Don't Plant Trees!
10 years ago
Monday, July 20, 2009
Ideas
Let's talk about ideas this week. Where do you get your ideas? Do pictures help or do ideas simply spring out of nowhere? I'll chime in later. Right now, I'm off to dress rehearsal for our local summer theatre children's show. I'm the music director and we're doing Alice Through the Looking Glass. Talk about a fantasy. HA!!
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Where do I get my ideas? From asking questions. From news reports. From wherever. But mostly from asking questions.
ReplyDeleteOn a totally unrelated note, I'll be at the Phillie conference for a day. Hope I can wave at you there.
I don't get very many ideas, so when I do have one I hold on to it and milk it for all it's worth!
ReplyDeleteSometimes ideas pop in my head, but mostly I need some kind of stimlus, like a picture. My WIP idea came from the Scholastic Book Club. I saw a book on fairies, looked it up on amazon to check out the price difference and looked through the list of other books that came up. One was a book about "pressed fairies" and I thought to myself, why would someone press a fairy? And what would they do with that fairy after they pressed it? I thought a dried out fairy might be something like fruit leather, which is something you eat. Then I wondered who would eat fairies and why? And Fairyeater was born.
ReplyDeleteWhen I'm done writing Fairyeater and am working on selling it, I'll start my next novel, which idea I got from a picture of the Garden of the Gods.
And I've decided to work to be known as the "Fairy Lady" so all my novels will have some kind of fairy in them. But I'm working at making my fairies unique.
Another way to get the ideas going is to brainstorm with my writing partner, Joyce. Some things we kick around are not usable, but some things are treasures. Ideas really are everywhere!
Janet, I hope to meet you at the conference. which day will you be there?
I realized that my ideas come from my own "fantasies." The novel I have been too busy to work on lately is based on trying to come up with an escapist world I'd like to live in myself. It actually started as a little writing project in which I made myself and a friend stars of our own fantasy story, and grew from there.
ReplyDeleteMy previous novel idea was about a thirty-ish woman opening a Victorian tea room at the Jersey Shore. Something I would love to be able to do myself.
But, I don't have tons of ideas banging around in my head competing for attention the way some writers do. I tend to keep one idea and develop it very thoroughly. So I have lots of ideas of how to deepen and broaden the setting, characters and plot of my WIP, but hardly a clue what the sequel will be about.
This is a hard one for me to put into words. My ideas and stories just seem to come. A lot of the story ideas in my WIP come from my own life. One of the main threads in my story is how different people are dealing with grief and loss. Most, but not all, of the situations come from how I have been dealing with my own loss, or how I wish I could have dealt with it.
ReplyDeleteOther ideas come as tangents from things I see, much like Pam suggested. Sometimes it's a bit frustrating because I read a story or see a movie trailer and think I would like to write that store, but of course it's already written. But even so I get related ideas. The job is to take those related ideas and make then stand on their own.
i have more ideas than i know what to do with. not all of them go into a story, but i try. i shouldn't be complaining. anyone want to take some of them?
ReplyDeleteStart an idea folder, Michelle. I have one with more things than I could ever write, but once in a while, I find something I need for what I'm working on at the time. I just need to remember to look at the file now and then. HA!!
ReplyDelete