Ideas: Where do they come from? (Where do they go?)

If you checked out last week’s blog, you’ll have read the short story I shared, which means you’ll know a portion of that plot had to do with World War I. Interestingly enough, I hadn’t planned, starting out, to write a serious story. I’d wanted to write something light and fun, especially considering one of the elements was that the main character was to have a quirky sibling (as voted on by Instagram peeps). There’s a lot of goofy, silly routes that element alone could have steered my plot.

So, how did a WWI angle make it into the narrative?

You ask a good question, reader, and I’m not sure my answer will satisfy you. Because the answer is that it snuck up on me. 

I’d written the first two pages of the story because I knew what the anecdote from their childhood was going to be, but then I had to sit back and think about the reality I’d placed them in. Being babies in the early 1890s came with considerations of the times then, as did making them adolescents in the early days of the 1900s. Lots of change occurring at a rapid pace. 

For instance, the twins would have been born into a world where the ball point pen, the zipper, and the electric oven were recent inventions—and then, in 1900, the world took off into the sky, literally, with the first Zeppelin followed not too long after by the first rotary-wing aircraft and the elevated railway. A lot going on, to say the least, and great inspiration for a character like Tommy, who was born with the inventing bug.

Then, naturally, the timeline of inventions brought me to 1915, when Britain and France introduced the first operational military tanks, and I realized, “Shoot, my characters are going to be young adults on the eve of war. How is that going to inform my story?”

Because, you know, learning more about the world and the research your ideas drive you to are both good for helping you figure out how to make your story more robust. This part in the process, if I was comparing building a plot to building a house, would be like starting to lay out the foundation and realizing where the far corner of the perimeter is. Now I had to piece together 1.) what I’d already been planning on using and 2.) what historically made sense to tie the twins and WWI together. 

Visually speaking, this is what this point in the process looked like:

You can see that’s an incredibly simple foundation, but, as boysy commented when I showed it to him, not every story needs to be a mansion. In fact, establishing simple yet solid bones of a house (story) sets you up to adorn it with all the fun frills and details that enhance the place. You can’t have nice windows or shutters for said windows, if you’re not even sure they’re going to be secure in their spot. 

In terms of my short story, thinking about how the WWI element could impact the characters shed a different light on where exactly this plot was taking me. That was when my ideas turned from “Light-hearted Territory” into “Serious Times.” Sometimes it happens. If you haven’t checked it out, yet, to meet Tommy and Jane, I’d be delighted if you did. 

But that’s all I have to say about that story’s details, for now. All this has been warming me up to chat about the moment you realize you have a story on your hands. Because an idea isn’t necessarily born out of a single instance. A spark of inspiration is often a result of your subconscious having collected the flint and steel behind the scenes. 

So, let’s talk about where ideas come from.

And do you know what? Sometimes—dare I say often—they sneak up on you. (Is that answer actually as dissatisfying as I felt it might be above?)

I was specifically thinking about idea generation in light of this most recent short story because the theme of war has popped up in a few, older pieces of mine. Spring of my senior year at UMaine, I took my last Creative Writing seminar, and the stories I wrote for that class all shared that theme. I know exactly why, too, and it all had to do with my Journalism thesis project.

For my final project in Journalism, I was focused on reporting during the Vietnam War. A great many things about how journalists covered Vietnam was ground-breaking, pioneering the way for future war correspondents. The public saw the realities of conflict like never before. Suddenly, carnage could be seen on their televisions, and reporters weren’t shielding the home front for the sake of morale. 

I was, as can be imagined, encountering so much material that informed this project: articles from those years, photographs, post-war essays and analysis, etc. On the conscious level, I was sifting through details and data from the viewpoint of thesis writing. Yet, when I sat down with my Creative Writing assignments, I realized there were more things I’d learned about the Vietnam War (and war, in general) that I still wanted to write about. Until I sat down expressly to write fiction, I hadn’t realized that inspiration was waiting there in my brain to be tapped into. I had so many ideas that I never struggled to come up with stories for Creative Writing the entire semester.

Ideas, essentially, are all around us. Every day, everywhere. We soak up a little wisp of inspiration from restaurant decor or the meaning behind your friend’s tattoo or the soundtrack of your favorite movie. The list of inventions created early in the 1900s I had to look at for last week’s blog was inspiring to me. A plot for a story might not emerge immediately upon observing something interesting because you have to treat ideas like coffee: there’s a percolation period. That’s not to say, of course, that you can’t sit down the same day you noticed something of note and speed type your way to a cool story. 

What I’m saying is that you can never discount anything about the world around you. Whether you’re reading or watching or listening, there is something being tucked away into your brain for later. Don’t be surprised when it reveals itself to you. It just needs the right moment, and—this may sound goofy—it will know when it’s right.

Novelist Haruki Murakami, in his book Novelist as a Vocation (2015) suggests writers who don’t set out to tell big, bold stories of outrageous events may find the actual writing is easier for them. He says it’s “because they can draw on their lives—the events routinely taking place around them, the scenes they witness, the people they encounter—and then freely apply their imaginations to that material to construct their own fiction. In short, they use a form of renewable energy.”

Of course, big and bold stories are told and done so effectively. It’s not that you can’t have a story about some guy trying to restore balance to the Force in a galaxy far, far away; it’s that the things you encounter on an average day in this ordinary world are going to help you see where to take that kind of plot. 

And, if you’re under the impression you don’t see anything worthy of inspiration, I’m going to let the professional poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, give you some advice: “If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself. Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth. For the creative artist there is no poverty—nothing is insignificant or unimportant.”

Ideas abound. Information may be collected from research or simply from stepping out your front door. May you be ready to write when the coffee’s finished percolating and the house needs to be built.