Harvesting Ideas

Where do you get your ideas? Interviewers always ask writers that. Ideas are everywhere. It's hard to explain, but a lot of what happens during the day ends up on the page at night. If I had to swerve the buggy out of the way at the grocery store, that could end up as a car or pedestrian scene or something more abstract like insects or birds maneuvering around each other. Or it could be conversational maneuvering such as a character dodging a question. A reader would never read that and think it came from a shopping cart. It's kind of like the way daytime events end up in dreams symbolically. In that sense writing is like dreaming the story. I don't make notes about day events. They appear by themselves just like dream imagery.

Another way to get ideas is to pull them from movies or books but in a different form. This is something I haven't really done, but one evening this week I read a short book specifically to look at what caught my attention and why the book worked. I started out not looking for ideas. I was looking to analyze plot points and plot elements. I wanted to see how the author crafted secondary characters and used subplot and added quirkiness to the story.

One of the first things that happened was the main character was told her job wold be gone in four weeks. Instead of "loses job", I wrote down "unexpected life upheaval". Instead of copying it, I abstracted the concept of what losing a job is. In a story I'll need an unexpected life upheaval. The character probably won't lose a job. She might fail a pregnancy test. It could be a car accident. The manager at work could be promoted and the character's nemesis becomes the new boss. What if the mayor died or retired and someone with rumored ties to crime were running for the office? The upheaval could be anything that directly or indirectly affects the character's life.

After putting the book down a few minutes to do something else, I thought more about it. The main character is kind of a freelancer, and her husband has a great job. The upheaval isn't the end of the world. It isn't necessarily financial. She had other job opportunities already in place. The job was something she found truly meaningful. So, the real upheaval is a threat to happiness. It's a threat to the character's meaning and purpose in life. The job loss isn't just a plot point. It serves multiple purposes in the story. It has deeper resonance that the superficial. Without fulfilling a purpose in life, the character becomes adrift.

As I try to figure out a plotting style that feels right for me, it's things like this that I'm starting to think about. Maybe I need to watch movies and read books with an eye to abstracting certain elements.

This is also the kind of thing I want to make YouTube videos about. At some point I'll need to let the Messengers web site lapse and create a new one branded around my name instead. A YouTube channel is a natural fit for that. I'm still working on making a small area of a room dedicated to that.

Have a great weekend.