BarryHutchison

In preparation for a two-day visit to a local school to run storywriting workshops, I’ve been preparing myself for some of the questions I expect I might be asked.  Chief among these is the age-old “Where do you get your ideas from?”.

It’s a question all authors have probably been asked at one time or another, but as I tried to come up with a witty yet informative response for the question a horrible panic gripped me.  Where do I get my ideas from?!

Are they whispered by the voices that echo in my head?
Are they dropped by the Idea Fairy who lives under my bed?
Are they found alongside Jesus’ face in a special loaf of bread?
Are they in a deep, dark, scary mine with diamonds, gold and lead?
Are they painted on my bedroom walls in shades of green and red?
No.  All of that would be utterly mental.  Don’t be so ridiculous.

Ideas come from everywhere (although not necessarily including those avenues listed above).  Look around you and you’ll find the world is littered with ideas.  In fact, let’s try cooking some up now with a good old-fashioned brainstorming session.

From where I’m sitting I can see the big subwoofer speaker for my computer.  It has the words “Peak Bay” written on it.  Let’s start with that.

Peak Bay -> Peek Bay -> Someone secretly peeking at people on the beach.  The dirty git.

So how about…

PEAK BAY
While using binoculars to watch a girl he fancies relaxing on the beach at Peak Bay, a boy witnesses a murder.

A bit too REAR WINDOW maybe.  Let’s look around the room a bit more and see what inspiration strikes us.

I have a Spider-Man piggy bank in front of me, but Spider-Man is out of bounds, unfortunately.  But spiders aren’t.  Marvel Comics may have Spidey under tight control, but the world of arachnids is still open to all.  So what about this?

PEAK BAY
While using binoculars to watch a girl he fancies relaxing on the beach at Peak Bay, a boy witnesses A GIANT SPIDER EMERGING FROM BEHIND A SAND DUNE!  He is too far away to warn the girl and can only watch on as she is wrapped in a web and dragged off down a hole in the sand.

Now we’re getting somewhere.  We’ve gone from two words on front of a speaker to the first few pages of a potentially exciting novel.  It could have romance, horror, adventure and a daring last-minute rescue.  Or maybe the boy is too scared, and because of what he was up to he can’t admit to anyone what he saw.  The girl is eaten, and a dozen giant spiders emerge from the sand and run rampage across the town.  Can the boy overcome his fear and find a way to stop the arachnid invasion before everyone dies, or will he just watch it from afar, and never tell anyone the hideous horrors he witnessed at Peak Bay?

The direction you take once you have an idea is the tricky bit – you have a near-infinite range of possibilities, and picking the best one is never going to be easy.  Generating ideas to develop, though?  That’s not hard.

If you’re struggling, try free association.  Find an object and then write down the first thing it makes you think of.  Keep writing without stopping until you have reached the bottom of the page.  There is no way of doing this “wrong”, so no matter how ludicrous what you’re writing may seem, go with it.  Don’t censor yourself.  Let your subconscious spew out onto the page.

For example, let me pick an object.  We’ll go with my belt.  A short burst of free association might go like this:

Belt, like a karate belt as worn in martial arts movies like the Karate Kid.  Poor Mr Miyagi, the guy who played him died in 2005.  I only know that because I saw it at the end of an episode of Spongebob.  There was  big picture of him with a crazy smile on his face, like a clown.  I don’t like clowns.  I once met a clown walking down a dark road after I’d been to a nightclub.  It was 3am and he was carrying a balloon.  Where do you get a balloon at 3am?  3am is the name of a song by some band or other I have on my iTunes playlist.  Matchbox 20, I think.  Matchbox used to make toy cars, I’m not sure if they still do…

And so on until you reach the bottom of the page.  You don’t have to punctuate at all, but I  break out into cold sweats if I miss out a full stop, so I had no choice in the matter.  Just do it the way it works best for you.

When you read back over the stuff you’ve written, try pairing off some of the idea nuggets and see what it produces.  I could have stories about Karate Clowns, a nightclub under the sea, an elderly Oriental man who lives inside a matchbox and drives a toy car, and so on.  Try it if you ever find yourself struggling for new ideas – you might be surprised at what emerges.

So, in answer to the question “Where do you get my ideas from?” I would have to reply with “EVERYWHERE!”.