Ideas about Ideas

Where do you get your ideas?

Ever since I got my agent and it was no longer an act of extreme hubris to introduce myself as a writer at parties, I’ve been waiting for someone to ask this question. I’ve got my answer all ready! It would go like this:

Random starry-eyed person: Where do you get your ideas?!

Me: China, where everything else in America comes from.

*drumroll*

China is the new Schenectady, folks!

Joking aside, though, I think about this question a lot. It’s fun to trace an idea back to its roots, which are often unlikely and inglorious. Take Eli, the titular character and central story force of The Legend of Eli Monpress (THE SPIRIT THIEF, THE SPIRIT REBELLION, the upcoming THE SPIRIT EATER). It started in a restaurant over breakfast about 5 years ago. My then-boyfriend-now-husband Travis and I were talking about roleplaying, since I was new to the idea at the time. He was telling me about games he ran in high school and talk drifted over to characters his friends had made for his games, namely one of our friend Steven’s characters, a thief named Eli who decided his goal in life was to get a one million gold bounty. Now, Steven picked this character mainly to make Travis’s life hard, and I actually know very little about the original Eli, but that idea, a thief with the driving goal of a million gold bounty, stuck in my head so firmly it took a novel to get it out. Despite the idea’s origins, however, my Eli is fully divorced from the original save for the name and the bounty. Considering how lame we all were in high school, that’s a very good thing, and I intend to keep it that way.

Ideas are like grains of sand which our minds turn into pearls. Something from the real world – an experience, a snippet of overheard conversation, a new way of looking at things – gets in and sticks. After that, our brains go to work turning it over and coating it with new concepts, refining and deepening until we get something lovely and wholly our own. Sometimes the idea is good enough to become a novel, sometimes not, but the act of making the pearl, the rush of creation as you link things up and add new layers is the most exciting, exhilarating part of writing, at least for me. I would actually say my greatest challenge as a writer is sticking with an idea all the way to the point where it’s a finished book without being seduced off by all the wonderful new ideas I’ve had along the way.

(The secret is to fold those new ideas into my current work wherever they will fit. Sometimes this is like shoving an elephant into a bird house, but it’s totally worth it if I can make it work. No project ever suffered from having too many awesome ideas, provided everything’s connected correctly. Actually, I’ve read some novels that were little more than a string of loosely connected awesome ideas, but this side note has gone on long enough already… Ahem.)

Years ago, when we spent way too much time bored and waiting around for buses, Travis and I used to play a game I called “Let’s make a plot!” We’d look around, find something in our immediate vicinity, and use it as a kicking off point for a story. For example, one time we had a copy of UGA’s college paper, The Red and Black, and a flier for a Christmas concert. This became “The Song of Red and Black.”

Long ago, the world had one song, and all was in harmony. Then something happened, dissonance entered the song. The singers kept singing, sure that the song would return to its true tone, but the dissonance only grew larger until the world was tearing itself apart. To save themselves and the song they had created, the singers split the music into two parts, the Song of Red, the melody which held creativity, passion, and color, and the Song of Black, the harmony of reason, reality, and absolutes. Each part was to be locked away in its pure form to protect it from the destruction so that later, when the world was still, the song could be rejoined and harmony restored. But the process took too long, and while the Song of Red was successfully preserved, the Song of Black was lost in the chaos.

The world collapsed, the singers were destroyed, and the Song of Black found itself alone in the destruction that was left. But though the song had survived, it was incomplete. And so the Song of Black became a wanderer, searching for its other half, the perfect and preserved Song of Red. As it searched for years and years, the broken world recovered. People came back and built new kingdoms and mourned for the paradise they had lost. After years of wandering and fruitless searching, the Song of Black met a young man with a beautiful voice who had fled to avoid the castration necessary to preserve it. But, for now, the boy could still sing the song of creation, and from the moment he sung, the Song of Black knew it could not leave him, for in his doomed voice was the shadow of the harmony it had been before the singers tore the Song apart.

What happens from there, I don’t know. But that’s a great example of how ideas can come from almost nothing, or, in this case, two pieces of trash at a bus stop. Humans think in stories, they’re our overactive brain’s way of making our world more interesting. My iron rule is to never turn down an idea that interests me, no matter how stupid or banal its birth. You never know what it can grow into.