IWSG July

 

The awesome co-hosts for the July 5 posting of the IWSG are PJ Colando, Kim Lajevardi, Gwen Gardner, Pat Garcia, and Natalie Aguirre!

This month's question is an interesting one - and one every writer gets asked all the time!

99% of my story ideas come from dreams. Where do yours predominantly come from?

There is no one place I get my ideas.  And I don't think I've ever started a story based on a dream, but I certainly have dreamed in the worlds of my books.  Once I even dreamed in one of my character's heads. That was a weird one!

But ideas can come from anywhere.  An Unstill Life came from a newspaper article I read about a school forbidding same sex couples from attending the leavers' ball.  Stumped came from meeting the subject of a documentary I screened at one of the cinemas I ran. The Sidewalk's Regrets also came from a documentary, this one about a musician friend of mine.  There was one line someone said that sparked the book, but later, I couldn't find the line again. 

Chasing the Taillights started off as an adult book about something very different, but when I started writing it, I found that I needed to explore why these two characters had the relationship they did and I ended up writing about them 15 years earlier instead.  One day I might go back and actually write the book I initially planned to write...

The book I'm working on now is a re-telling of Romeo and Juliet (very loosely, and I mean really, really loosely now), but also has parts that were inspired by a song.  And the book I wrote before this one was  sparked by a song (and by re-reading Lolita about 20 years after I first read it).  The one I have coming out this year (My Murder Year) was sparked by the political opposition to same-sex marriage.  Which makes me think I wrote the first draft of that one a really long time ago!

Often I'll read something or see something or hear something and some part of it hooks in my brain.  It will rattle around in there for a while, sometimes bumping into some other random idea trapped there, and when I'm lucky, these ideas colliding will become the beginning of a story.  Other times they just fizzle out along the way.

Sometimes the idea isn't big enough to be a whole book, so I write a short story instead.  And there have been occasions where that short story has been the starting point for a book.  But that doesn't happen that often.  Usually those ideas are smaller and perfectly suited for a short story.

I'm always fascinated to find out how other people get their ideas, so please, share in the comments!