Like any writer, I’ve been asked numerous times ‘where do you get your ideas’? I used to react to these questions with a snarl and a sarcastic remark, followed by a sassy strut accompanied by the theme music I hear constantly in my head. The reason for the reaction was due to the nature of the question: It’s both incredibly complex and brutally simple. I steal most of my ideas from stuff I read, watch, or listen to, and I have no idea how the process actually happens in my brain. How do I go from watching a rerun of Community on a Saturday night at 3AM after drinking an entire bottle of Scotch to writing a novel about superintelligent cats who subjugate mankind and make us all run around randomly so they can chase us? I have no idea.
Now that I’m older and more mature, however, I realize that this impossibility is exactly why people ask the question. How do you know if your ideas are any good? Sadly, there’s really only one way: You spend several years of your life writing them, and then show as many strangers as possible. Which is a lot of investment for someone who doesn’t have the careless, unearned confidence that I have. So I’ve taken to being more thoughtful about my responses to the ‘ideas’ question, and one thing I’ve realized is how often I have to have an idea several times before it actually turns into something resembling a good story.
Trickster Mark One
Take my novel Trickster, which morphed into the novel We Are Not Good People. I had the original idea that formed the kernel of that story back in 1995 or so; a flabby, not particularly good short story in which a stunned drifted encounters a man floating several inches off the ground as pigeons sat on his shoulders and head. The old man tells the drifter that its easy to do magic, you just have to be willing to be alone.
It wasn’t a great story, but it was a great tone, and the central image stuck with me. I carried that idea with me for twenty years or so. I never re-worked the story, though hints of it made their way into other stories, references to the old man, to the drifter, the fucking pigeons.
When I finished the Avery Cates series in 2010, I started thinking about what I wanted to write next. I found myself thinking of the old man again. That central idea — magic was possible if you’re willing to be alone, really, truly alone, came bubbling back and slowly morphed into the idea of blood magic, magic that literally stole lives to function. That, I thought, was loneliness, and I was off to the races.
In a way, I stole from myself. I developed an idea into a bad story in 1995. That kept the idea preserved in amber over the years, so when in 2011 or so I chipped the amber away that idea was still there, fresh and ready.
That’s one reason why I write a short story every month in a notebook. Most of these stories are terrible–but they each enclose an idea that I might be able to use later. I also write these stories because an old witch once told me the month I don’t write a story is the month I die, but that’s a whole other post, man.
