Ideas At Large

Hello to one and all!  I offer you Toasts And Salutations!

So, when you're making idle chitchat with someone, and they find out you write stories, that's when the usual list of questions comes at you.  What kind of stuff do you write?  Have you been published?  Where?  

And then there's the mother of all questions:  Where do you get your ideas?

This is kind of a silly question, because ideas and inspirations are absolutely everywhere!  Sometimes I think they lay in wait to ambush you as you wander by.  You get ideas from everywhere and everything, usually when you're not actually looking for them.

I've gotten ideas from books, comic books, radio shows, and movies, video games, role playing games, pictures, songs, and toys.  Sometimes you get an idea from some random throw-away comment someone made during a conversation.  

As for stories, it could be as easy as this:  You watch a movie and at some pivotal point in the plot you wonder what the story have turned into if THIS had happened instead of THAT.  And this could drastically change the outcome of the story, perhaps the whole thing if this pivotal point occurs very early in the story.

What if Conan's tribe had defeated Thulsa Doom's thugs?  Conan the Barbarian would've been a very different film.  What if Aunt May had died instead of Uncle Ben?  What sort of a man would Peter Parker have grown into?  They actually had an issue of What If? that explored this possibility.  What if the Darth JarJar theory actually happened in the movies?

All of these stories would have been very different.

Sometimes you only get ideas for moments, or characters, and keep them on file until you find an appropriate story to use them in.  

Then there's another possibility:  suppose you insert a different character in the protagonist's place.  In theory, THIS character would act and react differently than THAT character, and these two characters should react differently when stuck in the same situation; so the story would come out differently.

The story would read much differently whether the hero was a greedy knight or a sentimental archer.  

This, of course, is the most elementary of examples.  The more little changes you make, the more differences there are from story to story.  

But the real point I'm trying to make is that ideas come from everywhere!  And I do mean EVERYWHERE!  It doesn't seem to matter where you go or what you do, inspirations are just lying in wait, ready to pounce upon the unwary creative mind.

They're on All Sides!

All you have to do is be in the right place at the right time to find them.  And then you have to be perceptive enough to know the good ones from the bad ones.  And then to use them when ya need them.  But getting ideas in the first place?  That's the easy part!

There's a good chance we'll talk about this some more in the future.  But that's all for now!  I've got some writing to do!

Good adventuring!

Yours Truly,
Timothy A. Sayell