Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

The title question is something writers hear a lot. When I was a kid and let my friends and classmates read my stories, they'd often stare at me with odd looks afterward and say, "How do you do that? How do you write those stories?" Usually I'd just shrug. The fact is, I don't remember where I got the ideas for my childhood tales. But I know what inspires my adult writing.

I get most of my ideas from my reading. A line or two can instigate a whole plot. A phrase can give me a title, which can then lead to a full story. Words or pairs of words lend themselves to the clever name of a character. There is no lack of originality or creativity in finding inspiration in someone else's work. I'm sure you've heard the old saying that "There are no new stories." Shakespeare didn't care if there were or not, because he didn't come up with new ones. He borrowed plots and characters from all kinds of fiction and from history. A few times he just reworked old dramas. He got away with that because, well, he was Shakespeare, a man who could breathe new life into any old thing with his unique perspective and his unparalleled ability with language.

Whether or not the old saying about "no new stories" is true, I don't know. I do enjoy adapting other writers' work for different purposes, such as screen- and stage-plays. In doing so, I must always bring my own perspective and sensibilities to it. I don't really consider any story "sacred." I took the first quarto of Hamlet, a rarely staged version, trimmed it down and retitled it. The next summer, I finally fulfilled a ten-year-old dream by turning Macbeth into a farcical comedy and giving it a new subtitle. At that same time, I adapted a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, adding to it a chunk of another of their stories, changing the nature of one character, and even tweaking the ending.

I think my attitude toward existing fiction originated with Quentin Tarantino's adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch into the movie Jackie Brown. It's still the only time the maverick director has put someone else's work on the screen, but he did it in his own way, rewriting the dialogue to fit his style, and even excising the entire major subplot, thus changing the character arcs of a couple of the supporting players. It was something of a revelation to me.

I don't just play in other people's sandboxes, however. Usually I take sand from the beach and fill up my own backyard with it. When I'm captured by something I'm reading, particularly fiction, I might think, "What if the character had gone this way or done this instead?" Or I might muse on the viewpoint of a supporting character. Or I might just focus on one little action or incident. There's the start of my story.

But nonfiction can serve this purpose as well. The book I'm reading now, Jan Morris's The Matter of Wales, has already moved me to jot down the title for a screenplay about Owain Glyndwr, the medieval prince of Wales, and it features just a half-line mention of a 1970s murder that I'll turn into a Victorian mystery starring Doctor John Watson. It doesn't take much to get me started. Think about this blog post: the germ of it was created by the notetaking I just mentioned.

Still, not all my story concepts come from books. Movies might trigger something, or I'll be inspired by a conversation, or I can start a tale based on a memory, which itself might be called up by a smell or sound. While I don't know if I'm an especially visual person, I have gotten ideas from pictures, sights, and objects. A horror-story trilogy was once built around a toy mechanical grabber-claw; yes, it was kind of a Freddy Krueger rip-off, but at least the killer's origin story was unique and interesting. And you can hop back to my blog post The Emu Girl to read a fake-newspaper article I wrote based on a photograph. Anyway, I must have some visual sense, because I've written a stack of comic-book scripts, which include directions for the artist to follow, and I've directed stage plays that required me to see the show in my head first, and for which I designed most of the often-creative and elaborate costumes.

I have a fair number of notebooks filled with story synopses, plots, titles, character names, brief character descriptions, dialogue, quotes, phrases, and even single interesting words. My stories would literally be lost without these books, because my short-term memory is especially short (a symptom of ADHD) and necessitates jotting down ideas immediately. I swear, I've read back over these notes, some of which have lain fallow for years, and genuinely wondered who wrote them, because they're so good. And speaking of years, I've really got to get going on actually writing the stories that go with those notes; there are stacks of fleshed-out plots that could take me decades to turn into publishable material. Honestly, at the speed I work, and approaching middle age, they may take the rest of my life.

Hmm, that gives me an idea...

#ideas #adaptation #drama #writing