Many authors hate the question: where do your ideas come from?
Why? Are they afraid if they tell you, you’ll steal them? Or by talking about it, the magic fountain will dry up? Maybe they steal them from others and live in shame.
When Mary Chase was asked how she came up with her eight-foot rabbit Harvey, the imaginary friend of Elwood P. Dowd, she said, “I just looked up from the breakfast table one morning and there he was.”
Wish that worked for me.
My ideas come from careful study of the subject.*
My ideas struggle their way out of subjects I feel passionate about. Take for instance the pharmaceutical industry’s $21.2 Billion in Federal fines paid over the last twenty years, mostly for unlawful promotion and kickbacks. (Yes, drug companies have paid your doctor to write prescriptions you may -or may not- need.)
You might feel passionate about abortion or petty theft or drunk driving or romance.
Here are my recommendations for teasing a story out of your passions based on how I do it and using pharma fraud as a basis:
1) Research: Find firsthand accounts that occur before the current day. Look for snake-oil abuses in the nineteenth century.
2) Empathy: Try to imagine yourself as the different people involved on both sides of the memoir, Both victim and the perpetrator. How and why did they get involved? What were they feeling at the beginning, middle, and end?
3) Animate: Transfer those emotions and motivators to a fictional character. This is where a good deal of thinking, not writing, happens.
- Think about a tall, thin man as a bankrupt pharma salesman who spent hours convincing himself that doctors are denying his cure to the needy. So he offers cash for prescriptions—and, magic, his sales jump. He’s a hero at the local office.
- Sometimes the character works but isn’t interesting. Try it on someone else: a suburban housewife whose husband leaves for a younger woman and is desperate to prove herself in the workplace.
- Victims are easier to choose but harder to bring to life. Your victim must be sympathetic and duped for a good reason. It must be plausible. Why would someone accept a prescription for an ailment for which there are no symptoms? (I mean, really, would someone take steroids just to win some foreign bike race? Puh-leeze)
4) Concoct: This is where personal styles diverge. I form an outline, starting with the bad guy and then inserting the good guy.
- Work out the bad guy’s timeline, from the point at which he deludes himself, until he achieves his goal. This is a linear timeline with critical events marked along the way. What does he need to do? When does he need to do it? What will be his reward?
- Next, where does the good guy intersect this time line? Where those two paths cross is the story. The good guy upsets the bad guy’s plan and the bad guy doesn’t like that.
- Write an outline.
5) Adapt: All well laid plans are worth scrapping. I’m not James Patterson or Lee Child, but I’ve yet to write a story that follows the outline.
How do you weave ideas into stories?
Peace, Seeley
* Doesn’t that sound smart? I learned it the hard way: After explaining that the cookies in my hand and the broken cookie jar on the floor were the result of my brave tussle with a thief who obviously fled, I learned that a good story required more thought and planning.
