Where do you get your ideas? Do they come whole, or do they accrete?
After finally getting Dust of the Ocean off to final copyedits, I wandered about at loose ends for a little over a month, only having a few random ideas, none publishable, most barely longer than a snippet, pop up. I’d worry I broke the writing thing, except this happens every time, and… the last book was taking something that had kept coming back for over 7 years, starting from scratch, and turning it into a finished story. So my brain was due for a break.
I did look at finishing a story that got stuck 14K in, involving a vineyard in an occupied country about to burst into flames – metaphorical, viva la revolucion, and literal, because there was too much fire load in the surrounding forest when you ban logging.
There are structural problem on that one. Some day I’ll restart from scratch and finish it, so all that research on vineyards isn’t wasted. On the other hand, the research of hotshot crews, helitack, and forest fires? Something must have stuck in my brain, without me realizing it.
Because weeks later, two other things combined in less than 12 hours. One, a hard hat sticker from Armed American Supply (very hilarious site, very NSFW) saying “Hug a logger! You’ll never go back to trees!”
The second was a conversation about the realization that often comes in our late teens to early 20’s, that we need to become a better, wiser, less-crazy version of ourselves if we’re going to attract the partner in life we want. As a friend hilariously put it, “The girl of my dreams has nightmares about me… that’s not a requirement!”
These three things combined, and next thing you know, I’m researching silvaculture, and there’s a smart-ass hotshot crewmember in my head, rough around the edges as can be. Now if I can just figure out whether the forest fire was arson or accident, and cui bono…
Mad Genius Club 
22 responses to “Inspiration”
I get my ideas from seeing something that makes me say, “That’s not how this works.” And then I try to figure out how it does work.
There’s nothing quite like “seeing” a writer or film maker skating right past an incredibly better way to handle something to get the fingers typing away . . .
With the wonderful advantage that the serial numbers file themselves off a bit.
I had a story universe that was “Star Trek as it should have been”.
Basically, it came from two questions I had after watching the original Star Trek.
1) Why would the Enterprise stick around while a small team On Foot check out a planet?
2) Why would a small team completely depend on the Enterprise for transportation off the planet? Going along with this, was the matter of communications to the home base by the small team.
Unfortunately, I left this story universe un-written for decades.
Oh, the small team never included the captain or any other members of the command team.
“2) Why would a small team completely depend on the Enterprise for transportation off the planet?”
Because space is huge and shuttlecraft don’t have warp drive (or any other FTL) as a standard component.
In this Science Fiction universe, the Big Ship carried several smaller
“Lab Ships” that were capable of FTL travel.
They weren’t as fast as the Big Ship (or as long range as the Big Ship)
but would be able to reach an “exploration base”.
They also contained a “FTL communications device”.
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Paul (Drak Bibliophile) Howard
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Remember Babylon 5? The White Star was too small to have a jump drive without Vorlon tech. Shuttles were smaller.
Chuckle Chuckle
What is it about “my SF universe” that you don’t understand?
Of course, it predated (in my mind) long before Babylon Five.
We crossed paths. I posted that as a reply to mine before I saw yours.
My “Huh! That’s an idea” moments for entire series are a combo of “What if X…” and a flashphoto in my head of the primary character in some sort of action. The two are not necessarily related to each other in obvious ways when they arrive manifested.
Sometimes only one appears first. I have a persistent idea for an eventual series based on an opening sequence of circumstances and a primary character, but it’s not in a typical genre for me… (fantasy version of) occupied Roman/Dark Age Britain and a 30-ish military officer of the occupiers dodging political assassination, stopped from fleeing the region altogether by his defense and recovery of a disastrously destroyed border town. He will stick there, working incognito as a smith and a local leader before “fulfilling his destiny”, which will have something to do with the political and/or military infrastructure of the occupiers.
I don’t really do mil-sci-fi (read it sometimes, not write it), and this is a classic-style fantasy plot, so it may never materialize, but it sure sticks in my back brain persistently. Sort of a “I have the blurb but nothing else” notion. Might be a relief if someone else wrote it and I could read it. 🙂
Amazing how sometimes old research, or an old story idea . . . is just right there waiting to pounce.
Yeah, that “end of the Mayan calendar” story . . . believe it or not, is stirring . . . I really don’t like paranormal romance . . .
Your hotshot firefighter might trip over some arson forest fires like those that have been set in Canada. Alberta has arrested several arsonists, but I have read nothing about their motivation.
It seems that characters who pop up fully formed seem to resist some of the situations authors try to put them in. 🙂
I get my ideas from being irritated by things (certain novel tropes, the middle of a music video), texting jokes, an eerie drive through the Appalachians after a storm, the idea of someone without magic in a world where magic is omnipresent … I”m a bit like a clam. I need sand in my creativity to really spark stories building.
Ideas are everywhere. I have to kick them out of the way and they pile up in corners, whimpering for attention.
For example: I’m driving down a sunny country road in rural PA and a police car zooms past. Then an ambulance. Then a firetruck. Then the fire marshal. They all — I think! — took the same left turn because there aren’t any cross roads for miles and I didn’t see a thing on the way to Marietta.
So what happened?
I speculated, but I didn’t use.
All sort of things. My muse’s favorite is scenes.
There’s usually three things going on in parallel when a fiction project comes together for me:
-The sea of settings: this is a continuously floating mess of places in spacetime that I find vaguely interesting to read/watch stuff about sometimes extending to nonfiction. When a story idea hits, I tend to draw from here to find a location for it, and sometimes if I’m in the mood for a particular setting. This is why there’s a random Egyptian element to the setting of the space opera duology, for instance. The backstory said the humans had to have come to this region of space, in ancient times, from earth, and I went with ancient Egypt because I find it an interesting culture and know more about it than I do about say, the history of Korea.
-The junk shelf of plot elements: just ideas that have come to me or more often been spotted in the wild, that made me go hmmm. This is why the space opera features a loser forced to pretend to be more heroic and together than he feels, and Becoming the Mask as a result. It’s a plot element I’ve seen in several places.
-the male protagonist: this is usually me finding someone else’s male character (more often media than books) and deciding that he belongs in a different situation. The rest of the characters are either foils for him or people who are part of the situation. I did a series of blog posts back in May-June 2022(?) about how I settled on a hero and situation for the space opera, and how the supporting cast evolved from there.
Since I’m writing alternate history, most of my ideas come from thinking about ‘Can I plausibly change X? If I change X, what are the consequences? What happens with Y, Z, and then circling around to A, B, etc.’
My inspirations come when there are stories that I see that aren’t being told.
Or told badly.
Or told horribly…
And the random thoughts that keep returning . . . if time travel is possible, why does Hitler exist? Surely he couldn’t be the best alternative?
Ah, but I visited the universes where Hitler died young and they are worse. [Very Very Big Crazy Grin]
He discredited eugenics. For a time. The effects of letting 20th scientists try to breed men like cattle were — ugly beyond belief.
And then there was competent German leadership extending the war another two years. The nuclear war in Europe was brutal