The question writers dread is the one about where ideas come from, but while it is broadly unknowable, it can be answered. The problem is that the answer is never the same.
I believe it's Warren Ellis who likened the creative process to the birth of DC's Swamp Thing. A bunch of things, all collected or stolen from other places, fester in the subconscious until they're ready to emerge, remixed into something resembling but not totally like the components. It's a metaphor that's stuck with me for years (almost twenty of 'em), and I still agree with it 100%.
What's interesting about my five short stories of 2017-18 is that some have bubbled away for a long time, but others snapped into focus fairly quickly. To give you a sense, the one based on a movie idea was on my mind for years, since my friend and I put that treatment and script together; another one, which I wrote in May of this year, was inspired by a conversation I had in April.
It's worth remembering that ideas, as the conventional wisdom goes, are worth nothing on their own, which is what I think lay at the heart of that Swamp Thing analogy. Ellis, or whoever came up with it, rightly points out how a story idea comes from all the disparate things you've read or watched or listened to over the years.
This is also why Ellis, among other writers, recommends reading outside your genre (and here I'm on firmer ground, because I explicitly remember this from his old column, Come In Alone). One of the stories from last year, which I wrote out by hand in Tokyo, came from an old issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman (the one with Hob Gadlen) as well as the history of World War I. It may not have been obvious at the time, but I'm sure the decision to focus on that comes from the renewed focus on the Great War that's been present in the US and UK since 2014, when we marked the centenary of its start.
(And it's probably no coincidence that I'm writing this column, with this subject matter, on the centenary of that war's end)
As far as I can tell, the process for ideas to turn into stories, then, is to act as a receiver for interesting stuff, and then let it all accrete and build until it's time for it to come out. This means that you've been thinking about the story for a while before you start writing it, and so you probably have a good idea how it'll end. That ending may or may not materialize as you expect, because once you put pen to paper things take on a life of their own, but it's important to have that general road map.
If I had to give tips, then, they would be as follows:
- Keep an idea journal, and mark stuff into it whenever you get an idea for something that might be neat in a story.
- Read a set number of top-flight authors each year, and diverse authors in your genre, and just about anything else you can get your hands on (for our purposes here books can also be movies, TV shows, whatever).
- Think through your idea whenever you have some free time, and develop it a little. Put those developments into your idea journal.
- Write the damn thing when it's ready to come out.
The other interesting thing I've found about my own brain is its bias toward whatever medium I'm working in at the moment. Currently my ideas all seem to settle into short story form, but a year or two before that I was thinking in terms of movie scripts and treatments, because that's what I was mostly working on. Before that it was novels.
Yet that bias toward one format can work in your favor, as an idea that you developed as a movie can be repurposed as a short story or novel, and vice versa. In fact, now that I've taken the movie idea and turned it into a fairly different short story, I'm considering re-adapting that for a movie script. And so it'll go.
This is all meant to demystify the process a bit, and codify a little how I approach it. Yours may be different, but I'm sure it'd be interesting to compare, as everyone works differently. Feel free to comment with how you do it...
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