Day: August 5, 2009

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Some Ideas About Ideas

So I’ve been thinking about where ideas come from lately, because I keep seeing this idea floating around that explaining where they come from is somehow secretive and difficult to do. I didn’t get that, the hesitation thing, because I’d always thought the ideas were kind of simple to explain even if no-one was asking me to do so. Then I got interviewed for the first time and realised how hard it is to come up simple, easy answers off the cuff, and there’s petty good odds that if I had been asked the idea question (which, thankfully, I wasn’t) I would have resorted to some kind of “writers hate that question” rhetoric on the basis that it’d stall for time while I thought up a decent answer. So, as an in-case-of-emergency measure, I figured I’d work out an answer before I needed it. And my explanation goes a little like this: Imagine an equilateral triangle. Put “confluence” at one