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 point, “other people’s ideas” at the second point, and “knowing how stories work” at the third. The ideas happen in the middle of the triangle,  because ideas are basically a combination of those three things. Sometimes I’ll lean towards one point more than than the other two, but all three are usually at work in some way.

I think it’s probably the “knowing how stories work” work part that makes the entire idea process so mysterious to non-writers. Ideas are actually pretty cheap and easy. Everyone has them, all the time. Hell, I’ve had three in the last five minutes [i]. You can take pretty much anything and use it as the hook for a story once you know the structure and techniques of telling one, so finding a good story idea is largely a matter of knowing the right processes to develop a small concept (say, I’m going to write a story about a guy with a clockwork arm) into a full-blown narrative.

The trick here is realising that the initial idea is almost never a full story – it’s just a hook to hang other things on while the story develops around it. Once you’ve stepped over that hurdle the ideas themselves are largely secondary. Or perhaps its in realising that stories are really lots of ideas, come up with over time. Either way, I think the whole story thing is important – an average idea can be turned into a competent story, but the absence of storytelling chops will kill even the coolest concept.

“Confluence” is borrowed from a short story by Neil Gaiman in his collection Smoke and Mirrors. Partially I use it because it’s a good explanation, partially because I like the word (and it’ll give me an excuse to use the word conflate later in this post, and conflates just one of those words, you know?). In Gaiman’s story the logic goes something like this: “Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra.” And sure, it may have been put forward by a fictional writer talking about the creation of the fictional story he’s written inside the story we’re reading, but if you can remember that one aspect of the pyramid then the other two tend to take care of themselves.

Basically we’re talking about two ore more seemingly random elements coming together, fusing in your minds eye and becoming the basis of a story. It doesn’t matter what those things are – experiences you’ve had, stories you’ve been told by friends, short descriptions of a place, stuff you’ve heard on the telly – once you find the right connection between them you’ve got the beginnings of a story. Sometimes this happens by coincidence, sometimes its’ an active process. Either way, it’s not terribly difficult – a lot of beginner writing exercises are based on this principle. Two examples, off the top of my head: pick a character, put them in a setting they obviously don’t belong in and write about how they got there; or pick three different places (say, a cemetery, a shopping mall, and a water-slide park) and figure out a story that uses one each as the setting for the opening scene, middle scene, and final scene.

There’s a great essay on imagination by Sean Williams where he posits that the imagination is like any other muscle, and it works better the more you get used to using it. Thus the easiest way to have ideas is to pay attention when you have them. It’s not like they’re things that happen uniquely to writers an artists – most people spend much of their everyday life making connections between things that are going on around them and other stuff floating through their head, so it’s just a matter of paying attention. It’s all about asking the right questions to get you started. For me, questions are less interesting than that moment of confluence. The way I write is all about finding the right combination of concepts, finding the tension when two things come together in an expected way. I like putting things at right angles and what develops, then asking the questions that’ll flesh it out into a story. The stories that start with big flashes of energy are almost always the result of two things that create a lot of awkward tension (say, unicorns and autopsies) that immediately link to one of my big narrative kinks (aka, the stuff I really exploring as a writer). This isn’t necessarily inspiration energy that comes from the muse – the combination above led to Horn, and they came out of some fairly dogged and conscious pursuit of a concept to pair up with “virgins and unicorns” that’d lead the story away from familiar territory.

As for the importance of other people’s ideas, well, you know how science is basically a process of one person coming up with a new theory based on a variation in someone else’s ideas? Writing works much the same way – people building new work on top of other people’s ideas, finding new twists and permeations that suit their own narrative kinks. Over time the continued repetition of certain ideas gave us the basics of narrative structure, which gradually led to the accretion of genre traits, which lead to movements within genres, and so forth. Things clump together sometimes, and those clumps become the basis of new ideas (after unicorns and autopsies, the real energy in Horn came when I conflated the big clump of tropes known as Noir into the mix. Ask people who were there when I wrote it what I was like, and I’m fairly sure the phrase giggling like a schoolgirl may come up).

Other people’s work is probably the only place that I really see inspiration at work in the writing process, because while I don’t buy into the mythology of the muse I do believe in responding to other people’s awesomeness. If someone does something utterly cool – and I mean utterly, enviously cool – then my natural inclination is to try and achieve something similar. Not necessarily replicate it, because imitation isn’t that much fun, but finding the new angle on the same technique, or idea, or setting. A new twist, a new tension. Interestingly, I also find a lot of inspiration in ideas that haven’t worked out – not just the merely bad stuff, but the stuff that starts with a good concept and fritters it away. These moments tend to come in more of a “oh god, that should’ve been so much cooler” kind of vibe. Because cool is relative (again, see my note on Narrative Kinks above) and the way I’d like to see an idea play out isn’t necessarily universal.

And that’s me and the idea process. I’m not sure how universal this is, but I’d be interested in hearing how it fits into other people’s processes. It certainly works as an explanation for my approach though – pick any story I’ve written and I’m pretty sure I can unpack the origin of it’s various components using these three vectors as a guide (and they probably would have been easier to explain with a specific story in mind, but it would have taken three or four blog-posts instead of one).

[i] if you’re really interested, they’re I should write a series of speculative fiction love stories set in a Laundromat, I should start a website called readings from a couch that features authors giving youtube readings of their work from a big red couch, and a story that starts with wet footsteps across the floor, leading towards the toilet and the family pet drowned within. Pretty ordinary ideas, and unlikely to get used for anything, but I could probably do something with them if I really wanted too. And before you ask, I know exactly where all of them come from.