Where do we get our ideas? It’s complicated

 by Maureen Milliken

The newspaper article wasn’t anything exciting. Someone in New Hampshire was running out of time to claim their $100,000 lottery win. I read the story half-hoping that I'd bought a Powerball ticket in Franklin, New Hampshire, last September and somehow forgot about it and the winner was me. Even though I haven’t bought a Powerball ticket in a while and can’t remember the last time I was in Franklin, New Hampshire. I’d moved on to wondering if the person was just playing some kind of sick game, waiting for the last minute to cash in, half-admiring their steely control. Or maybe they bought it and just forgot, a sadder story, but more likely.

Then it happened. If you write mysteries, you may be familiar with the feeling. That out-of-nowhere blast of inspiration. The excitement of seeing a story behind a few words, even if you don’t know what the story is yet.

No, it wasn’t the topic of the story itself, but this paragraph halfway through the story: “This wouldn’t be the largest unclaimed prize in New Hampshire lotter history. In 1987, a Tri-State Megabucks player never stepped forward to claim their $2 million jackpot…”

We’re often asked where we get our ideas. Depending on my energy level, my answer is “everywhere,” or it’s a more elaborate explanation of how ideas can come from anything – a newspaper article, a conversation overheard in the grocery store, a nugget excavated from a long otherwise boring story a friend is telling you.

I can never quite explain, though, the reality of it. That something that may seem mundane, or boring, sparks something deep in my brain and explodes. That feeling the second I read or hear something that it’s the start of something. There’s a story there. It’s big. It’s good. It’s exciting.

With the lottery story, I’m not sure what it is yet – I haven’t thought much about it and don’t want to get derailed from the book I’m writing now. That’s okay. That gives it time to form and grow and get tattoos and baggage.

I took a screen shot (I read my newspapers on my iPad) and marked it up with “mystery plot!!!!” in red. It’ll be there when I need it.

That’s not how all ideas happen, of course. There are different levels of ideas. There are the big shining book-writing-motivating ones, like the uncashed lottery ticket. Those don’t happen all the time, probably a good thing since I can only take so much excitement.

There are also the smaller ones that can work for a scene or character development.

The same day I read about the uncashed lotter ticket, I read in one of my local papers (yes, I do read a lot of newspapers, a blog post for another day), about a neighbor feud in which one drove a log skidder into the side of the other’s house, which caused about half of it to collapse. Sure, that’s something someone in one of my books could do.

Boom. Another screen shot.

One day a few months ago I was at the transfer station (the dump, for those of you from away) and a sheriff’s deputy pulled up behind a woman who was sorting her recycling. He tried to serve her some papers, which she ignored, so he put them in the front seat of her pickup truck. He was being kind of a jerk, taunting and harassing her as she sorted her recycling into the bins and ignored him. It was like a whole scene from a book, with characters I hadn’t written yet. I played it over in my head until I got home and wrote it down.

It’s in the same folder on my computer with some other scenes like that, of characters who I haven’t written yet.

The inspiration for the book I’m working on now was sparked by the story of a guy who was making a movie in Maine back in the 1970s. It was his lifelong dream, but wasn’t going very well. Then someone killed him. It’s not so much the ready-made plot that struck me as the poignancy. The guy had quit his job, moved his family halfway across the country and put his marriage at risk to live a dream. Even though it wasn’t working out, he didn’t seem to know that yet. Then some jerk killed him for a really crappy reason.

It actually took me a long time to work a plot out, but that wasn’t the point of the inspiration. It was the feeling of it that struck me.

The thing is, I know there are some days I would’ve read that paragraph about the uncashed lottery ticket and thought, “Gee, that’s too bad,” and moved on.

There are days when I would’ve read about the splitter being run into the house and said, “That’s Maine for you,” and turned the page.

Maybe on a different day I would’ve watched the deputy harassing the woman at the transfer station and felt annoyance and nothing else.

The murdered movie-maker? Maybe in a different mood, I would’ve thought it was a great topic for the podcast my sister and I do and that’s as far as it would’ve gone.

When someone asks me where I get my ideas, sometimes I toy with the idea of explaining all of this. How sometimes there’s a convergence of thought and feeling that comes together in my brain and heart and blows something up into an idea, big or small. Other times, though, ideas pass by without me catching them.

I never do try to explain it, though. I know from hard experience that the stuff going on in my head doesn’t translate well.

Instead I just say, “They’re everywhere. If I’m lucky, I catch a few.”

 Maureen Milliken bio

Maureen Milliken is the award-winning author of the Bernadette “Bernie” O’Dea mystery series. The fourth book in the series, “Dying for News,” won the 2025 Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. The fifth book in the series, “News From Away,” is due out later this year. She has also been co-host since 2016 of the Crime & Stuff podcast with her sister, Maine artist Rebecca Milliken. She lives in Central Maine.