Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

Point of Origin...story ideas.

It’s the dreaded question faced by every writer. Where do you get your ideas? The answer is as varied as writers themselves. Dreams, coffee shops, doctor’s office waiting rooms, artwork, newspaper headlines, television commercials, nightmares and tattoos are just some of the places where the first spark of an idea can hit you. All of this stuff swirls around in the ether of a writer’s imagination. Most writers can’t tell you where they get their ideas at all, only that it’s a process that we all go through and its as individual and varied as we are. Let me walk you through my own process to show you what I mean.

I get a lot of my initial sparks to build on from my nighttime sojourns into dreamland. The other night, I woke up rigid with fright and my heart pounding a serious staccato in my ears. In my nightmare, a man was floating towards me, and walked right through a locked plate glass door. In the nebulous-fiber-optic-weirdness that is the network of dreams, I knew he was a newly turned vampire. I knew he was crazy because when he looked at me, nobody was home. This was not someone you could negotiate with, nor was there any room for escape. He promptly grabbed me by my wrists and very messily ate me. Insert whatever psych profile fits. I was nervous, I had unfinished business, something was bothering me…whatever.

This is the point where most normal, sane, non-writer people would have woken up. Not me. I’ve had regular trips to nightmareville since I was a kid and have developed unique ways to deal with it. There is a technique called lucid dreaming where one can control one’s dreams. I’m not great at it, but I try. At this point I rewind the dream. The man comes towards me, but this time I back into the stacks (I’m in some type of store) and grab a bottle of holy water (it looked like a really fun store at this point) and smash him in the face with it. He screams and bites my wrist, and I have a broken broom handle that I use as a stake. Presto dreamo, I’m safe and can now wake up.

I’ve still got that lingering unease that comes with nightmares, but instead of getting up and making tea, I lay in bed and toy with the scene. What if the female protagonist (of course I’ve turned myself into the heroine…it puts distance between me and the nightmare and also makes me much cooler) fought the vampire venom and didn’t become a vampire? How would she do that? She’d still need to feed, but on what? My mind starts to churn out all the possible answers until I settle on a few. Emotions? Pheremones? Sex? Oooo, yeah, I like that she switches it to sex. And she’s been a good little girl up until this point in her life, so she has all these moral issues to deal with because why make it easy for her? Characters need to be conflicted. And why did that crazy guy go into her shop in the first place? He was too easy to get rid of, so he couldn’t be the real bad guy. Who is? What does he want? Is there a hero in all of this mix? What does he look like? He’s gotta be cute, strong enough to fight vampires, maybe have a grudge against the main villian. Yeah, she’s collateral damage between these two big shots. But how will the initial meeting with the heroine go?

By the time I’m finished answering some of these basic questions, I’m calm, zen even. I also have a few major scenes of a decent story idea floating around in my head. Now, I still have way more world building to do, tons of character development not to mention crafting a plot from this whole mess, but I’ve got my next project started. And it came from a nightmare. Pretty spiffy, huh? Maybe it will turn into a great WIP, maybe it won’t, but now I have something bubbling in the story percolator that occupies half of my brain space. But that’s the process that one story idea went through with one writer’s brain. At least the start. The writing process…that’s a whole other post.