A question I get asked at every reading or interview is, “Where do you get your ideas?” Here’s one way:
I started this morning as I do every morning, by pouring a cup of coffee and reaching for a book. I always read a few pages before settling in to do some writing, and this morning I planned to work on The Boy Who Shoots Crows. I promised my editor at Penquin that I will have it finshed by Thanksgiving, so I expected to work most of the day on it. But this morning the book I reached for was The Satanic Verses; a student gave me a copy of the book yesterday and I wanted to be able to discuss it with him next time we meet. But I had read less than a page in Rushdie’s novel when one of his lines generated a totally unrelated image in my head, and suddenly, in that strange synaptic way our neurons speak to each other, I had an idea for a short story.
I sat down at my desk intending to jot down a few notes about the story. Three hours later I looked up and saw that I had written nearly 1500 words–and that was only a summary of the story’s beginning and end.
Where do ideas come from?
Where do shooting stars come from? Where does lightning come from? Where does love come from?
They come out of nowhere. Out of everywhere. Out of someplace you don’t expect.
If I had the leisure to do nothing but write, I could spend at least the next ten years writing novels, stories and screenplays based on the ideas I’ve already jotted down on notecards, napkins, in book margins, pieces of mail, and on every other surface friendly to ink. The problem has never been a shortage of ideas, but an incessant flow too voluminous to contain.
Here’s what Steinbeck said about ideas: “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple, learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
And, as Henry Ford said, “The air is full of ideas.”
Me, I don’t get ideas. They sneak up and hit me when I’m not looking. Ideas, to me, are life itself, and, as John Lennon observed, life is what happens when you’re busy with something else.
