Where I Get Ideas For My Books
Ideas for great fiction are everywhere. Here's where one well-reviewed novelist gets her ideas for novels.
My novel, RABID, will be published in April, 2007. Now, I'm working on the next one and some short stories. People always ask: How do you come up with your ideas?
When I meet folks and finally admit that I’m a writer, people invariably ask me my ideas come from. My novel, Rabid, which will be published in April, 2007, is a novel of ideas.
I’ve considered telling them everything from Ouija boards to super-secret computer programs that they give you in MFA programs or that I steal them from strangers who haplessly tell me their ideas for the book that they want to write.
The truth is, I have lots of ideas for fiction. Hundreds, probably. They’re sitting in little files in a folder called Embryos. Every time I see something interesting on TV or in a newspaper or in a non-fiction book or a joke or my mom tells me weird about a relative, I note it down in a word document in the Embryos folder.
Here are a few embryos that may some day become short stories, novels, or nothing:
- The new buzz word for Iraq is exit strategy. In fiction: Bad marriage, then the wife decides that she’s going to stick it out until the kids are in college or leave home. As a result, she essentially gives up and the stuff doesn’t annoy her as much because she has an exit strategy. The marriage is temporary, and you can bear a lot more of any bad thing if you know that it will end, and indeed when it will end. The husband and everyone else thinks that the marriage is getting better because they’re not fighting anymore. Then, the last kid goes off to college. She says, “Well, I guess we can get our divorce now.” He says, “What!”
- I read an article on eco-tourism, where people go camping in the Amazon rainforest or sift through rubble for potshards on an archeological site or kayak with wild orcas. So, Disaster tourism: A tourist with a morbid curiosity travels to disaster areas, like New Orleans after Katrina or 9/11, to make himself/herself feel better. Or a travel agent who specializes in such travel for ghouls like that.
- In Iowa, it must be disclosed if anyone was murdered or committed suicide in a house when you buy/sell it. So: A young couple buying a house runs across a “ghost disclosure form” in the real estate purchase agreement. Real estate agent pooh-poohs it is a family ghost, probably won’t bother them at all.
- One empty embryo file is titled, “Sex and the Single Sheep.” I'm not sure what I was thinking, there, but here's an idea: Take the title of any well-known book and alter a word. For a non-fiction book on the effect of fishing on Christianity: The Da Vinci Cod.
The newspaper, magazines, and other books are full of fiction fodder. In science, the greatest discoveries come right after you say, “Hmmm, that’s weird.”
In fiction, there’s food for thought anytime you say, “That’s weird.”
Non-fiction books are great sources of ideas. These are chock-full of stuff for your brain to nosh over:
