Ideas and inspiration
Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 12:35 PM | Writer's Cramp Those who’ve read my stories will sometimes ask me where I got the idea for something in the story. The details of the answer vary, but the answer itself is the same: “all over the place”. It’s as Neil Gaiman once put it: “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.”
Case in point: this morning, I was sitting in the hygienist’s chair this morning for my biannual teeth cleaning, listening somewhat absently to her make small talk. She was telling me about her kids and the challenges of paying for all the costs that compound when they participate in a sport like basketball or baseball — the gear, the uniforms, the registration fees, the shoes. She makes use of hand-me-downs and secondhand stores, but the shoes are the hardest, she says, because getting the right size in hand-me-downs at the time when her sons need them is tricky, and they’re one of the hottest items at Goodwill. Which means new shoes for her boys, more often than not, and even a relatively inexpensive pair is $80. “And he’s only ten years old!” she says. “He has no concept of eighty dollars.”
I was listening, but I was also thinking about my current story, because it’s what I do. All the time, pretty much. What she was saying wasn’t a new thought to me, but for whatever reason, it sparked a quick sequence of thought that led to a flash of inspiration and then an idea explosion, all in the space of 10 to 15 seconds.
Thinking about how to explain the concept of eighty dollars to a ten year-old led me to think about how a parent of modest but comfortable means, say, 100 years ago, might’ve provided things like shoes for their children and in turn, how those children would’ve understood the difference between needs and wants. Which led to a similar scenario in earlier times (way earlier times) when humanity as a whole was significantly more agrarian and how our ideas of needs shift as humanity progresses.
From there, I imagined a never-actually-existed-but-nice-to-imagine bucolic scene of village life reminiscent of fairy tales, all stucco cottages with thatched rooves and simple, contented folk who work hard and always have enough to eat, children and adults engaged in activities of a bucolic village variety. (I know, I know…me and Walt Disney.)
And that led directly to another scene which I can’t describe because it’s spoilery, but which solved a plot issue I’ve been struggling with in Book 2 AND gave me an idea how to solve a larger problem of character perspective I’ve been at a loss to deal with until now. I was so excited to finally have a breakthrough on this part of the story that I actually clenched the arms of the dental chair to keep myself from leaping out of it to grab my writer’s journal out of my purse, which the hygienist mistook for pain and asked me worriedly if she’d hurt me. I reassured her she hadn’t, grinning like a maniac the whole time. I may have freaked her out a little.
I have work to do today, an appointment this afternoon, and dinner and tomorrow’s lunch to make this evening, so I’m just going to have to contain myself until later tonight. It’ll be harder than waiting for Santa.
inspiration, process in on writing
Reader Comments (4)
I'm so sorry you have to wait to work on this idea!
I've had similar chains of ideas occur to me while in relatively captive chairs--dentist, pedicure, hair stylist--places where you can't easily read and where some light interaction is going on, but the brain, she is working and working.
There's something about having the current project always on the front burner, always simmering, always PRESENT, that makes all of life seem to contribute to the soup pot.
Oooh, I love your idea of a project as a soup pot of ideas -- terrific metaphor!
The captive chairs thing is definitely where I get some of my best and biggest ideas, and for precisely the reason you describe. Driving is an obvious one, and where it happens most often for me since I'm doing it so often, but I hadn't really thought about the similarities between that circumstance and being at the dentist, stylist, etc.
And I appreciate that you understand the sheer torture of having to wait to work on this idea...it's so hard to focus on other tasks that I really do need to get done when I've got this Thing sitting there, taunting, tempting, calling.
Just catching up on some reading and wanted to tell you I got a laugh out of the mental image of your excitement in the dentist chair. I love when things like that happen, actually. A seemingly unrelated conversation or whatever it might be suddenly makes pieces fit and click and take flight.
:) Glad it gave you a laugh. It was pretty funny.
Isn't it funny how our brains work? How there all these things going on under the surface that we don't even know about and yet our brain is busy, busy, busy making connections and interpretations. Then...POW! Something so seemingly random triggers a sudden inspiration and to us, it seems to come out of nowhere, and yet to our brains, it's perfectly logical.