Interviewers have frequently asked me, “Where do you get your ideas?” — as if there were some mysterious wellspring from which imagination bubbles that spews out a whole plotted book. We can call this inspiration. Where does it come from?
In fact, in the deeper sense, that’s not an easy question to answer. I certainly don’t understand the workings of my own brain well enough to say what childhood encounter might have spawned a certain character. But since I write historical fiction, there is also an easy answer to the question: I get my ideas from real events. And that’s an endlessly fruitful source of plot prompts for anyone, no matter what genre you you produce.
And That’s the Way It Was
You don’t have to go back very far into the past to find balls for the old imaginative cannon. The newspaper or your daily feed will do very well. How about “innocent student suddenly snatched off the street by masked police without knowing why”? (Oh, wait, Kafka has already done that.) Or get off page one to find things like “woman accused of murdering her husband says she had finally had enough.” The headlines are endless. Truth is stranger, more complicated, funnier, more tragic, and easier to find than fiction. I’ve heard more than one author admit that her plotline was inspired by a news item.
Or Not, But Nearly
Think about all the stories in the news in the last few years about refugees fleeing a war zone. That was true a few years back when I started writing a story set in the thirteenth century BCE—about refugees fleeing a war zone. Same country too. Then there was a book about the plague that swept Egypt and the Near East in the Late Bronze Age… written during the COVID lockdown. The list of possibilities goes on and on. You can lift a basic event (refugees, plague) and change times, settings, and causes and produce something completely new. Something no one would suspect of having been ripped from the daily news.
People, Places, and Things
Same goes for settings or characters. Keep an eye peeled. A prominent politician. A colleague from work. A family member (but keep it discreet!). I’ve even modeled human personages on my cats, who have very pronounced personalities. All the reactions and tics that make a character unforgettable are already worked out. Then, there’s that person you know better than anybody. Have you ever thought of sticking yourself into a novel as a character? You can change sex, transpose into some other era or into a fantastic world, mask the product however you want. But you certainly have the third-person-close POV nailed.
Have you ever visited an interesting village in the mountains, cut off from everything? What would happen up there if…? Is the city of your birth full of local color? Mine is. It would make a great setting for a novel of almost any genre. I just went on a bus trip to Italy with fifteen French people who were members of an Italian club. Any closed group like that is full of relationships, little dramas, and potential crime. Think of Murder on the Orient Express but in a modern form, isolated in the middle of a foreign country. Murder in Modena? Hmmm, I like that!
Even small objects can give you an idea. A lost purse. A found set of keys. A (faked) passport. Thereby hangs a tale!
These are just a few ideas of where that mythical fountain of inspiration can be found. Don’t neglect to fill your bucket, especially if you think you’re out of ideas and don’t know how to get started on the next book. Let us know if you’ve ever used these tricks.
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