to rousing applause at the end.
I did what all good creative writers or speakers do, I made it up and made it entertaining. Because to this day I still don’t know what a rainstorm feels like to a horse.
Ideas are everywhere. What separates writers from non-writers is that writers see the ideas and non-writers don’t.
I think this applies to all creatives. Not just writers.
Michelangelo saw David in the block of marble and chipped away until he freed him.
My post-apocalyptic cozy catastrophe, The Rocheport Saga, began with a single sentence that popped into my head one day: Today I killed a man and a woman.
That sentence turned into 2200 plus handwritten pages. So far I’ve published 7 volumes of the saga and hope to return to it some day to finish it.
I was watching The X-Files reruns and asked myself what if Mulder and Scully were pursuing Cthulhu instead of aliens. And Pierce Mostyn was born.
Ideas are everywhere. One just has to see them. Writers do and non-writers don’t. Creatives create. Non-creatives don’t. Creatives see the ideas and turn them into art, music, literature, and inventions.
Festival of Death began life as a short story assignment for a Writers Digest course. The story was about a welfare worker (I worked in the county welfare department at the time) who wanted to reduce his ever growing caseload. So he invited his clients to his home for dinner, killed them, and ate them. The idea horrified my WD instructor.
Years later the clients were being sacrificed to Aztec deities in the rituals of a neo-Aztec cult in the caves below Minneapolis. The cult was discovered and broken up by my ace PI, Justinia Wright.
Justinia Wright herself came about from a story I read featuring an amateur sleuth named Athalea Goode.
I pondered on that name. Athalea is from the Greek and means truth. Goode is English meaning good. Truth and goodness.
What if I switched it up to Latin? Justinia means justice, and Wright is English and means a maker or builder. A maker of justice.
And then drawing inspiration from my sister for her physical characteristics, Justinia Wright was born. For her Watson, I used myself as the model. And so the brother and sister PI team of Tina and Harry Wright was born. Additionally, I borrowed the ethos of the Nero Wolfe stories. And now I have 9 books and several short stories in the series and more are on the way.
Some writers get inspiration from their dreams. HP Lovecraft and Stephen King to name two well-known authors.
Dreams have never done it for me. I find more than enough material in the waking world.
I accumulate fountain pens. I like them. And sometimes I get a pen with the former owner’s name engraved on the pen. When I see that name I wonder why do I, a stranger, have the pen instead of some family member or significant person in the former owner’s life.
From that musing, my flash fiction piece, “It all goes” came about.
I buy a lot of estate pipes. Part of my desire to reuse and repurpose perfectly good items instead of dumping them in landfills.
I have several pipes made in Germany during World War II. I wonder who smoked the pipe during those years. Was it a Nazi official? A soldier? A submarine commander? A businessman?
Then how did the pipe find its way to America? And who smoked it here?
There’s a story, multiple stories, in those pipes. I just don’t know what they are yet. But it will come to me, of that I’m sure.
Ideas are all around us. Creatives see them, hear them, smell them, taste them, touch them — and turn them into wonderful things. The rest of the world just walks on by, not knowing they are there.
Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!
CW Hawes is a playwright; award-winning poet; and a fictioneer, with two bestselling novels. He’s also an armchair philosopher, political theorist, social commentator, and traveler. He loves a good cup of tea and agrees that everything’s better with pizza.
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