People sometimes wonder where I get the ideas for the stories I write. That’s not an easy question to answer. The real answer is “everywhere” or “where ever”. I pick up ideas as I go.
Sometimes, random ideas pop into my head. Like the story I’m working on now, titled The Clockwork Batsman (and yes, the thought of that story did influence my blog name). I was just randomly lying in bed one night, about to fall asleep, when the words “The Clockwork Batsman” came into my head. A few more collisions later and I had the idea fully formed, of two men who built a clockwork automaton in the early era of baseball and are trying to sell it to various teams.
Other times, it comes more organically. A conversation, for instance. I wrote an entire novel off an idea I contrived while talking to a friend about a woman who had a rather commanding (and intimidating) presence about her. I refered to her as being like a dragon, which sent the friend laughing, and me writing.
At least once, an idea has come to me by reading something and then going “Ok, and what about the EXACT OPPOSITE?” The first thing I ever had actually published (a short story called “Addiction” in E-ON) came from this. Another person in EVE had his character being deathly worried about cloning (the mechanism in EVE which explains how characters can be killed and keep coming back), so much so that the character fell into a depression every time she was killed. My idea was to do the very opposite of that, someone who loved to be cloned.
Not every idea I have actually comes to fruition though. I have a dozen or so sitting in my head, waiting to progress beyond genesis. Most will probably make it no further than they have already, replaced in urgency by newer ideas. Some may get turned into stories, some might work their way into other stories in a smaller role than I’d originally expected, and some will be ignored. But never forgotten.
Because I never know when I might want to use them.
