Where Do Ideas Come From?
The spooky part of writing stories
I don’t believe in inspiration. I don’t believe in “ah-ha” moments. I believe in work.
Writing is craft. You have to show up and get to it. But, and this is a big but, story ideas don’t come from work, they come non-work, or at least when we all consider in our capitalist world what we have deemed as “real” work for a hundred years.
You’ve certainly have heard the notion that a writer is always working—thinking about sentences, narrative movement, words, characters, scenes. I can’t tell you how many countless times I have figured out the direction of a story at 3 a.m. from my bed with my eyes open to the darkness of the room.
But ideas, those are different. Those come quietly. And many times when I’m what the great capitalists would call being lazy is when they arrive, on little birds feet, mostly.
One idea came from a YouTube video about an island in Ireland I simply happened-upon while watching videos on my phone as I road my stationary bike. The beauty of the land, its brooding sadness, made me consider place to set a story. I read a news piece online about a man who concocted a very simple. but unusual bank heist. It was what I needed to help me resolve a character’s motivation and the finish a short story. An episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown had…
