So tell me, where do your ideas come from?
The question writers laugh at and where to find your own ideas
When writers get together, perhaps a publishing dinner or the green room of a literary festival, they’ll talk, in the way that two or more people in any shared industry do, about other events they’ve done, what’s going on in their work world. Who had an amazing publishing deal, which editors have done a terrible job on someone’s work. It’s fun for us writers to get together because most of the time, it’s just us and our tiny minds (which we always feel we’re in danger of losing). We need to feel shared experiences, like all humans, and the quickest way to do this, which is why it happens so often, is for one writer to say to another: ‘Then someone in the audience asked: “Where do you get your ideas from?”’ And everyone falls about laughing.
Because writers (and I suspect songwriters, painters, sculptors have the same conversation when they get together, too) know that ideas don’t come from anywhere. There’s no Ideas Bank that artists go to. Ideas are everywhere and nowhere. When you’re in gear, ideas surround you like the water when you swim in the middle of the ocean.
Does this alarm you? I’m sorry. Perhaps you aren’t swimming in ideas but flapping on dry land like a desperate fish. Stay with me, I’ll tell you what to do.
I’m not saying writers don’t know how it feels to stare at a blank page and have no clue what to do next. Of course it happens. Some of them love this frightening challenge, it’s what gets them up in the morning. Others will do anything – a wall of post-it notes, usually – to avoid it. Lee Child (over 100m books sold) says he writes each novel by writing a sentence, smoking a cigarette and then writing the next sentence with no idea where it comes from. (He says there are around 11,000 sentences; for his health, I sincerely hope he doesn’t smoke 11,000 cigs for each novel.) Nor does he edit because when his editor suggests it might be better if something else happens in his plot, he simply replies: ‘I know. It probably would but it didn’t.’ As if he had set down a true story. (All this, by the way, in his interview with the very excellent Always Take Notes podcast, which I highly recommend.)
I think Mr Child’s approach is rare. There are writers – mostly crime writers, I’d guess – who take an organised approach, laying out their plots carefully, with spreadsheets and arrows. I’d say most of us, though, lie somewhere in-between. I have a framework where I know who the central characters are in the beginning, how they will change at the end, roughly something major that happens in the middle, but with no exact plan of how I will get from one point to the other. Partly because it makes writing the book almost as exciting as reading it, and partly because you have to leave room for the characters to make choices according to how they evolve and not to fit the plot. If a character suddenly does something you know they wouldn’t do, just because it means the plot moves along more smoothly that way, it’s maddening and you don’t trust anything more the writer says. Or so I think.
But! We were talking about ideas. I believe there are two elements to finding ideas, the general and the specific. For the general, which is something I’ve mentioned before, you need to think like a writer. In other words, be on the lookout for ideas – because they’re there, as I said, everywhere and nowhere. You just have to shift your mind into the gear that sees an everyday thing as a possible starting point for a story.
Don’t look at your phone in the post office queue, look at the other people, see the crying baby in the pram, the teenager shoplifting a chocolate bar, the grumpy postmaster. Invent stories for them, or simply make a mental note of their outfit, a funny word they used, the colour of their hair. Eavesdropping is good (if they’re not talking about you). Listen to your friends when they tell you what’s going on in their lives, observe the state of your own friendships and romances. You can write it down, if it helps it stick. Alan Bennett said he used to keep copious notebooks until he realised that he never looked at any of them when he sat down to write, but I suspect there was something useful in his being fully conscious of noticing things. It probably became habitual after a while, hence no more need of the notes.
Storing ideas, even little ones, are great to attach to bigger ones later. And so that’s when we need the specifics.
Specific ideas are the ones that we need when we sit down to write a chapter or scene and we know that we need at this point to show that, say, our protagonist is jealous. But how to show it? What’s the best scenario? For this, I turn to a number of tried and tested means. As a starting point, inverting cliched ideas can help: instead of boy meets girl, boy meets animal. If it’s a male protagonist and it’s not working, make them female. If it’s night time, make it day, and so on. Sometimes turning something upside down gives you a clearer version of it. Self-help books are great for ideas about people struggling with any kind of personal issue. YouTube videos and the British Newspaper Archive are good for period detail. JoJo Moyes got her idea for ‘Me Before You’ (15m copies sold) from the newspaper. Think how many people read that news story but only she spotted it for the good idea that it was.
Or rather, happily, this leads me back to my original point – the laughing writers – it’s not just the spotting of an idea, which any old Charlie can do. It’s the execution of it. It’s the seeing which part of it works, how it can be stretched and changed, then turned into a short story or novel. It’s the staying power to sit with the idea while it spreads and takes on other parts. Seeing how it connects with other smaller things we’ve been thinking about sometimes for years, bubbling along in the subconscious part of our brains. That’s the hard part, not the finding of the ideas. That’s why we laugh.
There’s another thing, I’m afraid, that’s going to make me sound even more like the mean-spirited member of a ‘Writers’ Only! Club’ – just bear in mind, I am sharing all this, and I do like other writers, and non-writers, too. Some of my best friends are not writers! Anyway, the awful thing that some people do that makes us titter behind their backs, is when they say – and they are never, ever writers: ‘Oh, I’ve got an idea for your next book.’
The problem is, first of all, as I’ve outlined above, the idea is the least of it. The second thing is that ideas change almost as soon as they are in your hands, like an ice cube. If you take an idea that someone thinks is ‘theirs,’ they’ll almost immediately be offended because it’ll change into something they don’t recognise. Or they’ll continue to claim it, and you’ll be furious because you have turned into something that is very much your own. Never say never – and some collaborators can be extremely generous (I was indeed this lucky with my first fiction editor, Ed Wood at Little, Brown, who did entirely conceive of the original concept for ‘The Mitford Murders’.) But on the whole, don’t offer someone an idea, and don’t take anyone else’s.
And if you spot something and realise it’s a real humdinger of an idea – a plot twist that no-one has ever thought of before, a setting that is both highly original and utterly relatable – for god’s sake, keep it to yourself until you’ve written it down! Ideas are amorphous and ethereal and yet, somehow, entirely stealable. And much like the dress your sister stole out of your wardrobe, if they steal your brilliant idea, they’ll trash it and waste it. Keep it your own, take the best from it: then sell it.
Loved this and enjoyed it as well. It almost feels as if you are sharing this over a cocktail! Thank you both new info and also reminders! Cheers!
Loved this advice Jessica. I try to write my micro-ideas down - any random piece of dialogue, character trait, cutting insult or location that floats into my head. Hoping they'll all be useful at some stage!