As a writer I’m sometimes asked where I get my ideas from. That’s a difficult question to answer, and I haven’t really come up with a good response yet. It seems ideas just sort of pop into my head. I have no idea how I would get them if they didn’t.
I suppose story ideas are mostly a reflection of the things we think or dream about, the things we wonder about, the hopes and fears that we have, our experiences. Then we make stories that are sort of a culmination of those things.
My idea for Marinian Pearls came mostly from wondering about what it would really be like to live in the sea. How cool would it be if I could swim around down there, exploring the mysterious depths. What would I find? What kind of dangers might there be?
I wasn’t interested in the kind of mermaid story that would have some kind of fantasy underwater kingdom; I wanted to explore what the real ocean world is like. Writing this story was a lot of fun, especially doing all the research. I read all the books I could find about the ocean, and watched all the videos, too. I tried to keep the scenes in Marinian Pearls as authentic as I could, while adding whatever fictional twists I needed to add adventure and to make up for all that is still unknown about the ocean.
But I’m not as sure of where I got my idea for Out of the Bottle, the novel I’m currently working on. This story is about a genie who wants to be free. She’s forced to serve whoever owns her bottle and has to grant their wishes. Wherever the idea came from, I am having a fun time with it. I’ve gone with my genie all over the world, and have gotten to learn a lot about other cultures. We’ve also met all kinds of character types, and those were a lot of fun to write up too.
So. Where do ideas come from? I’m still not sure I can give a good answer to that. But wherever they come from, they’re just the start. The igniting little spark. Then comes the hard work of figuring out the story, doing the research, and getting all those words down on the page. And then re-writing the whole thing, editing, re-thinking…
Coming up with the idea is the easy part.