"How do you get your ideas?"

[deathpixie]

Something I was thinking about today - how do other writing people get their ideas? Not the actual idea for a story; I mean to process after, the process of elaborating and expanding that initial "Hey, wouldn't this make a good story".

What prompted it was I had another one of my flashes this morning - those sudden intuitive leaps that connect one part of a story with another, in a way that you've apparently been leading up to all the time, without realising it. It's how I plot; I get the initial idea, construct a rough plot around it (kind of a Start and End, with various scenes I want in the Middle), and then start writing. The bits in the middle are filled in with these starburst flashes, where I've obviously been thinking about various problems with the plot in some forgotten corner of my brain, and then when I have the answer, it leaps out at me. Usually when I'm just waking up or in the shower or riding into work.

So, now I'm curious (and bored - I ran out of work and my inbox is empty) - how do you write?

Comments

[seraangel.livejournal.com]

I get an idea, I sit and write it.

I don't plot at all most of the time.

It could come from the fact that I start out my writing of fanfiction by doing round robins.

But then again it's how I've always written, even my original stuff.

I don't get starbursts so much; as the words write themselves. I tend to start out with a vague idea of what I want to write, what the story is meant to be about. I usually never have an ending in mind, just the start. Then, I write until the idea ends.

[ex-thissuga.livejournal.com]

as I've tried to explain to Alicia often and failed (*grin*), I always end up writing in chunks and pieces. like, if a story has an actual plot-plot, I'll write crucial plot points out of order (like for instance, so and so dies) and then have to somehow frame the actual story around random events that need to make sense. if it's just a wackiness ensues kind of plot, it usually ends up being all those random scenes tacked together in a row, with maybe a few edits here and there.

it's weird though, now that I've started thinking about it, I've started writing a lot more linear-ly and a lot less organically lately. like, starting at the beginning and working my way to the end. huh.

but mostly, yeah. random scenes that then need to be sorted out and plotted, not the other way around. it's kind of fun, finding that perfect scene you wrote first, that needs to go near the end - and trying to figure out how to *get* to that point from your beginning. A to F to X to M to G to N to B to W. very non-linear, ninety percent of the time. I don't even THINK out the plot before I write it out of order; it's all random.

of course Alicia's called me insane and she may well be right. ;)

I have no idea.

[dkellis.livejournal.com]

Seriously. Then again, considering that I have yet to actually complete any of my fics/series, I don't know if I'm qualified to answer.

The initial idea generally comes about as "wouldn't it be cool". I usually know if it's an actual Idea (as opposed to a brain burp) if it refuses to go away after a few days, and instead builds on itself.

By this time, I usually have a rough idea of how the story is supposed to begin. Endings aren't as important, at least not until I have somewhat more than 50kb (ie first chapter or so) written. So I just sit down, and write. Whether or not I'll actually use that beginning is debatable, but at least I'm writing.

And after a while, I just run out of steam and stop. This usually happens somewhere around the first hundred kilobytes, which is enough to make me want to finish the story. Then I start throwing out random what-if ideas, and writing out scenes (inspired by various things, and hacked and modified to fit) that would work well in the middle or at the end. (This is where most of my "story snippets/teasers" come from.) Sometimes, when all else fails, I just think about how the presentation of the story is to be done, and start HTMLing.

Getting from where I left off to a particularly juicy scene is probably the hardest part of ficwriting. There are a few fics that are in that particular limbo, either on indefinite hold or being written one sentence at a time.

Of course, if a story is utterly beyond all hope of recovery, then I scrap the story, but use the idea in another of my fic universes (four at last count, not including shared realities, so there is probably no lack of targets). And then I rewrite the scenes to fit their new home, and try to work towards them. Rinse, lather and repeat.

I don't often have a Starburst, but when I do, that moment is sweeeeeeet.

[yshyn.livejournal.com]

One word: piecemeal.

I think I have a chronic inability to write in a linear fashion. I usually have a fair idea of where the story is going to go, and I know what's going to happen (this, incidentally, tends to gradually reshape itself as I progress through the writing... the initial idea, that is... often the premise changes after I throw down a few scenes), but even if (and this happens so rarely I can count on one hand the number of times I've done it in the five years I've been writing) I actually write out the whole plotline, I'm still going to have a few scenes in my head that just /beg/ to be written before anything else. I'll get a line of dialogue, or a flash of imagery, and it goes down. The hard part is generally stringing these scenes together to form a story.

Sometimes I'll just be sitting there, writing out random bits and pieces of dialogue and scenery in my head, and slowly the idea will creep up on me that maybe I should go 'this' way, and more scenes begin to take shape. It's always a very quiet sorta inspiration, I've rarely been struck over the head with inspiration. Not that I haven't had that experience, but when I write, it tends to be a more evolutionary form of writing, taking shape slowly over time.

Danged if that doesn't sound pretentious. I'm so bad at talking about my own writing. >.<

There have only been two instances where I can remember not following this, and both of those were cases of me sitting down and writing a very short story, by hand, from start to finish (because the idea had seized and wouldn't let go).

[cynjen]

I think, basically, I have the same format you do, but rather than thinking of them as flashes, I see it as excavating a plot point. It's like it's all there, buried, and if I don't prod it too much, it'll unfurl as it's supposed to. (Maybe I'm mixing gardening and archeology with this metaphore, but you get the idea.)

That's all :)

[darkmark.livejournal.com]

Usually I get inspiration by reading comics. If I'm engrossed in reading, say, The Atom, I'm likely to tell myself, "Wouldn't it be great to play around with the Atom!" I used to generally know the beginning and end of my stories, and have to work out the middle. Since "Wendy", I've taken to plotting things out ahead of time and sticking to one story until it's done. Hope this helps.

[wgsarah.livejournal.com]

I write in bits and pieces. Usually I have an opening sequence in mind and an eventual resolution, but once I have that opening bit written I write whatever section comes to mind first. Except the end. The end is alwaysalwaysalways last. And then I go back and re-write the whole thing. ::grin::

I would like to say that I only work on one thing at a time and write from beginning to end, but I'm easily distracted.

We Get Ideas!

[pollymel.livejournal.com]

Taking a few minutes to write this. :) Ideas come to me in a number of ways. Once or twice I've had stories come out of a mood, a few times they've come from a "I'll show them how they're wrong!" impulse, and often random lines will leap into my head. When I start a story I don't always know where it will go, but sometimes I do. The Hellblazer/nsync one, for example, started with Len and I talking about how people act like Wade Robson is the Spawn of Satan, and then we came up with heaps of hillarious ideas, most of which were much less funny when I was sober again, and I bounced through that fic, and then somehow I decided that Constantine would be brilliant in there.

Sometimes a bunch of free floating ideas, a way of talking, a phrase, a discriptive term, some character detail, a particular concept or a reaction to something will suddenly all come together to get me a story happening.

Or I could just randomly be hit by May Gibbs.

Of course there's been a dearth of ideas lately. *squints at brain* I think it's broken.

And that truly was unhelpful