Ideas, and Where I Get Them From…

Most days, I’ll be too tired from running around after my kids and dogs while doing as much writing as I can to answer this question any more eloquently than, “My ass.”

Partly sarcasm, but also partly true. After all, isn’t it a writer’s job to say more with less?

I don’t get fantastic ideas from meaningful events, shot at me like a bolt of lightning of inspiration. When things happen in real life, I get too busy trying to process them to actually think about writing about them. I don’t base my characters from interesting people I know–for one thing, I’m too anti-social to really seek out these sorts of people, and for another thing, I think everybody is interesting in one way or another.

I think what I’ve become good at is spotting stories from settings and scenarios, which I have to painstakingly create first before I can get anywhere, and how people might react when dropped into those stories. I like to follow leads, i.e. a simple hesitation a character makes when talking about their father could lead me to discovering a magnificent backstory where said character’s father ran off to fight dragons, leaving him and his mother behind to fend for themselves. Then, because I write character-driven fiction, I dive into it from that character’s point of view.

I don’t have ideas. I just happen to like people. I like learning about people and hearing their life stories. I am even occasionally fascinated by the reprehensible people, who I don’t like, but who I try to learn about anyway. I tend to want to know as much as I can about new people I meet beyond their names: where they come from, what they do, how they view the world, what makes them tick. Even people I’ve known for a long time still endlessly fascinate me, which is probably why most of my friends are people I’ve known for decades.

So in the end, all these things come together in my head to form the basis of a story, which only gets more detailed the more I work on and think about it.

Meet a glorious cast of characters in The Agartes Epilogues. They all have issues.