"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

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