Ideas! Where do they come from?

[RAVENEYE]

Mar 22, 2021 11:40:25 GMT -6 farida said:

I have one more for you, from the newspaper that reported my grandfather's death in November 1960.

WANTED: Strong, fit farmhand and milker, no older than 28, for farm with 24 cattle + calves. Generous salary, Sundays and half-days off. Room and board included - marriage is an option.

Some intrepid female farmer had her priorities straight. We laugh... but in 1960s Germany there were not a lot of men around, for historial reasons. This woman probably thought she might as well save a bit of money and combine the hiring process with the dating game.

LOL, I love the specifics she mandates. Twenty-eight. Why 28? She must've been quite young herself for 28 to be the upper limit. Mail-order brides was certainly a thing in the wild west, so I love the flipping of the tables here with practically a mail-order groom. 

Hmm, I wonder if anyone answered the ad, and if they were happy...

[HDSimplicityy]

Mar 22, 2021 6:07:08 GMT -6 farida said:

I get a lot of ideas from old newspapers. I love trawling through newspaper archives and use snippets from them in my historial fiction. Sometimes, they can spark a whole story. How about this excerpt from a Bavarian newspaper in 1929:

Police have arrested Anna Sterndl (79) over the murder of Ernst Sterndl, her husband of 52 years, this last Wednesday. Sterndl, who owned an outlier farm, was found by neighbours with an axe in his head. Under questioning, Anna Sterndl said that "the day had come when it was enough".

I mean what the hell? What was this woman's life like on that Bavarian outlier farm? And what made her snap?

And I love ads. Here's one from the East London Advertiser, 1898:

"Parrot for sale. Speaks fluently, tells anecdotes. Enquire at 37 Gower Street. Ask for Mr Stratton, NOT Mrs."

Did that guy sell his wife's annoying parrot on the sly? What secrets and anecdotes did the parrot know? My God, why can't I interview that man?

Those are two great prompts! Near bottomless source given how many newspapers have been printed.,

[Octagon]

For me, it is most difficult to formulate ideas, a problem I can ascribe to either mental slowness or mental illness; but to my mental illness I ascribe it, because, if I were truly of slowness of mind, I would have no ideas any of the time, but I do. For at times, when I can push through the barrier blocking the thinking of my mind, though not in the recent year, I am able to come up story ideas which are decent. Therefore is my lack due not to mental slowness, but illness. But perhaps it is my medicine that fills my mind with so thick a pooling of mud, that my thoughts, by action of the will that is in me, cannot be easily formed.

[pelwrath]

I remember from a How to write Sci-Fi and fantasy books, than an idea isn’t a story. An idea is a seed, so maybe it’s a two prong question. We need the idea first. For me it was creating a believable vampire to be alive now.
The story had to cone from that. Conflict between two sects of vampires, what caused the conflict and it’s resolution.

[RAVENEYE]

Sept 14, 2021 3:51:19 GMT -6 Octagon said:

For me, it is most difficult to formulate ideas, a problem I can ascribe to either mental slowness or mental illness; but to my mental illness I ascribe it, because, if I were truly of slowness of mind, I would have no ideas any of the time, but I do. For at times, when I can push through the barrier blocking the thinking of my mind, though not in the recent year, I am able to come up story ideas which are decent. Therefore is my lack due not to mental slowness, but illness. But perhaps it is my medicine that fills my mind with so thick a pooling of mud, that my thoughts, by action of the will that is in me, cannot be easily formed.

I can commiserate on this. Depression, anxiety, etc. sap the brain's energy. Been through that. The brain just becomes exhausted, and creativity shrinks, which only causes more anxiety. And, yes, medication does seem to numb certain creative parts of the brain, while giving rest to other parts, and allowing creativity to return in some measure. That's been my history with it over the past year, anyway.

[rippy]

Mar 5, 2021 21:46:34 GMT -6 ScintillaMyntan said:

Just noticing them

To me, getting ideas — as in very raw and preliminary ideas — is more a matter of judgment than inventiveness. We get ideas all the time! "What if the storm strands us inside for a week?" "Wouldn't it be fun to climb a spider web?" "What would I do if I were in that person's situation?" It's just about paying attention to them and being able to discern which ones have potential. During times I write more, I find I have more story ideas, not because I actually have such thoughts more often but because I get in the habit of evaluating them as story material.

Daydreams

I daydream too much. But sometimes it leads to stories, particularly if I consider what the narrative could do as a story rather than just a private way of making myself feel better about life.

Usually, I have some vivid dreams ,and I draw from them for inspiration. Then I work the dream craziness out and hope there's something viable there. Other times... it's like Scintilla. I love to day dream, especially right before bed. I imagine myself in some crazy, wacky situations and if I carry the narration long enough, I eventually decide it might be worth to write it into a novel. That I won't just abandon it for another idea, which so far has been a dilemma for me. Too many ideas. Too many directions I want my writing to take

[ScintillaMyntan]

Another really good source of ideas I should've mentioned the first time around: unusual feelings or emotions.

I found that if something is frightening to you in an unusual way, or there's an event in your life that makes you feel something that isn't often described, or something you encounter just has a really peculiar atmosphere to you, there's often the potential for a piece of writing there.

[Valhalla Erikson]

Whenever I am writing a fantasy story I'd take inspiration from various concepts of mythology and folklore. It comes in handy when I want to create a new race of fantasy creatures rather than the traditional Tolkien ones.

[LarkShadow]

Once upon a time in my brain somewhere a fog lifted to reveal a setting, or a character. In the case of the former, world building began almost on its own. It really needed little help from me, just a nudge here, a change of direction there. Fog would give way to lush or barren landscapes full of life and death. Nature taking its course to form rivers, plate tectonics to form mountains and hills which in turn help decide what the landscape formed into, which decided where the peoples that live on this world might reside, and depending on the level of technology or magic, how large those cities might be. Though if magic was present surely in the past some person or thing may have had enough power to catastrophically change the landscape for generations. Maybe the story of that catastrophe was lost to time, maybe it was a recent event and the peoples and nature was still trying to heal.

In the case of the latter, who is this person? And why do I care? What story do they have to tell? Why is their personality the way it is? Are the beautiful or ugly? Or somewhere in between? Has their looks helped determine and shape who they are as a person? how old are they? Does that matter? Can they do magic to help achieve their goals? WTF are their goals in the first place and why? Do they have friends? Do I have friends? What even am I? What is real and how can I know? Would this character have lunch with me sometime?
Point is, don’t do drugs, kids.

[HDSimplicityy]

Apr 1, 2022 10:42:08 GMT -6 LarkShadow said:

Once upon a time in my brain somewhere a fog lifted to reveal a setting, or a character. In the case of the former, world building began almost on its own. It really needed little help from me, just a nudge here, a change of direction there. Fog would give way to lush or barren landscapes full of life and death. Nature taking its course to form rivers, plate tectonics to form mountains and hills which in turn help decide what the landscape formed into, which decided where the peoples that live on this world might reside, and depending on the level of technology or magic, how large those cities might be. Though if magic was present surely in the past some person or thing may have had enough power to catastrophically change the landscape for generations. Maybe the story of that catastrophe was lost to time, maybe it was a recent event and the peoples and nature was still trying to heal.

In the case of the latter, who is this person? And why do I care? What story do they have to tell? Why is their personality the way it is? Are the beautiful or ugly? Or somewhere in between? Has their looks helped determine and shape who they are as a person? how old are they? Does that matter? Can they do magic to help achieve their goals? WTF are their goals in the first place and why? Do they have friends? Do I have friends? What even am I? What is real and how can I know? Would this character have lunch with me sometime?
Point is, don’t do drugs, kids.

You let your imagination run rabbit trails. Voila, and you have a setting! People take more thinking to come up with. 

Simplest answer is our ideas come from the source of our imagination: just our creative bone. The talent or skill or gift we get to hone.

[Octagon]

I, too, have been struggling with this, unable to formulate themes or content, the majority of the time.