A question every fiction writer gets asked is “Where do you get your ideas?” And while the wittier among us come up with things like, “$5 in an envelope to the grocer down on 7th Ave.,” others sometimes try to explain their particular process or just detail what led to the idea for a particular story or book.
I thought it might be interesting to people to instead follow along with me each week in the grabbing, exploration, and shaping of an idea. To get into the meat of the process, or perhaps many different processes, since I, like most writers I know, get their ideas in lots of different ways.
So without further ado, what shall we have for Story Idea #1?
Simple start – let’s look at today’s paper. Always helps to read at least one or two, maybe skim a few more. It’s pretty easy when you can get the juiciest stories culled and delivered to you via e-mail, news-reader, or whatever your personal choice of electronic injection might be. (Me, I read a physical copy of The Vancouver Sun, the North Shore News, Maclean’s, and a bunch of monthly or bi-monthly special interest magazines like Wired. I also scan the electronic versions of the Washington Post and New York Times.)
So, again, today? Well, we’ve got China testing stealthy jets which their civilian leaders pretend to know nothing about, leading to speculation that the Chinese government thinks Obama’s a one-term president so why bother forging a good relationship with him?
And we’ve got Bayer, the giant German pharmaceutical company, trumpeting a drug called ATX-101 that they can inject into people’s double chins to dissolve the location-specific fat. Results take about 16 weeks to be “noticeable.” They expect that when it passes its trials, revenue from it should hit $320 million per year.
And we’ve got a class-action lawsuit against the Newfoundland and Labrador government for introducing moose to the the island of Newfoundland some 100 years ago, thereby making that government responsible for the 700 to 800 cases every year of vehicles hitting moose. (Oh, those crazy Canadians.)
So what kind of writer are we? Thriller? SF? Funny satire? Just for the hell of it, and because I’m in that kind of mood, let’s combine all three. Let’s say we have a struggling president who is grabbing onto the saber rattling of a threatening Chinese government. His public plan will be to verbally attack. His private plan, cooked up with his personally-appointed new director of the CIA, will be to introduce a genetically-modified, fast-breeding of Canadian moose into Taiwan and then blame both the Canadian and Chinese governments for conspiring to kill Taiwanese citizens. What he doesn’t realize is that his very-popular wife is being treated for her double chin by a secretly rabidly-nationalistic Chinese doctor and these treatments are about to got horribly wrong.
Yeah, I don’t think I could sustain the comic tone this kind of idea would need for an entire novel. (Though I have friends who could.) So it would probably be a novella or very short novel. But hey, that length, which has generally been death for the last few decades, has a whole new life with e-books. So…
Stay tuned. Next week maybe we’ll come up with something more serious.
