Every writer gets asked this eventually. I’ve had it at WI talks, U3A talks, Rotary meetings, in interviews, and at least once from an interviewer at Fenland Youth Radio who looked genuinely suspicious of my answer, as if I were holding something back.
I wasn’t. The answer really is this anticlimactic: I don’t know. I certainly don’t go looking for ideas. They turn up.
The Honest, Slightly Unhelpful Answer
Give me a word, a sentence, a stray image, even just a mood, and something will happen. I don’t decide what. I find out by writing it. Twenty or thirty or forty minutes later, there are hundreds of words of something that didn’t exist before, and I genuinely couldn’t tell you in advance what it was going to be about.
That’s not false modesty. I’ve tried, on occasion, to sit down and deliberately think up an idea, plan one out logically, the way I imagine more sensible writers do. It never works half as well as just letting the Muse get on with it.
In fact, a challenge I have made on more than one occasion to friends, acquaintances, and even strangers is for them to give me a word or phrase. I will then attempt to write a story based on that. For instance, one science fiction story began with a friend asking me to write about aliens on the moon; I gave him the Galactic Collective. On another occasion, just before Christmas, someone asked me to do a story about gingerbread; I wrote about the Home of the Broken Biscuits.
Remind me sometime to tell you about the strangest prompt I’ve ever been given (and what I did with it).
Where She Finds Them
If I had to point to sources, I’d say: everywhere and nowhere in particular. A phrase someone says at a Wordsmiths meeting. Something half-overheard. A picture I happened to glance at. The genuinely odd bits of history I stumble across when I’m meant to be doing something else entirely. A post or comment on Facebook or Twitter. A video I saw on YouTube.
None of it arrives labelled ‘this is a story idea, please use accordingly.’ It just sits there until the Muse decides it’s interesting, usually at the most inconvenient moment available — after 2 am being her personal favourite, followed by those times I’m astride the porcelain horse! Fortunately, I usually have my iPhone nearby, so I can dictate something to nail down the idea.
Why I Don’t Worry About Running Out
People sometimes ask this as a follow-up: “Don’t you worry you’ll run dry eventually?”
Honestly, no. After 2.2 million words and counting, if anything, I worry about the opposite — that the ideas will keep arriving faster than I can possibly deal with them, while I’m still elbow-deep working on something else entirely.
I already have a dozen notebooks in Evernote filled with thousands of ideas I’ve come up with, encountered somewhere across the Internet, on television, and even from prompt books I’ve bought. If I want to write all those stories, I’m going to have to outlive Methuselah many times over.
That’s rather the curse and the blessing of being a Pantser. The ideas aren’t rationed out by some careful internal system. They just show up, and it’s my job to write them down before they vanish.
So if you ever ask me where my ideas come from and I shrug and say I haven’t the faintest idea, I am not dodging the question. That genuinely is the answer.