The Ideas Process

Anyone who’s ever read an interview with a published author will know that ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ is not only a pointless question – ideas come from everywhere and nowhere – but one that is almost universally hated and met with exasperation. God knows how many times someone like Neil Gaiman, or Terry Pratchett, or J.K. Rowling, to name but three off the top of my head, must have heard that question. Can you blame them for getting a bit pissy about it?

Nevertheless, there is a sort of reason and rhyme to the way ideas come, or at least I find it to be that way with me. There is, you might say, a method to my madness.

Take Heal, a series of short, linked stories I started because I wanted to write a character who was blind. The challenge of describing his whole world – in first-person, I might add – without using any visual information appealed to me. On top of that, I wanted to write a story in which there was a protective older character, the stoic, strong, reliable sort, who jealously guarded their charge from any and all people they considered might be a threat, but who secretly liked the main character a lot and was their best friend. This desire was sparked off in me by the dynamic seen between the two lead characters in fanfiction of the 90’s TV show The Sentinel, a sort of power-dynamic I adore to this day. I developed the idea from there – a blind healer, with healing hands, guarded from the world by his companion. Put him in a new city and his blindness is not only a disability but a way to completely disorient him from everything he knows, make him learn it fresh along with the reader. Everything about the story was built from those two desires, and grew around them organically to form the story.

Similarly with other ideas. I wanted to write a story about grief, because my own mother had died suddenly and unexpectedly the year before, and while at the time I had written very angry fiction, now I wanted something slower, deeper. So I gave my situation to my character, Toby, but changed it so that it was his sister and her husband who had died, and gave him another character to play off of – his brother-in-law’s brother, John, who had lost a sibling the same way he had. From that I grew other ideas of grief and loss into my story – John had been in Iraq with the Royal Marines, and lost many of his men along with his whole, healthy body; Toby’s failed relationship comes back again and again to haunt him, because she is always there to remind him of what he lost. I added more to the original seed, but it was the speck of dirt that I built around, the starting point of the snowball.

If I’m honest, usually my brain just suddenly goes ‘that would be so cool,’ and that’s all it takes for me to have a new idea.

Every idea, every story, starts with a seed. Whether that is a character, or a dynamic, or a theme, you have to start somewhere. The ideas may come from everywhere and nowhere. But the stories come from the ideas. And the story is the harder part. In my opinion, building the story is what takes the talent, not having the idea.