How Now from James W. Ziskin

Not "where" do you get your ideas, but HOW? Do they come to you as images? Memories? Overheard conversations?

Boko, thinking up ideas over tea

Ideas come, ideas go 

But HOW they do it I don’t know

They pop up here, they turn up there 

They seem to spring up everywhere

While we’re at home, at work, in bed

Or idling at a light that’s red

They often take us by surprise

In stealthy mode and in disguise

But HOW they do it none can tell

Which may in fact be just as well

For when we try to understand

The secret of some sleight of hand

The magic’s lost, ideas die

So maybe just don’t wonder why

flkjsd;fj

Peeking into the Process

Not "where" do you get your ideas, but HOW? Do they come to you as images? Memories? Overheard conversations?

by Dietrich

There’s no single way — ideas come from images or memories, and sometimes they come from eavesdropping on conversations.

My novel Zero Avenue began with a single scene in mind: a young woman with an electric guitar slung over her shoulder, standing in the dim light of Vancouver’s punk scene in the late ’70s. I put myself back in that time and dusted off the old Ramones albums and got into the spirit. I didn’t know the character’s name yet, Frankie del Rey came later, but I pictured her, and I knew she had a story to tell. From there, it was a matter of asking the right questions: Who is she? What’s she running from? What does she want? The rest just grew around that opening scene.

It’s doesn’t always start with a character. Sometimes it’s a place or a moment. In Call Down the Thunder, I pictured a lone figure splitting firewood in a dusty Kansas yard during the Dirty Thirties. Looming in the background was a sky heavy with an approaching dust storm. I felt that sense of doom and isolation as I started writing, and Sonny and Clara, the couple at the heart of that story, emerged from that single frame. Images like that make great starting blocks —they’re vivid, sensory, and they start me writing.

Imagination is the engine, and sometimes a news article or something online sparks it. The narco sub scene in Triggerfish came that way. I read about these subs built in secret jungle locations, loaded with cocaine and moving underwater and undetected up the coast from Mexico. I pictured a couple on a pleasure boat making out, a nice quiet evening in a West Coast cove with nobody else around. They’re just getting into the wine and making out when up pops the telescope of the narco sub, bringing its load into Canadian waters.

Memories can play a role, although I don’t write about my life in any literal sense, sometimes fragments of it can sneak into the picture. And I’ve known interesting people who I’ve based loosely characters on. A mix of fact and fiction and I come up with imaginary folk who live on the edge, some who bend the rules, and especially the ones who live to break them. 

Certain impressions stick with me too. Back when pot was still illegal in Canada, I read something about the billion-dollar weed industry here in British Columbia. It reminded me of a true story I once heard about a guy who robbed a pot field and got chased off by the farmer blasting a shotgun, the guy getting away with nothing but a backside of rock salt. As well as inspiring a scene for The Deadbeat Club, it gave me insight into the why behind it, the human impulse that makes someone take a dumb risk.

Then there’s eavesdropping — okay, I admit I’m not above leaning a little closer to catch something juicy I can use. There’s raw honesty in the way people speak to each other, especially when they think no one’s listening. Dialogue often starts from fragments like that. It gets polished and handed to characters and they make it their own.

Beyond images, memories, and overheard scraps, there’s something else: the “what if.” It can come from something small like a headline, a random fact or a fleeting thought — just an idea that grows. It’s a game of being curious and twisting facts around into something I can use. “What if” they get away? What if they double down? “What if it all works out?”

So, ideas are a mash-up of images, memories, conversations, and questions that want answers. It’s all fuel for a writer. I collect the bits and pieces and look for ways to click them into place. It starts with a simple idea for a scene. I drop in the characters and let them figure it out, allowing the story to flow scene by scene, letting it build and seeing where it leads.

   

Not Where, but How

 

Terry here with our question of the week: Not “where do you get your ideas, but HOW? Do they come to you as images? Memories? Overheard conversations? 

 I love this topic! 

 For many writers ideas come thick and fast. The trick is to find the ideas that have “legs,” i.e., ideas that you can live with over the course of a few months, ideas that seem like they will strike a chord with readers, and ones that you can successfully mold into a publishable work of fiction. 

But the question is how do those ideas come to the writer? Here are some possibilities: 

 1) Character—a protagonist, antagonist, or victim shows up in your imagination. This is not a fleeting image, but a character that nags at you; that wants to have his or her story told. I still remember the images from an Edgar-winning book from 2021, Please See Us, by Caitlin Mullin. I’ve always been haunted by my mental image of the victims in this stunning book. And I wonder what came first—the victims or one of the two young women who struggle with their intuitive sense that dead girls are begging to be seen. 

Or how about Eric Beetner’s The Last Few Miles of Road?

Hard for me to imagine that anything but Carter McCoy showed up first. He inhabits the novel so thoroughly, that he’s what I think of first when I think of this book. Can't wait to read the next one!

 2) Scene—a place where something happens. A place that grounds the writer and the reader in the action to come. The sights, the smells, the sounds of a place. 

Here is Catriona McPherson setting the scene in The Child Garden: 1985. It was far from silent in the dark wood. There were mice, rats too maybe, scuffling in the undergrowth, and the heavier tread of a hedgehog as it moved along the line of trees…Underneath these living sounds, the river glugged and churned, sucking at stuck logs and nudging at pebbles….So it can’t have been quiet enough to hear all those sounds when the end came.” 

 Most of my readers probably think the character of Samuel Craddock came first, but that isn’t the way it happened. I knew I wanted to write something that came straight from my heart, and my first thought was “where should I set this book? It had to be in a town based on where my grandparents lived when I was a child, because that town—its history; its public and private buildings; its landscape; its inhabitants lived inside me. Only then did I think, “Who will be the protagonist?” 

 3) Action—thrillers often start with action. A bomb goes off. Or there’s a chase. A train wreck. A spy realizes he or she has been outed. Soon the main character shows up—to avenge the dead, to catch the bad guys before the “ticking time bomb” goes off, to uncover the plot intended to bring governments to their knees. I often wonder if most thriller writers envision the action first, and then figure out who, what, and why. When Adam Sikes wrote The Underhanded, did he first see the history professor relaxing at his French country house, or did he picture the bomb that almost killed the professor? Or did he have the idea for his evil cabal? 

 4) Dialogue—does a writer like Wendall Thomas, who writes hilarious dialogue in her Cyd Redondo series, think about a conversation that sparks the idea for her next hilarious travel disaster? Or does she picture her characters in the travel agency where they work? Wherever they are, I'm sure they are talking! Do those conversations come full-blown and lead to the mayhem that ensues? 

 5) A “big” idea. I’m thinking of Ben H. Winters, and his “Last Policeman” trilogy. Maybe he had the idea for the policeman first and decided to put him in the situation that the series explores, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the idea came first—an asteroid will soon destroy the earth. What does a policeman do with regard to crime under that circumstance? It’s an intriguing premise, and Winters does it justice. 

Another book that comes to mind is David Corbett’s The Truth Against the World. The idea at the heart of the book is that the United States has erupted in violence. Dark forces have been unleashed and the country is increasingly dangerous. The characters are rich and interesting, but the “big” idea is what drives the book. 

 In my Samuel Craddock series, I often have in mind a social justice issue. This is not on a par with a “big” idea, but it’s often in the back of my mind when I start a book. I know who my protagonist is, and I know the setting, so in a sense, it’s a bit of a cheat to say that’s what drives a book. But without those issues in my mind, the series would go stale. 

 6) A situation. Capers, meant to be outrageous and funny, usually stem from some outlandish situation. I suspect that most writers of capers start with some combination of character and situation. In Rob Brunet’s hilarious Stinking Rich, a motorcycle club hires a high school dropout to tend a barn full of marijuana.

The situation is a perfect setup for the crazy plot. It hardly matters who the dropout it is, or who hires him. The situation is what the book is built around. 

 7) Memories. Yes, sometimes a memory can open up an idea for a novel. Someone remembers his Aunt Julia fainted when she hears that her old flame has been found murdered. Why did she faint? Did she think she knew who did it? Was she relieved that guy was dead? Did she think he’d died years ago? Memories can spark all kind of ideas. 

 8) Image. This is the “how” that most often happens for me. In my first book, A Killing at Cotton Hill, I started out deciding where the book would be set and who the protagonist would be, but to really get into the book I had to follow my image of my protagonist sitting on a porch in a rocker and someone coming up the steps to tell him something that would change his world. 

 For my latest Samuel Craddock, I didn’t really have a plot, but I had an image of a big truck loaded with junk, headed for a dump site. I kept ignoring it, but the image kept popping up. Eventually, without knowing where the truck was going, or what it was up to, I started writing. And boy did I ever find out what the truck was up to!

These are just a few possible ways that authors can “enter” a book. I’d love to hear from authors if they have other ways that their books beguile them into becoming “real.”