"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

[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).