Where do you get your ideas?

Every profession has its pitfalls. Doctors are always being asked for free medical advice, lawyers are asked for legal information, witches for puncturing someone’s life and writers are asked where we get our ideas from. (I proudly pronounce myself as a thinker and a writer.)

In the beginning, I used to tell people the not very funny answers, the flip ones: 'From some past incidence or from something where I was remotely connected or from a dusty old book full of ideas or I stole it.

Then I got tired of the not very funny answers, and these days I tell people the truth:

'I make them up,' I tell them. 'Out of my head.'

Folks don't like this answer. I don't know why not. They look unhappy, as if I'm trying to slip a fast one past them. As if there's a huge secret, and, for reasons of my own, I'm not telling them how it's done. Not letting them penetrate inside my mind or my sad looser life kind of.

And of course I'm not. Firstly, I don't know myself where the ideas really come from, what makes them come, or whether one day they'll stop. Secondly, I doubt anyone who asks really wants a three hour lecture on the creative process. And thirdly, the ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series. You don’t agree talk with my wife you will never doubt me again in life.

Every published writer has had it - the people who come up to you and tell you that they've got AN IDEA and better still they want to make you a part of their idea. The proposal is always the same - they'll tell you the Idea (the hard bit), you write it down and turn it into reality (the easy bit), the two of you can split the money fifty-fifty.

I'm reasonably gracious with these people. I tell them, truly, that I have far too many ideas for things as it is, and far too little time. And I wish them the best of luck.

The Ideas aren't bloody the hard bit. They're a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you're trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.

But still, it's the question people want to know. In my case, they also want to know if I get them from my dreams. (Answer: no. Dream logic isn't story logic. Transcribe a dream, and you'll see.) And I don't give straight answers. Until recently.
Yesterday an old friend someone who used to read this blog popped this question and continued by saying why I don’t write no more(as if he reads my blog always)
And I realized I owed him an answer and he is not mature enough to know any better. And it's a perfectly reasonable question, if you aren't asked every time you talk.

So, Joy …
You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if...?

(What if you woke up with wings? What if your mother was a run away slave and your grandmother practiced witchcraft? What if the religion you follow is all farce…

Another important question is, If only...

(If only real life was like you plan it. If only I could run away from problems rather than face it. If only I had a clone working for me in my office and hagging with my family.)

And then there are the others: I wonder... (I wonder what she likes in me which no one does... I wonder am I the one for her) and If This Goes On... and Wouldn't it be interesting if... ('Wouldn't it be interesting if the human civilization didn’t have a tongue to taste nor a stomach to feed daily?')...

Those questions, and others like them, and the questions they, in their turn, pose ('Well, if we didn’t have tongue there wont be any variety… what if there is no variety?')
An idea doesn't have to be a plot notion, just a place to begin creating. Plots often generate themselves when one begins to ask oneself questions about whatever the starting point is.

Sometimes an idea is an entity ('There's a ghost wants to show his presence). Sometimes it's a place (‘There is this wonderland...'). Sometimes it's an image ('A woman, sifting in a dark room filled with empty faces.')

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

And when you've an idea - which is, after all, merely something to hold on to as you begin - what then?

Well, then you write. You put one word after another until it's finished - whatever it is.
Sometimes it won't work, or not in the way you first imagined. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. Sometimes you throw it out and start again.

Where do I get my ideas from? I make them up. Out of my head. Recent idea: stolen one what if color blindness is natural and people who see color are abnormal? What if majority doesn’t set the rules?