By Paul Kupperberg
Here’s the way the
conversation usually goes:
Them: “Oh, you’re a writer?
Are you famous?”
Me: “If you have to ask, I
think you’ve answered your own question.”
Them: “Well, what do you
write?”
Me: “All sorts of things.
Novels, kids books, comic books.”
Them: “Really? Where do you
get your ideas?”
Depending on who’s asking, I
have a variety of answers, ranging from the snarky, “I subscribe to an idea
service; every month they send me two dozen ideas and I pay them for the ones I
use,” to the truthful (but not very helpful), “It’s my job.”
The actual writing is only a part of a writer’s job.
While I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s the easy part, it’s still only a part
of the process, because before you write you have to have something to write about. Fortunately, having been at my
job for a goodly number of years, I’ve gotten pretty good at the whole “getting
ideas” thing which come, to me at least, in two distinct flavors: the complete,
ready-to-write idea and the broad concept.
The complete, ready-to-write
kind are, as you would imagine, the best kind. Those are the ideas which come--pop!--into your head, fully developed,
with a beginning, middle, and end already in place. Sometimes, it just feels
like all you’re doing is copying something you’ve already read or seen. These
are, needless to say, the kind of ideas that don’t come near as often as you
wish they would. I can only think of a handful of instances where this has
happened to me, one time being in the early 1980s when, in search of an idea for
a sword and sorcery concept for a DC Comics series, I came up with--pop!--Arion, Lord of Atlantis, about a sorcerer in the Atlantean end
days.
That’s not to say Arion came completely out of nowhere.
Knowing the editor of the Warlord
comic was looking for a back-up feature to replace one that was spinning off
into its own title, I had been noodling with S&S ideas for a while. As a
result, Atlantis, sorcery, and a soupcon of Larry Niven’s classic The Magic Goes Away had been percolating
in the back of my mind for a while, but I hadn’t really made any sort of effort
to turn those ingredients into a concrete idea. Well, not consciously at any rate. So, when the big picture idea came to me--pop!--while I was in the process of
doing something totally unrelated to writing or sorcery, it felt like I had given
birth without having to go through the messy process of labor.
The broad concepts, the so-called the germ of the idea, is much more common and can come from
anywhere and anything. In just the last week, some random lines from different
movies I was watching jumped out at me as being perfect story titles. What
stories they would title weren’t clear at the moment of impact, but pretty soon
one of them joined forces with a little project that I’ve been working at
sporadically over the last few months, that of using pieces of sculpture and
paintings created by my late grandmother as the inspiration for short stories. The other will, eventually,
find a home somewhere.
Another broad concept came
to me listening to an interview with Ben Bradlee, newspaperman and friend of
President Kennedy, on CSPAN. Bradlee spoke of a conversation he’d once had with
JFK about this post-presidency and, without even thinking about it, I grabbed a
pen and paper and jotted down the quote. That, in turn, became the beginnings
of a short story that will, when I find the time, finish sometime in
the near future.
I’ve found ideas lurking in
conversations, in newspaper and magazine articles, in other people’s stories,
and in looking out at inspiring views. I’ve had these ideas while actually
searching for them for in the course of an assignment, and I’ve had them
without any place in which to use them. I’ve been awakened from a sound sleep
with them, and I’ve had them drifting off to sleep. Not all of them are gems,
though, but the really good ideas are the ones you don’t forget, even if you
get them when you’re half a sleep or don’t get a chance to write them down. The
ones that slip away probably weren’t worth remembering in the first place.
Where do I get my ideas? I
guess the truth is I get them anywhere and everywhere.
Where do get yours?
© Paul Kupperberg
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