The Mystery of Coming Up with Fresh Ideas

I’ve been talking about what it means to “see” for a writer over the past couple of weeks, and how that seeing can generate new ideas, new ways of looking at things, and therefore color your writing. And last week I focused on the simple power of asking questions as a force in generating ideas.

This brings me back to a story about questions and ideas. My mother was a very simple person—she was bright but never had many chances in life. She left school in the 5^th grade and didn’t enjoy reading. So to have a daughter who not only enjoyed reading but absolutely loved school was something she never quite understood.

I remember after becoming a writer being back in Iowa for a visit and she turned her head toward me in a questioning way and asked “Where do them story ideas of yours come from anyway?” How to describe it? How to capture the process of idea generation… ? I told her it was really natural and that I bet she did it too without even thinking about it. I finally described it to her this way: “Imagine you’re on the bus and you see a man across the aisle. Don’t you wonder, oh, what he does for a living, where he might have grown up, where he’s from, why he’s on the bus, if he fights with his wife, etc.?”

I vividly recall her crooking her neck and thinking about that for a few seconds, then shaking her head in response: “Nope. I just probably think what a big nose he’s got.”

And that, for me, has always encapsulated how writers just SEE the world differently. We don’t just see the surface of things, we dig beneath. And sometimes we don’t even dig, sometimes it’s a bit of a curse. Because you see motives and plots everywhere!

In essence, what we do differently is wonder. We wonder what’s behind what someone says to us, we wonder, for example, what the real reason someone cancelled a date with us was—do they not like us? Are they sick? Did they get a better invitation? Are the dropping us as a friend? Are they going to someone else’s house for dinner?

We wonder about EVERYTHING! The world, the people in it, the planets, the meaning of life, the train trip we’re taking in Europe, the problem of global warming—you name it, we wonder about it.

This takes a fair amount of time. You can be sitting on a beach enjoying the sun and the sea breeze and wonder if that couple two blankets down are really contract killers here to kill someone—and in about two seconds you formulate an entire scenario with possible plot twists.

Is it a curse or a gift? Well, I suppose it can be a bit of both.

But it’s fun, isn’t it? It’s exciting to imagine the meaning behind the surface actions of people—and that’s what a writer does, get behind the obvious to the hidden. You just have to look and see something that others don’t… and then you have to write it down! That, of course, is the hard part and we’ll be getting down to writing something you can “hum” next week! [Oooooo… what could she be talking about???]

Copyright © Diane Lake

14Jul19

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com