Experiment: The Foul and Dreaded Question: Where Do You Get Your Ideas? (Patreon)

Greetings, Laboratory Folk! I am writing this from a teensy hotel room bed in St. Petersburg, Russia. When last I was here, it was ten years ago, and the dark of winter. I must say, this city is far less scary and intimidating when it is sunny and green and full of flowers. I am told this was the coldest July on record, and indeed, the weather here in August is much more like October back home. I had to pack a coat. A COAT. In the midst of desperately trying to claw back bits of the Russian I once knew from the memory hole I currently call a brain, I’ve been contemplating the Dread Question that authors get asked so very often (why yes I have had a lot of interviews lately why do you ask) a Question so Dread that it has become a meme of its own, a kind of metonym for everything authors hate, for everything people don’t understand about writing, a single question that encapsulates so much irritation and yet, unlike so many memes, actually happens in real life with a regularity that would have Metamucil in paroxyms of envy.

Where do you get your ideas?

Now, I think this question comes from a well-meaning but deep misunderstand of what writing, and being a writer, is. It’s the literary equivalent of asking an actor how in the world she memorizes all those lines. Yes, that is technically a pertinent question, and yes, it is technically part of her job, and yes, perhaps somewhere lost in the mists of time, when she was first starting out and had little enough idea of her own craft herself, that might have seemed like a daunting skill to acquire, but in fact, it’s the base minimum of her skill set, one that now comes so naturally she can’t remember a time when it might have been hard, and is so low on the ladder of her problems as an artist as to barely be counted as a rung.

For a writer, having an idea is not even the first step on the garden path to a book. It’s not even leaving the front door. The idea is the cup that you pour coffee into in the morning while standing in the kitchen four hours before you get yourself together enough to even glance at your coat hanging next to the front door. 

Ideas are cheap. They’re all over the place, if you’re looking. Execution is hard. 

So let’s not talk about execution at all.

Because everything I just wrote up there is my Standard Answer. And you here in the Laboratory get better than that. Or worse. Depending on how corrosive the liquid in the Erlenmeyer flask is today. (Side note of no importance whatsoever: you know I’m a dirty, filthy humanities major because the first time I heard the phrase “Erlenmeyer flask” it was the title of an X-Files episode and I thought Erlenmeyer was probably a side character whose name I just hadn’t caught during the episode and I guess maybe he had a flask? I must have been getting a snack or something when the flask happened? But that’s what I think of literally every time I type that phrase.)

ANYWAY.

It’s not entirely true that the idea is cheap nothings or that they are an infinite resource. I’ve had a bit of a time with them lately because so many of the things in my idea file from before I had a baby seem dusty and unappealing to me just now, and new ones have been slow to arrive for reasons I will drop onto the aforementioned kitchen floor like unto the aforementioned coffee cup momentarily. Ideas do matter. They can be hard. You do still have to memorize your lines. 

In the midst of writing this essay, I had one of those pithy lines pop into my head—the ones that seem wise and learned and could show up in a textbook, even if they’re perhaps not as true as they want you to think they are. It was this: science fiction begins with what if? Fantasy begins with once upon a time, and horror begins with it was a dark and stormy night. It’s a nice categorization, a way of looking at the different ideas of each of the main non-realist genres. Each line is a beefy synecdoche—they stand in for a whole array of assumptions and tropes. (Ooh, I am using ALL the fancy literary words today!) And ideas can be reverse engineered that way. Consider which opening appeals, where it leads, who is waiting on the other side of the period or question mark.

But deeper than pithy, deeper and broader, I come to other conclusions.

Ideas for books and stories and poems are a kind of muscle that must be constantly exercised—translating the raw data of lived experience into a usable premise. Only it’s a muscle in your eye. There’s no workout routine that will make your eye swol. But that’s exactly what the eye of a writer must be.

When I look back over my books, I know the inciting moment/idea for each of them, mostly because for all those books I have given dozens of interviews telling the story of how I came up with the idea for the book, which is the Professional and Civilized version of “where do you get your ideas?” deployed by journalists everywhere. And to my pattern-seeking mind, they fall into two categories (not counting specific commissioned work): books and stories came from something I experienced, or something I got mad at. And of the ones that rose from experience, it’s fairly evenly divided between something I experienced in real life and something I experienced through reading a book or watching a movie. And then there are the books that came to life from the idlest of comments, ones that could easily have floated away into vapor, but did not. 

The Orphan’s Tales came from reading a new translation of Arabian Nights and falling in love with the structure. Within that structure, each one of the OT stories has a dizzying variety of origins. Deathless came from listening to a fairy tale read to me from Russian by my ex-husband. Radiance came from reading an interview with the son of a cinematographer and spending days thinking about how my father’s obsession and ability with film shaped my life. The Prester John books, Under In the Mere, and Glass Town Game rose out of my own long-standing obsessions with the subject matter, all discovered through my aborted academic career. Palimpsest (and thus to some extent Fairyland), Space Opera, Six Gun Snow White, Silently and Very Fast, The Quidnunx (upcoming), and Speak Easy all came from casual comments friends and loved ones and even Twitter followers made with absolutely no knowledge of what they would become when they collided with my brain. The Refrigerator Monologues is the perfect example of me getting bookmad at something, but it’s rather alarming how many of my short stories come from the same place of pug-nosed belligerance.

So for me, the specific conglomeration of personality and ability and brain pathways that constitute the writer I am, which is not the same as the specific conglomeration that constitutes anyone else, what I notice is that mostly, mostly, I get my ideas from listening. A little watching, a little living, a lot of reading, a little doing, but the numbers don’t lie. 

It’s listening that most consistently finds a seed in the world that becomes a book. Listening and asking questions. Speak Easy exists because I was staying with a friend on 72nd Street in New York, looked out her window, and said: “What’s that cool building over there?” 

But see, there’s another part of it.

Did you miss it?

I was staying with a friend in New York.

I am not the first to say this and it isn’t any kind of revelation, but I think it’s something that gets rather left out of the conversation when it comes to science fiction and fantasy while being central to the basic assumptions of literary fiction. Lived experience, the more varied and unusual the better, is the core of written experience. Both Oscar Wilde and Anais Nin (and probably a whole heap of other dear dead and sainted ghosts of the typewriter) said that writers live twice, the first time when they experience a thing, and the second time when they write about it. It’s horribly true. And a third time when they edit it. And a fourth time when people read it and project your experience back at you gorgeously colored with their own, and their perceptions and insights and love spattered into every crevice of it. And a fifth when that book has become so much a part of your identity and the story of you that the experience itself is iconized, beatified, frozen and yet forever changing, no longer entirely your own, but also more intimately yours than the hundred thousand other experiences that never got bound between two covers and shipped all over the world for the hungry eyes of others. And probably a sixth I’m not thinking of or don’t know about yet.

In realist fiction, the writer’s job is to recreate the world and human interaction authentically, in a heightened style, of course, but it’s a memetic form that seeks the truth of life through faithful depiction, like photo-realistic painting or still life or any of the schools who strive for the same verisimilitude. To mine meaning from proximity. It’s funny because it’s true. It’s real because it’s true. It’s meaningful because it’s real. So of course, naturally, the literary/realist writer must experience as much as possible in order to pull off this trick. This notion plays very easily into the old writer-as-douchebag trope, who simply must experience young lovers by the truckload in order to create Art. Or Jonathan Franzen threatening to adopt a needy child in order to experience youth like some kind of entitlement vampire who must feast upon being constantly wrong in order to live. 

But this idea isn’t often visited upon the science fiction or fantasy writer. After all, one cannot really experience riding a griffin or being the chosen one or traveling in time or other planets. Not in real life. The skills involved are not those of grinding experience to make the flour of fiction, but of a kind of pure imagination, living Somewhere Else, finding a preferred world of the mind, as separate from the world of the mundane. There is a tacit assumption that SFF is not (and perhaps cannot be) confessional in the way realist writing is. It is of the head, not the heart.

Of course, this is nonsense. But it feels true to those outside the genre, and even to some who consume it, taking it purely at face value. Many years ago, I wrote a short story called Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time (which remains one of my favorites of my own work and I think the truest thing I’ve written about being a writer) and I will never forget the absolute rage in the Clarkesworld comment section. So many people were downright furious with me for writing something that “isn’t even fiction, let alone science fiction” something that according to them should never have been published, something so obviously autobiographical that it shouldn’t have been accepted by the magazine. They were angry because they felt that somehow, they had been tricked into reading realism. Into reading about someone’s real life, into experiencing their experiences, instead of their ideas. It never once occurred to them that the story was simply convincing fiction. It was obviously, obviously real—and they hated it for that.

SFF is full of lived experience. It is sometimes encoded, it is sometimes buried in a fast-paced narrative, it is sometimes distanced by the bells and whistles of the genre, but it is all there. It took me years to arrive at a point where I was no longer working out trauma via fantasy fiction and could move on to telling stories that hadn’t in some fashion happened to me—and the same people who stroked out about Thirteen Ways never noticed it for a minute. You cannot travel between planets, but you can travel between countries. You can notice that the human memory is a veteran time traveler. You can ride a hundred machines and animals. You can be transported by a million everyday experiences that are only everyday when seen with an everyday eye.

And for me, if I am not visiting friends in New York or taking long road trips and talking away the dark road and doing and finding and conversing and listening, the muscle in my eye goes soft and weak, because it is not seeing anything new. This is why it had been a hard desert, this Mojave of pregnancy and childbirth and breastfeeding and rearing. Because the newness is so localized. Because the newness becomes routine so quickly. Because the only experience my eye is lifting is this child, this beautiful child, each and every day of him, and while it is a miracle, it is also a wordless blur, and I have not the distance from it yet to write about it.

And because listening is where so much of it comes from. Listening, listening. To the people I meet, to the world around me. If you listen, people will be just extraordinary right in front of you. A woman once told me, out of the blue, in context of no relevant conversation, that she loved eating gold. Another once told me that her aunt always answered anyone who asked her how she was doing with “Oh, darling, I’m elegant.” A woman who was cutting my hair said that ten years ago she was bitten by a spider, and the poison still moves in her body, so that every year on the anniversary of the bite, she cannot move for the pain. 

One time, someone said I should write something about tattoos. Or about Eurovision. 

And someday, the baby will talk, too. Because he is always listening. He is always turning what we all say to him into the story of himself. Part of a writer’s job is to stay a child in that way. To retain the talent for integrating the world they experience with the world inside them and creating something new.

There is no idea file like human conversation. If your eye is open. And swol. And you let them talk longer than most people do, because most people don’t let anyone talk as much as all that, since they want so badly to talk themselves. If you write it down so you don’t forget. If you remember. Memory and listening, these are two of the writer’s most essential superpowers. 

Ideas are cheap. Yes. Yes, that’s still true. But they are not always easy. Especially the original ones. Did you know, when the gold rush first started in the Yukon, there were just huge nuggets of gold and copper and silver lying around on the ground or in rivers? You could just pick one up and be rich. But very quickly, the easy stuff was gone, and you had to start mining. Using dynamite and acid and pickaxes. It’s like that with everything, and especially literature. Thirty or forty years ago, you could invent an entirely new sub-genre and become rich and famous just by taking comics a bit seriously or retelling a fairy tale with a bunch of sex and motorcycles in or not having the good guys win in the end or hell, just writing something about computers. A lot of the free-standing gold is gone. That doesn’t mean you can’t still do the same thing over again. You just have to make a fabulous necklace out of that gold. The raw nugget doesn’t interest people so much anymore. But to pioneer, these days, you gotta get out the dynamite and go after the mountain. And for all our writerly eye rolling about where we get our ideas, it must be confessed that that is hard, and sometimes thankless, as it is when you really have unearthed a slab of silver and you rush to sell it only to be told no one is interested in silver right now, it’s all about platinum, but they buy it for less than its worth and quietly process it, and then five years later when silver is hot, your once-in-a-lifetime slab is already part of a hundred other rings and bracelets and you’ve got all this platinum lying around that nobody wants. 

EXTENDED METAPHOR DANCE PARTY I AM NOT BITTER.

But it’s there. Still. Under the surface of experience. All the gold and silver and platinum and blood and tears and story. An ocean of it to be found.

So the answer is: ideas come from out of nowhere and out of everywhere. The key is not the ideas themselves, but to be open to them, to be listening for them, to be waiting with a fucking net when they zip by. They fall into your head one morning because you chose that coffee cup and not this one—and not just the initiating idea of a story, but all the little ideas that make up the whole of the thing. Or they get dropped into your lap by the woman cutting your hair. Or the one driving you to your reading. Or the one you meet at a convention. Or anyone, any time. Or you find it reading another book by another person, or in a bit of history that peeks out at you from some article or other. Or someone you loved betrays you, leaves you. Or you fall in love. Or you build an endtable or blow a glass vase. Or you swim across a bay. Or you hang out at a bar all night talking to strangers. (The last time I did that I met a young arsonist who had just gotten out of jail and was carrying the articles about the fires she caused with her like pictures of her children. Not making that up.) Or you visit a city you never knew was one of the secret places of your heart until you got off the plane. Ideas are interwoven with the stuff of life, and if you’re not living that life and experiencing as much of it as you can, even if that doesn’t ever actually mean leaving your home town, you won’t exercise the muscle in your eye and you won’t find that glittering seed that was meant for you and you alone, that no one else would even think was special.

Listen, just listen.

The story you’re going to write is talking to you. It’s hiding in someone’s mouth. An arsonist’s. A hairdresser’s. A tour guide. A soldier. A friend. You just have to get close enough to hear it.