Where do you get YOUR ideas?

Something authors get asked often is, “Where do you get your ideas?” One time, I helped set up an author’s visit to my kids' school. Brandon Mull was coming to speak and he asked us to have the kids come up with questions for him to answer. Without time to have every question answered, we sifted through them to find some of the most interesting. The person I was “sifting” with was a friend of mine who along with her husband often assisted Brandon with his school visits. She told me to throw out the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” because Brandon got asked that all the time and it wasn’t worth taking time for. Sure enough, that question appeared in about one of every five questions. At the time, I wondered why he wouldn’t want to answer it – especially if so many kids asked.

I’ve since discovered that it really is just not a good quality question to ask because most of the time, authors don't know exactly how to answer. Most authors are prepared to answer it anyway because it doesn’t go away. Some say things such as – “everywhere” or “daydreaming”  or even some odd place like “Pooghkeepsie.” Probably my favorite answer was given by Neil Gaiman when he said, “What you do is, 11:58 at night, you go down to the cellar. You roll the goat bones. There’ll be a banging on the door. It will open and this thing will fly in. It will explode. You’ll have a something like a chocolate. You eat it and you have an idea… I don’t know. You make it up out of your head.” You can watch his entire answer to this question HERE…

You see, I’ve worried about my ideas. I have A LOT of ideas but I wonder – are they good enough? Will my ideas come across to everyone else as boring, overdone, or cliché? Do I have anything original in me or will I only ever be able to produce regurgitated material? Is it ALL about that ONE idea? Do I have to have that one brilliant idea in order to succeed?

Jim Butcher says it definitely is NOT all about that one idea. He argued that even if your idea has been done a lot, you can still put your own spin on it and get a new and vibrant story out of it. There were others who argued with him that “The Idea” was what was most important; that even if you are a horrible writer, when you have a brilliant idea, your book can be successful. And so, someone challenged Jim by giving him two “horrible” ideas with which he was supposed to create something new and vibrant. The ideas given to him were Pokemon and the The Lost Roman Legion. Jim went on to create and sell a 6 book successful series based off of those “horrible” ideas. He has also rocked the New York Times Bestsellers List and has published around 30 books not including short stories and comics. I think he has proved his point. (You can watch him narrate this story HERE...) 

But, what if you get stuck? You’ve worked and worked and all of a sudden, nothing comes? Or what if you have too many ideas? You just don’t know where to begin or where to continue?

There are tons of ways to organize yourself before you start a book. There’s drawing an arc with plots points and character profiles and the Save the Cat method and all kinds of outlining and other ideas but I’m not really talking about organizing here. (Though being organized can be very helpful to many authors. Some detest it and only write in the dead of night with hair standing on end while bags under their eyes grow larger and larger frantically scribbling before their muse leaves them for another year, but again, this is a separate topic.) 

What I want to talk a little about is gathering that inspiration and how to use it over and over.

Here are some great tools, activities, and tidbits to help you organize your ideas and find inspiration in the things around you…

1. – Inspiration board/ Smash journals/Pinterest/ etc…

These are obvious (I think?) but if you are stuck or need some organization, here are some great examples of crafts or online opportunities to increase that inspiration and find direction…

•  Inspiration Boards – Sometimes being able to touch and see textures, patterns, and colors is all that is needed to jumpstart you toward the next section in your book.

I borrowed these images from www.alwaysvery.com...

And these from www.everythingetsy.com...

• Smash journals - These are the same idea as an inspiration board only in journal format. You can also collect your daily mementos, such as concert tickets, restaurant napkins, or a smear of your current favorite eye shadow while finding inspiration for future projects.

From http://journalgirl.com/blog

This one I found floating around without a credit… sorry to whomever created it…

• AND of course, there is PINTEREST - I am linking my book board (which up until just now has been private) to see how pinterest can help inspire your current project…

http://www.pinterest.com/lotzofunmary/book-board/

Many authors have pinterest boards.  Check out…

Marissa Meyer - http://www.pinterest.com/marissameyer22/

Lucinda Brant - http://www.pinterest.com/lucindabrant/

Abbi Glines - http://www.pinterest.com/abbiglines/

Marie Lu - http://www.pinterest.com/mreefish/

Hunter S. Jones - http://www.pinterest.com/huntersjones/

Deborah Harkness - http://www.pinterest.com/debharkness/

Emily Giffin - http://www.pinterest.com/emilyfgiffin/

Jennifer Weiner - http://www.pinterest.com/jenweinerbooks/

Meg Cabot - http://www.pinterest.com/megcabot/

2. – Brainstorming activities…

These are just a few activities (there really are so so many) I have collected from authors on how to break out of a slump or how to discover more about your book…

• Giving Life to Characters by Shannon Hale  http://www.squeetus.com/stage/mince_characters.html

Shannon has suggested that a great way to get to know your characters is to give them a personality rating.  There are several different systems that you can give them.

Here is one to try…

http://www.outofservice.com/bigfive/

or

http://www.ipersonic.com

• Writing Prompts by Writing Excuses

Writing Excuses is a podcast on all things writing done by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler. Not only do they have ingenious advice on writing, they also give writing prompts for each episode. Sometimes the prompts are a little out there they may just be what you need right then.

• Keep an “Idea” folder by Brandon Sanderson

Brandon has talked about keeping an idea folder where he puts all of his ideas. He has talked about how he will look at that folder and then try to combine two of the ideas together. This is how he attributes most of the concepts for his books.

• One final idea for helping jumpstart your creativity is to do Brainstorming activities.  Here are some examples…

a.       First line story starters.  Open up a book nearby and write down the first sentence or you can even pick out a sentence in the middle of the book then continue to write your own version of what comes next.

b.       Word association. Write down one word. Then write the next word that comes into your mind, and the next, and the next. For example…

Cinderella, shoe, foot, ankle, joint, attached, detached, fix, mechanic, robot, cyborg, half-man, handicapped, etc. (This was my attempt at a start for word association generating the idea of Cinder by Marissa Meyer.)

c.       Acting. Take a piece of a scene (your own or someone else’s) and act it out. You can ask others to help you with this and it can be fun. Afterward, write down how you felt and what happened as you experienced it.

OK, OK, tons of ideas and possibilities out there. Finding that one BIG IDEA isn’t as important but we all need to feel inspired and find creativity with our writing. I feel like I have only scratched the surface with all of this but hopefully, there is a start here; a direction to follow if the need should arise. Lastly, and most importantly…

As Henry Miller said...