“You should write about…”
These
four words can drive a writer crazy or at least, that’s the way I
feel about them but I know that the speaker means well and has no
idea where/how an author gets ideas. Sometimes the author doesn’t
know either.
Stephen
King said it best,
“…good
story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you
right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come
together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to
find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
I
have so many ideas already jotted down that I couldn’t possibly
live long enough to write them all. And more come to me daily and,
truth to be told, nightly—as in the middle of the night. I seldom
get up to write them down and I usually forget them by morning. Great
literature prizes dissipate with my dreams.
My
partial solution to this dilemma is to write as many short stories as
I can. Then I must find a theme that links them together in groups
and put them in a book. I have started such a theme with my Twisted
Tales by one of my alter egos, Lea Chan. I wrote four short stories
from ideas I had and discovered that in each of them, I had a scene
beginning with the words, “The doorbell rang.” So, I used that as
the title of the first of my Twisted Tales. And since I have many
more twisted ideas, I will add them but with a different title.
At
the moment I am writing romantic short stories from ideas I once had
for novels and will put them in one book. All of the stories have
connections to the three romance novels I wrote as Tricia Lee,
another of my alter egos.
And
so it goes. I have plans for many more series such as time travel,
the world’s richest person, culinary romances, and on and on. Will
I finish them? As I once told my art students, “There’s no such
thing as finished.” But alas, I won’t live forever.
4 comments:
I could really relate to a lot of what you posted. Sometimes those ideas are so elusive, and yet at other times they bombard us. Great post, Pat!
Marja McGraw
Thank you, Marja! Elusive and bombarding--great ways to dscribe how one feels about all those ideas.
Great post, Pat!
Here's something that has happened to me several times. Someone says, "I should tell you my life story so you can write about it." I politely decline and try to explain that, as interesting as I'm sure their story is, that isn't how the writing process works. What I don't tell them is that an idea has to come to me on its own, from whatever source, in order for me to care about it enough to write about it.
I understand completely, Patricia. There are people who write biographies but not all of us can or want to do it. I definitely agree that ideas have to come on their own as you say from whatever source. Thank you for your insight and comments.
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