Ideas come from ordinary, everyday life. And from imagination. And from feelings. And from memories. Memories of dust in my sneakers and humming whitewalls down a hill called Monkey. ~Jerry Spinelli
“Where do you get your ideas?”
I’m guessing that is a question many writers have tried to answer, including Jerry Spinelli in the quote above. Imagination can be a wondrous thing. I’ve heard people say they have no imagination, but I never believe it. Not completely. Maybe they can’t imagine writing a novel, but I think they can imagine how the sand would feel damp under their feet on a beach even if they are at home sitting in their easy chair or the sound of a siren in the dead of silence. You might say that doesn’t take imagination but experience. Perhaps you’re right. Experience does help the imagination work better. It would be difficult to imagine the sound of that siren if you had never heard one.
The same is true with coming up with ideas when writing a book. Experience helps, but at the same time you can let your imagination fly free and pull ideas from nothing. No, that’s not right. Not nothing. Instead of nothing, from everything. All your experiences. All your dreams. All you have read or seen on screens. It’s all somewhere in our remarkable minds. We can’t always access every memory. I’m terrible with names and sometimes can’t remember people I should remember. That information is all stuffed in a file somewhere in my head, but sometimes the drawer is stuck shut. Maybe crammed too full.
But something changes when I’m writing. Ideas can pop up seemingly out of nowhere just when I need them in a story. Something the way a mushroom can pop up practically overnight from some damp decaying matter in the ground. Mushrooms are amazing bits of God’s creation. And they have purpose. A way for nature to use up everything.
Writers use up everything too as they pull ideas out of the many life memories that have settled down deep in our brains. Not that there aren’t times when the ideas are a bit elusive. That can be especially true for me when I am just fishing for an idea for a story I might want to write. Nothing’s planned then. I don’t have any lists of characters or a setting or historical events in mind. Everything is open. But I can’t just say I want to write a book. I have to propose an idea. I need to come up with characters I want to get to know through thousands of words and find those characters a starting place in history or life. Then I have to condense all of that into a page or two of what I think their story is going to be with the hope a publisher will read it and say, yes, that’s a story we want to see when you get it written.
So right now I’m searching through my memory banks, remembering feelings and imagining what might happen next for a whole cast of new characters. Time to see what story ideas might pop up in my head and what I might catch in my lake of ideas.
Do you like coming up with new ideas?