Never Ask an Author This Question

“Where do you get your ideas from?”

Aside from ending the question with a preposition, why is this a question you should never ask an author (or any other creator)?

Let me tell you a story.

I got up the other day and went for a walk around a parking lot. Not terribly exciting. I mean, it’s not like asphalt and parked vehicles make for an inspiring walk. Maybe if I were lucky, I would run into someone walk a dog. Mostly, I expected to see nothing of particular interest.

It helped that I didn’t know where to look.

And that’s the key.

Because I didn’t know where to look for something interesting, I found a few things. A dry creek bed. Some flowers. A fallen tree. And I met someone walking their dog and got to pet Bella, a lovely little puppy.

That doesn’t sound terribly exciting, I suppose, but I collected a few pictures and I kept coming back to the fallen tree. The pale gray of the dead bark. How one side was stripped of branches because of the fall while the other seemed to still be reaching up for sunlight.

I don’t know if this will ever find a way into one of my stories or a poem. It might never show up in any of my writing.

Oh wait! It’s showing up here, right now. Never mind.

Now back to my initial thought: where do we get our ideas?

Anywhere.

Everywhere.

But rarely any one place. 

When I read Room by Emma Donoghue, the premise fascinated me; I marveled at the imagination that could conceive of such a thing. Then I learned real-life stories inspired her. (If you think I boggled that there was a real-life incident, you can imagine my feelings when I learned of several!)

But it wasn’t the premise alone that made Donoghue’s novel such a fascinating read for me. It was the author’s choice to write the novel from the point-of-view of a five-year-old child. She could have written it from the perspective of the abducted young woman. Instead, she wrote it from the child’s. This made the story worth reading with analytical intention.

And this is what I mean about how difficult it is for a creative person to answer the question: where do you get your ideas?

In September, I am going on a writing retreat and taking two rough draft novels with me to be revised and edited.

An acrimonious divorce—not my own—inspired manuscript, mythology and fairy tale, and ergodic novels.

Journals inspired another manuscript. How do you make a narcissistic protagonist, a person who acts in selfish and sometimes selfish ways, sympathetic? Can I seduce a reader into understanding the unimaginable?

There are other manuscripts. Another inspired by the same divorce mentioned above. One inspired by a summer I spent at summer camp with my best friend. Another a novelization of my adolescence.

But none is inspired by one experience. Within the novels are other influences. News. Song lyrics. Dreams. Fantasies.

A fallen tree found while walking around a parking lot.

So maybe this is your invitation to just look around. Where? Anywhere! I didn’t know where to look when I went on my walk. And I discovered a blog post you are now reading. Let me know if you find some inspiration and where you found it. Maybe your inspiration will inspire others.

* It’s okay to ask an author “Where do you get your ideas from?” by the way. Some authors will have an answer at hand. But if the author hems and haws, it’s probably because the answer is a little more complicated than a simple single source of inspiration.