Where do you get your ideas from?

Probably the most common question a writer gets asked is, “where do you get your ideas from?” it is a legitimate question that is natural for a person to ask. Writers hate that question. If you ask them why, they will say it is because they get asked it all the time. But the truth is, maybe we hate it because we don’t have a good answer for it. Sometimes we know exactly where an idea comes from: an exciting incident that happened to the writer or to someone they know. It can be the sight of something beautiful or something ugly that starts the wheels turning. But often, ideas are just something that pop into our head, a flash of inspiration with source unknown.

New and strange Ideas pop into people’s heads all the time, not just writers. The difference with writers (or other creatives) is that they see those ideas as something that might be worth exploring. Stephen King has said that the practice of keeping a pen and pad by your bed to capture middle-of-the-night ideas, is the best way to memorialize bad ideas. He says the good ideas are the ones that stick with you and don’t need to be written down before you forget. That may be true, but I do like to be able to jot something down captured from a twilight though or a dream, because the light of the day may reveal it to be a worthwhile start to a story. If it is not, nothing lost.

So, if you are wondering where writers get their ideas from, you might just as well ask yourself where that weird dream you had last night came from, or that joke that you came up with. We all get ideas. Writers just do the hard work of fleshing those ideas out into a story.

Star Liner

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