The most frequently asked question

Sooner or later a publishing writer will be asked: “Where do you get your ideas?”

Answers traditionally have been facetious or sarcastic; for an exhaustive list of those, head here. I was asked this question many years ago and spent a few minutes rambling an unsatisfactory reply. I’ve since developed my own glib (albeit truthful) response: “The same place you get yours.”

To a writer, it seems like a dumb question. But what all the smart-arse replies – including my own – fail to acknowledge is why people feel the need to ask it. No one asks an accountant or a mechanic or a carpenter where he gets his ideas. Nobody ever bails up a lawyer and asks him how he thought of that devastating line of questioning. But for some reason there is endless curiosity about how writers conceive something out of nothing.

The simple explanation is that writers think differently to the rest of the population. Those who don’t adhere to ‘normal’ ways of thinking are always objects of curiosity. Perhaps that’s why people ask writers where they get their ideas – they’re trying to understand an aberration.

Further to that, I suspect the ability to identify and develop story ideas is as genetically pre-determined as blue eyes or red hair. I can’t speak for all writery types, but as long as I can remember my mind has gone off on imaginative tangents that are, in biological terms, ‘semi-voluntary’. (Breathing is an example of a semi-voluntary action – you can hold your breath for a while, but sooner or later your brain will make you breathe again.) These imaginative excursions are the same; sometimes I actively pursue and develop them, often they just pop up of their own accord.

On rare occasions I’ve had ideas delivered in dreams, but most of the time they start as ‘what if’ scenarios. I’m forever exploring such scenarios in my head, and only a tiny percentage ever lead to stories. Most, in fact, are as mundane as ‘What if I had never quit that job?’ or ‘What if I had got my first girlfriend pregnant?’ But now and then I’ll wonder something like, ‘What would happen if vampires decided to practice sustainable population?’ and creatively speaking, we’re off to the races.

The other thing worth noting is that writers tend also to be voracious readers. In other words, they put themselves in the path of fresh story ideas all the time and are therefore more likely to have their own. I can think of at least three original story ideas that came to me while I was reading something written by another author. Not every well read person is wired up to be a writer, of course, but the percentage of today’s publishing writers who were not hungry readers as children must infinitesimal. And their stuff probably isn’t very good.

My guess is that while ‘regular’ people – for want of a less conceited term – ponder plenty of what-if scenarios regarding their own lives, they don’t often trundle down the make-believe roads necessary to develop a story. That’s why responses to “Where do you get your ideas?” tend to be sarcastic. Writers don’t have special access to ideas – they are just more inclined to find or pursue them and then put in the hard work that will make them into stories.

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