Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

 “A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.”—Oscar Wilde

“Take, take, take.”—The White Stripes

A common question many authors sneer at, likely because the answer isn't nearly as simple as the question is innocuous. As if there could be any one place a writer gets their ideas.

I once told the editor of my former English department's newsletter, a man who wanted to publish one of my poems, that, in fact, I had not written any of my own work. I admitted to him confidentially that I had unearthed the various stories and poems at the end of a long stone wall beside a big oak tree. The scribblings were folded into a box under a rock that had no earthly business in that Maine hayfield. A piece of black, volcanic glass. I threw myself on his mercy for my literary treachery. If he believed me, I was pardoned, but my work was never featured in the newsletter.

Stephen King takes the opposite approach, saying he gets his ideas from “everywhere.” I don't know whose answer is more unhelpful, but his is closer to the truth.

Yesterday a middle school aged girl asked me, wasn't it true writers get most of their ideas from dreams? Never mind what I was doing talking to a middle-schooler, but the prevailing interest in the question surprises me. (I wasn't doing anything talking to the middle-schooler, just having lunch with my friend, her relative through marriage. She isn't married, he is. Never mind.)

Being a writer isn't something you are born with. You don't wake up one morning with a headache and a little case of being a writer. You don't have special story dreams, or invent a whole world halfway through breakfast. What you do is teach yourself to pay attention to things that are interesting. An artist might watch for interesting images; a musician listens for interesting sounds. Ideas don't pop into your head so much as you stumble over them in your reading, watching movies, or just walking down the street. What you have to do is know to stop and pick the thing up, wherever it comes from, so you can play with it later to see if the idea goes anywhere.

All writers are forgers. There's no need to be ashamed of that so long as your thefts are piecemeal. If you spent your whole life on a lonely island, what chance is there that you could write anything beyond the limited scope of the horizon and your own meager thoughts? You wouldn't even have any youthful fairy tales to populate your imagination. What you have to do is “stuff your head,” as Ray Bradbury said. Dive in to anything that interests you, and then when you sit down to write, or even if you're just daydreaming, you'll start shuffling the pieces around until you hit on something that excites you. You won't be able to help it.

Don't forget to play—that's key. Misbehave. Surprise yourself. Take what the other guy did and do just the opposite. Pluck a quote from The Shawshank Redemption and twist it to your own purpose. See what happens. Just maybe leave the antics out of your correspondences with publishers. Such people often have no sense of humor about the seriousness of their work.

Tenth of December

"Two fallacies that need to be debunked. One is, 'To be a writer you have to get an MFA.'  False. Two is, 'If you get an MFA you'll be a published writer.'  False."—George Saunders

 George Saunders, “Tenth of December,”Talks at Google

George Saunders reads a near-sci/fi story from his latest collection, Tenth of December, and answers writing questions. Literary circles consider his work to be outstanding. Maybe worth a look. His advice, at least, seems sound.

At this reading he talks about editing, and honoring the readers intelligence to keep a story interesting. "As a general writing principle, you're main job is to do something, and then notice it, and then adjust accordingly. And then notice a thing that you've done, and adjust accordingly. Kind of rinse, lather, repeat, you know, a million times."

George addresses other questions such as what makes a good writer, and how a writer approaches truth in their fiction, “one phrase at a time.”

Unity in Imagery

“. . . the unity of effect or impression is a point of greatest importance. . . . without unity of impression, the deepest effects cannot be brought about.”—Edgar Alan Poe.*

Obviously you want to maintain tone in your writing to establish atmosphere. You don't write a somber scene in which your leading character's thoughts “scamper” through their head when they hear the “cheerful” ring of the telephone. You could make a case for cheerful because it juxtaposes with the mood of the scene, but only if it appeared without the other misstep. Scamper is the real offender here. There is something light and playful about the word that nudges the reader off course emotionally. Just think of how totally you would be thrown out of the scene if the character scampered over to the phone. The difference is a matter of degrees.

Your imagery should support the scene as well. However clever or accurate you may think a given simile, if it distracts from the intent of the scene, it probably has to go. But it's also a good idea for your images to support each other. This is to eliminate clutter.

Developing writers have a tendency to jump around with their imagery. He exhaled smoke like exhaust from a rusted Buick. It was the color of sour milk. The crowd moved like a school of fish. Things like that. Those images could well fit the atmosphere of the scene, but not one of them ties into the other. They're disjointed. The reader is jerked along from one to the next and doesn't know how they add up.

When you write concurrent images, it helps make a scene feel solid. As an example, I wrote a scene set in a jazz club that has an entrance like a cave. The music inside ripples, builds into a wave and comes crashing down on everyone. Later, a musician cups a hand like a great shell to his ear to catch what his bandmates are saying. A thread of water related imagery runs through the scene, cementing the sense of place. I stumbled on the idea because I happened to have named the club The Blue Room. You should look to your scene when possible to suggest a direction for your imagery. Use every part of the writing buffalo.

It's actually easier to work this way than a helter-skelter approach, because once you have your first image you've given yourself something to build on. Now you'll know whereabouts to reach for the next one instead of having to start from scratch each time.

*Quote from “The Importance of the Single Effect in a Prose Tale”