by Janis Patterson
I am always astonished when people ask, “Where do you get
your ideas?” The world is full of ideas. Almost anything can spark an idea. At
a writers lunch not long ago someone brought a very technical book on
statistical analysis they had just published as a part of their day job. The
subject was so esoteric while I could read every word in the title, but could not
understand what they meant as a whole. (I am definitely among the
mathematically and scientifically inept!) When the author explained, I said,
“But what a wonderful idea for a plot!”
Everyone looked at me as if I had just lost my mind and one
writer was blunt enough to say, “Not for me, it doesn’t,” whereupon I spun out
the skeleton of a tale including – as I recall – rogue scientists, an honest
researcher and various unscrupulous types manipulating the future through
scientific predictions based on statistical data.
It’s usually at this point where The Husband says, “You’re
weird.” This impromptu story-spinning of mine has been part of me all my life
and is now an almost obligatory performance at dinner parties and other social
functions. Pity I don’t remember any of these tales for more than ten minutes
or so.
The point of all this being that anything – anything! – can
be the germ, the seed, the kernel of a plot. Of course, we all know that for a
book you need hundreds of ideas, ideas that will interlink into a seamless
whole, but every plot starts with a single idea, even if you don’t know from
where it comes.
And they do come – in waves and deluges and herds… The only
trouble is that they don’t necessarily mesh with each other enough to make a
coherent plot.
In a way it’s a shame to let all those ideas die without
even attempting to incorporate them into a manuscript, but sheer numbers and
time crunches make that impossible. The whole exercise is extremely useful,
though, as just that – an exercise for my imagination. As the saying goes, use
it or lose it. Therefore I fully intend to keep on entertaining (and
occasionally unnerving) those around me with my flights of fancy. As an
acknowledged member of the Reality-Challenged, it’s great fun.
So how do I decide which idea becomes a book or even part of
a book and which is an amusing piece of ephemera? Easy – I don’t. It’s the
idea. It grabs ahold of me and won’t let go. No matter what else I’m working on
– writing or cooking or anything – it’s somewhere there in my mind, as
tenacious (and occasionally annoying) as a terrier. Eventually I give in and
start writing. Generally every one of those books is finished, usually
including a few ideas that somehow didn’t manage to stand on their own. I do
have a few – a very few – of these stories that petered out before the final
‘The End’, but I don’t think they’re dead. They’re just dormant, and when the
right combination of ideas comes together they will be finished, even if not in
the form I originally intended.
That’s why I think writing is a form of magic. Like
electricity, I don’t really know how it works, I just know that that it does.
