Where DO you get those ideas?

I knocked off another chapter today after taking time to figure out how I’m ending this book. I think I have three chapters left. Could be four. We’ll see. As it is, things went together well and I am very pleased with how things appear to be tying themselves up.

Before I started working on the chapter, I sat down and knocked out 1,000 words on a brand new and unrelated story. The other day I’d gotten the idea for the first line of a story and when I went to type it out this morning, the character just kept talking. In that thousand words I learned a lot about him, got a sense of his world, and figured out the core plot for the first story which should run about 10K words.

Lots of folks want to know where writers get their ideas. There’s a long-running joke about a subscription service in upstate New York that sends us ideas every month. I’m sure there are websites that purport to do the same thing even now, for a hefty fee. Many beginning writers are loathe to mention ideas for stories, husbanding them as if they are precious gems. And, yes, they are precious but probably wouldn’t work all that well for another writer because he’s not going to come at them from the same angle and see the same potential in them.

Moreover, they’re not rare. Among all the writers I know, one dictum us universal: ideas are cheap. They come all the time. We have so many more than we could ever use, it’s disgusting. It’s putting the story around them that’s the hard work.

In many ways it goes back to that old saw, “Write what you know.” It just needs to be turned around. The more you know, the more you will have to write. Everything you read, every experience you have, every story you hear, every person you see, all become grist for the mill. Right now, with over fifty years of life experience and reading and research behind me, I’ve got a ton of fragments floating around and if they didn’t come together to form stories, that would be the surprise.

It is possible, in part, to trace this character’s roots. I’ve been writing the Trick Molloy stories and I decided I wanted to work with someone who is his opposite. So I need a high-tech setting with no magick. I need someone who is attractive, well groomed, elegant and stylish. I need him to be very smart and playing at a very high level. I need him to be a chameleon and erudite.

Since I’m a gadget geek, high tech ain’t hard. I clean up nice, I can dance, I own a tux, I’ve tied a bow tie, I know which fork to use, so I can get the mannerly and stylish thing down. The work of Paul Ekman gives me clues on how to read people. Research, now and in the future, can fill me in on what is the latest and greatest if one wants to be part of the IN crowd; and I’ve been in enough elegant places and situations to fake all that, too. For the longest time I’ve admired the work of Ian Fleming, noting that the James Bond he wrote about, and the one we see in the movies, are not quite the same. And reading a recently-released CIA manual devised by a magician to aid spies in their work was the immediate catalyst that provided me a window into seeing how I could actually approach all this (with years of studying magic to allow me to put it in perspective).

I’m not sure when the story will be done, but since the first part came in at 1,000 words, it looks as if it’s setting itself up to be serialized on this website. It might even be fun, when I collect the story together, to provide a plain version and an annotated one, tracking back all the ideas. That would also be weird, but I might give it a go.