Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Where do you get your ideas?

I'm sure you have all had this question asked of you; "Where do you get your ideas?"

I'm not sure about you but I sometimes find that hard to answer. Not because I don't want to, but because I'm not always sure. Ideas come from everywhere, and nowhere. I'm, much to my dismay, not a real disciplined writer. I admire those writers I read about that get up every morning at 5 am so they can write for two hours before everyone else gets up. Frankly I don't have the energy to do that. I just write when I can find the time during the day.

I always have a couple of magazines and two or three books on the go at any time and read whichever I feel like at the moment. My manuscripts are much the same way. There is the primary one - the next I hope to publish - but there are also four or five others that are at the research stage or very preliminary stage that simmer on the back burner. Sometimes an idea pops up that works for one of those "back burner" stories and I jot it down. (I always have paper handy for this - always!) These things float up when I'm listening to music, walking somewhere, biking or just using the old 1000 yard stare sitting in my back yard. I never know what will trigger it or when it will happen. (See above note about paper.)  These little tidbits go into the appropriate file for that particular story.

So, by the time I move a story from the back burner to the front one I will have all these random notes collected for it and I'll be damned if I can remember where they came from. So when I get asked the question I really mean it when I say I don't know.

It is what it is.