Go
ahead. Ask a bunch of writers to name the most common question they get asked
in interviews, and I guarantee one of the top five will be “Where do you get
your ideas?” And most writers also rate it as one of their least favorite
questions.
Theodore
Geisel—best known as Dr. Seuss—was one of those writers. He once answered it
thusly: "I get all my ideas in Switzerland near the Forka Pass. There is a
little town called Gletch, and two thousand feet up above Gletch there is a
smaller hamlet called Über Gletch. I go there on the fourth of August every
summer to get my cuckoo clock fixed. While the cuckoo is in the hospital, I
wander around and talk to the people in the streets. They are very strange
people, and I get my ideas from them." (You can read more of Geisel’s
writerly wit and wisdom in this great Mental Floss article).
And
yes, I get asked that question quite a lot, but unlike many other writers, I
enjoy it. It requires fresh thinking every time it comes down the pike, which
is probably why my answer is different every single time. So…where exactly do I
get those weird, fascinating, relentless sparks that with the proper kindling
become plots and characters?
Friends
sometimes drop them in my lap. I was having lunch with my friend Donna, a
fellow Sisters in Crime member, and she told me about a controversy in the running
community concerning bib mules.
“Bib
whats?” I said.
“Bib
mules,” she replied. “A really good runner who runs a marathon with a slower
runner’s timing chip so that the slower runner can get credit for a very fast
time.” She went on to explain that this was just one of the many ways that
amateur athletes try to cheat their way to medals and prizes and entries in
prestigious races like the Boston Marathon
That
conversation was the spark for my upcoming novella “Trouble Like A Freight
Train Coming,” a prequel to my Tai Randolph series. It’s being published in two
weeks (!) in Lowcountry Crime, an
anthology that also contains a story by Writers Who Kill author James Jackson).
And like any well-tended spark, that idea soon burst into a conflagration of
fictional lies and deceptions and all manner of criminal shenanigans
Some
story ideas are harder to trace—I still have no idea how Tai’s name came to be,
or even when it happened. She has always been Tai in my head. Once I started
researching, I was surprised at the various meanings that name has in languages
across the world (for example, in Polynesia it means “tide,” in Romanian,
“yours,” and in Mandarin Chinese, “too too much” or “extreme”). All of these
meanings are appropriate for my character, but I wasn’t aware of any of them
when she first started appearing on the page.
Where
do my ideas come from? I’m not sure I want to peel off every layer of that process.
The mystery fiction I write always comes with a solution, but I prefer some
mysteries to remain…mysterious.
How
about you? If you’ll permit the question, where do you get your ideas?
