How Do You Come Up With Ideas?

Coming up with ideas has never been my problem. If anything, I have too many ideas -- and like a bunch of over-eager students, they're all raising their hands, waving their arms, and screaming to be called upon.

deathwizard said:

If anything, I have too many ideas -- and like a bunch of over-eager students, they're all raising their hands, waving their arms, and screaming to be called upon.

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Man, I hear ya. Usually the screaming starts around 3am.

-Derek

I'm always inspired by completely random bits of nonsense. And I too have an issue with too many ideas... the difference is, I don't have a lot of ideas I feel like persuing all the way to a finished draft. Those quality sparks only happen a few times a year.

I'm never sure exactly where my ideas began. There's no moment in time I can recall.

I get a vague impression, a character, a conflict, and I have to sort of nurse it on its way from there. I started and stopped the novel I'm shopping around right now 3-4 times before getting the ideas clear. Even the maps I've drawn have changed.

I expect I'll go through the same process for the next series of books I'm planning. I'm picking away at it a little right now, developing ideas, style, and the world. Writing little excerpts helps me figure out what will work and what won't. I'm hoping to be ready to write it as soon as I've written "The End" at the end of book #3 of my current idea.

We're having a discussion like this over at Castle Debacle.

But I'm having trouble with the rolodex image analogy. You mean your ideas come on 3x5 cards with all the character's information on it, and you just turn the dial until that character comes up and then you start writing about him?

Because ideas can come from anywhere. My kid might say something like, "Do you miss your childhood" and that becomes the essence for a story. Or my dog might bark at nothing and an idea comes from that. Or the temperature dropping to below zero might trigger something. An item in the news. A scene in a movie or a book. Ideas come from everywhere.

Usually a scene, character, or event pops into my head and I write it down. Then, I let my (overly active) imagination run wild. Although, I do get a lot of those ideas from my dreams. Actualy, my first novel was a retelling of a nightmare I had. Of course, I had to flesh it out, but you get the idea.

Ideas come when I'm pondering stuff. What the stuff is and where I find it depends on the story. It could be an object in my house or something that someone said. Ideas aren't the problem because they're everywhere. Doing something with an idea is the tricky part.

The basis for my series is in...fanfiction. Yes, there, I've said it, stone me and we can move on. A lot of ideas stem from wanting to create analogues of the OCs I'd written for the fanfiction series, whilst others come from stuff I see and think "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if that building didn't exist" or "That would be a great place for a fight scene".

The location inspires a lot - I've created a group of characters (which I'm looking forward to writing), simply because the city's river is really polluted.

Usually in my dreams. Especially after I've had too much caffeine.

Nicole

I get weird lines in my head like; 'It's squishy' developing into a pair of 8 yr old girls plotting to kill their baby brothers.

I only do what my rice crispies tell me to do...

I didn't bring him up, and I don't feel bad quoting this essay

Neil Gaiman said:

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.

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Sums it up for me. I can't say where I get my ideas. I can only point at a story and say where I got that idea.

Blood sacrifice. (j/k)

Seriously, ideas come just from living. Books don't form from just random ideas, though. Random stuff gets thrown into a pot on the back burner of my brain to simmer for days, months, years, decades until I'm ready to write something new. Then I start stirring and see what's cooked up while I was busy doing other things. Usually thousands of little ideas have merged into a really exciting concept that I can spend a year or two of my life playing with next.

HeronW said:

I get weird lines in my head like; 'It's squishy' developing into a pair of 8 yr old girls plotting to kill their baby brothers.

I only do what my rice crispies tell me to do...

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I get lines in my head, too. Images come with the words, and sentences spin out of my control... tada! First page!

Then I think, "hmm. I'd better write the rest of this."

Things like plot and characters and continuity come later.

I get my ideas from all over the place, but mainly books, films and things i see on the internet. I am a gamer and their are a lot of good (and some very bad) games that have some interesting ideas on traditional ideas. For the fantasy fans their is an Xbox/PC game called Oblivion that has lots of sub plot ideas just waiting to be developed into full stories.

But some of my best ideas - ones I can't stop thinking about sometimes just 'pop' into my head, where they come from I have no idea but I am grateful form them.

I'll think I've got a couple of great ideas, then something weird will just burst into my thoughts and thats what I've got to write about. This last novel I finished all started with a Tracy Chapman song and a couple (probably too many) margaritas. I'm looking for that next burst of thunder, so I guess I better start drinking tonight!

I usually start with character. I create that first and then think about what kind of world that person would live in, what would create the best conflict for them.

In terms of just little ideas - what to use here and there and complications to the plot, etc... or even characters themselves... well, I steal.

Example: I read a manga where the author killed off the MC's husband, and then had the MC marry the husband's best friend. It turned out to be a joke (SO FRICKIN MEAN, I was nearly in tears) but I thought, hm, that would make an interesting dilemma for the best friend. So I jot it down.

In my home town, when I was growing up, there was a dude we called "walkie talkie guy" because he wandered around with two walkie talkies, talking into one and listening in the other. He had some other unique things he did. So I jot that down.

I do this all the time, and now and then my brain will collect a few of the ideas and spin them together into something interesting and new. There's my idea. It's not like I'm copying entire plots or even characters... I just take note of interesting twists and dilemmas I see elsewhere and then I make them my own.

Usually, my characters send me a memo. The metaphysical 5 by 3 card floats through imaginospace untill it reaches a rift in space/time, slips into our world and is found by either the Post Office or some other clueless berk. They then read the adress, mail it to me, I get it, open it, read it, then either write a story or crumple the paper dramatically, look up at the sky, drop to my knees.

"DAMN THEM!" I shout. "DAMN THEM ALL TO HELL!"

I get my story ideas from a bunch of different places.

A TV series inspired my current finished product (in query process - not fantasy).

A book cover inspired my defunct WIP, well, a book cover and my own created character that had once appeared in an RPG.

My current WIP was inspired by watching a TV show about the Salem Witch Trials around Halloween time. It sparked an idea that sat in my brain and has been slowly revealing itself to me.

Sometimes random ideas or conversations with my BFF spark story ideas that often find their way into my novels (i.e. the sequels to my first novel that are currently stored as first drafts).

Once an idea is sparked, I write it down...and let it ferment for a while before I ever commit it to a completed storyline.

My first novel spawned from a line of dialogue that I dreamed. All subsequent books started with a character. Characters just show up in the back of my head - there is a dark red door there with a tarnished brass knob - and just start telling me about themselves.

Ideas just happen - there are heaps of ways they come about for me. Sometimes things just inspire them through seeing the world in a slightly abstracted way - I see a fly, I shift my perspective so that everything's a lot bigger than it is, and then the fly is a flying craft which is manoeuvring in some really weird, cool ways. Why can't craft fly like that? Well, the people inside would probably be killed, and if not, at those speeds, your brain couldn't keep up. So then you're thinking of ways to get around those issues - machines could be designed to pilot like that, maybe humans could be altered, and then you're getting the consequences of that, and so it goes.

So that's one way I get ideas - my brain moving from something to something only vaguely related but far more interesting, and then again, and so on. Dreams are also good. Another way I get ideas is through scenes in my head - I get a fairly generic scene playing out with some characters I don't know yet, and then I'm asking questions about it, to see how it can be more interesting than generic. A character died and I didn't want that to have happened, but how, short of 'it wasn't that character's time so a god brought them back' can they be resurrected? And then I'm thinking about paradoxes and realities, and that spawned the basic idea behind the plot of my on-hold story.

Further ideas are also drawn out as consequences of other ideas. If I have an idea for, say, how magic might work, and an idea for a metaphysical system within a world, then by combining those ideas (if they're compatible), new ideas result - because if X works like this, and Y involves these elements of X, then the characters in this world would theoretically be capable of accessing Z - and that, right there, is the beginning of a plot.

ACK! DREAMS! I'd be locked up, or one of Lovecraft's elder gods if the dreams were real instead of fodder for fiction. I've even gotten commercials in my dreams. I think my wave-lenght has been hijacked...

HeronW said:

I've even gotten commercials in my dreams.

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Oh my! I hope they were good commercials!! Funny ones, at the very least. I'd hate to think that if you were stuck with commercials in your dreams that they'd suck...

Dreams are another excellent source of ideas...although most of my characters choose to talk to me (what? voices in my head? NO) right before I start to fall asleep...waking me up.

I recently started meditating. Boy is that opening a can of worms...fat ones. They aren't kidding when they say your mind opens up when you meditate*lol*