Where do you get your ideas for the books you write? That’s a question every author gets and one that often frustrates them. Many don’t know where they got the idea for a particularly story? Do we remember three years later, when we finish the fourth draft, where the germ of the original idea came from? And when we compare the fourth draft to the first, how can tell when the final idea took root out of the mess that was the first draft?

A story idea is not a static thing that lights up like a bulb above your head. It’s a seed that falls to the ground and dies and comes popping out of the soil of the imagination as a fresh shoot, and keeps on growing and changing and maturing, until you have a full-grown oak tree that looks nothing like the little acorn you started with. When does the acorn become a tree? When does AN idea become THE IDEA for that particular story?

And if the one asking the question is asking something more generic, such as, “Where do you get ideas for any story, not for one particular story?” that’s no easier to answer, really.

I brainstorm, but I admit, I’m not one of those writers who has ideas bulging out her brain and who can’t find enough time to write them all. Ideas are hard for me to come by. I have to shake the trees a long time to get even one acorn to fall.

I have given two speeches at the new Toastmasters club I joined last month and I’m hard-pressed to come up with an idea for a third. Blog posts come no more easily. I stare at the screen and struggle to find something to write about. Same with short stories. I’d like to enter several short story contests and submit to a few children’s magazines, but I can’t come up with ideas.

Rebecca LuElla Miller tells us that story ideas are everywhere. And I agree with that. She goes on to say there is a bit of a trick in discovering which ideas will be interesting to write about.

And that, I think, is what children want to know when they ask authors during school visits, “Where do you get your ideas?” I think they want to know how to bring their passions to the page. Of course there are ideas everywhere, but they don’t all make a good story idea. They won’t all make interesting speeches.

What we need is passion.

On one wall in my living room there is a picture of elephants running, on another wall the Château de Chillon. My mother sits in one chair watching TV, my sister lies on the loveseat with a book. I’m on the couch with earphones in, listening to Apocalyptica and blogging. There are bookshelves bulging with clutter, lamps, a fan, several computers, a tea-cup, and a floor that needs to be vacuumed.   Hmm. None of these inspire me to write a story about them.

The Château de Chillon has some promise. I was there when I was six. I remember a toilet there, it looked like an outhouse seat, but the hole was a chute that went all the way down to the lake, and I remember seeing Lord Byron’s signature carved into the post in the dungeon. And I actually put some of those memories into a novel I’ve written. But does the castle give me an idea for a story?

It gave Lord Byron an idea.

What we need is a character. We need a character who wants something. A character who can’t have what he wants. A prisoner who couldn’t get free, a prisoner who lost all of nature and all his family, found his way into Lord Byron’s mind and burst out in a poem, after Byron looked at the dungeon at the château.

Stories are about people. Maybe the people in the stories are robots or toasters or bunny rabbits, but they are people still. All stories are about people.

I guess all I can say for sure about ideas right now: They have to be about people in some kind of trouble.

Where do you get your ideas?

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