Where do you get your ideas?

Scouting the Austin Marathon Course Developing a Strong Writer's Voice (a...

Where do you get your ideas?

That question is probably the most common one I get when I tell people I'm a writer. Granted, so far, all of my books have been nonfiction/technical or business, but don't go thinking that the idea is somehow absent from these efforts, or that its somehow the sole provenance of the fiction writer. Even if your job as a writer is "only" to write blog posts or magazine pieces, the idea is the thing that will spark a great effort.

So, back to the question. How do I get my ideas? I get them from all over. The key is to have an awareness of what's happening around you, and the other is to have a little notebook with you. I really like the little Moleskine pocket notebooks (I have both the flip-up reporter style notebook and a more traditional notebook, fantastic products) and carry one around wherever I go.

If I'm watching the news and I hear a report about a murder in a trailer park, I jot down some notes in the hopes I can use it in a future murder mystery. I have a few of these ideas boiling now, waiting for the right catalyst (i.e., a narrative arc -- more on this in a few minutes), but for now an idea is good, even if it is just attached to a little inconsequential patch of something like 3-4 words jotted in a notebook.

Sometimes I overhear a snippet of conversation between two people and wonder how to develop what I've heard into a fictional story or a magazine piece. Or I see something and that spurs action. The other day I was coming out of my favorite Indian restaurant (Bombay Bistro on the north side of Austin) and saw a big giant truck parked in a compact car only space. I snapped a picture, went home and used the picture as an anchor for a GetOffMyLawn rant. Simple as that.

(The story is posted at http://www.getoffmylawn.org/2011/01/compact-car-only/ -- that site is pretty addictive, if like me, lots of stuff pisses you off. If you want to contribute to the site, just click on the VENT link. Yes, you can post anonymously. Enjoy.)

What I'm talking about here is not just situational awareness, but also the ability to see potential in everything. Have you ever been lost in a grocery store or frustrated at the lack of product choice in a particular category? A writer will turn that impetus into something: perhaps a character in a short story or novel will always get lost or never be able to find stuff. Or, they'll write a blog post about sucky product choice in detergents or dog food at the local corner store. Or maybe write a magazine article in which you interview a person who makes a living designing layouts of grocery stores.

Recognizing that just getting started with your writing is a big problem, I decided to write two iPhone/Android apps to help would-be fiction writers get going on projects (please note, iPhone not iPad, seems to crash on iPad, still investigating grrrrrrrrrr). It was obvious that I couldn't quickly create programs that would plot out entire stories (and who the hell wants that anyway) I sat down and thought a bit about how stories emerge.

A story has a narrative arc. It begins with a character in some kind of situation. Think Luke Skywalker down on the farm, pounding sand. Then something happens. The droids appear, the long arm of the Empire reaches into his life, and suddenly, Luke has to make a decision: does he go on the trip to Alderaan with the crazy old guy in the bathrobe?

If he decides not to go, roll credits, go home, this was an interesting "day in the life of Luke the sand pounder on Tatooine" story. Boo.

If he does decide to go, the fun begins. He meets Han and Chewie, ends up on the Death Star, rescues the Princess, and then goes on to fight an epic battle against the armies of darkness, and WINS THE DAY.

At the end, Luke stands on the podium, no longer a farm boy from a jerkwater hicksville planet, but a galactic hero. And more important, he's now a man, tested by the trials and tribulations and conflict he has overcome. Maybe in the back of his mind, he's feeling bad about having to personally drop the bomb on however many people were on the Death Star, but hey, those people were BAD so don't worry about that now.

Initial situation. Call to action. Conflict and obstacles small and big (usually in threes by the way). Victory. Change in the character.

That's the narrative arc of the story.

The plot on the other hand, is different from story, and it's where the rubber meets the road, if I can abuse a cliche. Some would argue that my overview of the story above makes Star Wars seem grand and lovely, whereas watching the actual product (complete with shit dialogue, Luke's relentless whiny dipshittery, the 12 parsecs gaffe, and the fetching bagels on the side of Leia's head) that George Lucas produced are two entirely different things, blah blah blah blah BLAH BLAH BLAH.

I don't care at this point, because all I care about is the story. Plotting and character development and dialogue and setting and all that other stuff comes later. FIRST YOU MUST HAVE STORY. And story comes from an initial situation. and that's the rub, that's where writers get all hung up and can't get started.

Enter StoryStarter.

StoryStarter was designed to give you a bunch of random choices for the variables that make up the initial situation:

* A protagonist (or hero)
* An antagonist (or "bad guy")
* A physical setting
* A conflict

All of these are divided by genre, so if you're writing a mystery you might have a bus driver as protagonist, a retired cop as antagonist, a city park as setting, and a bad loan as conflict. What can you do with that? Something probably. But what makes this tool more useful is that you can mark a checkbox next to something that you do like (maybe your protagonist and setting) and then spin the dials again to get the other variables to change.

There's a fun category called Just Have Fun, which features some crazy choices (like ninja pirates and voodoo lesbians, I think) which gives you a bit of space to let things run, particularly if they are seeking Nazi treasure in the downtown YMCA locker room. Even better, if you decide to keep a protagonist from say mainstream fiction, you could switch over to Sci-Fi and get a setting from there, and then switch to Just Have Fun and blow the doors off.

Screen

StoryStarter is available on Android: http://www.appbrain.com/app/storystarter/com.tripledogs.storystarter
And iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/storystarter/id410592966?mt=8

But sometimes you need a little bit more then an initial situation, or maybe you're not the type of writer who likes to play around with dials and such. You need something to pop up and smack you in the face, as clear and convincing as an ice pick to the medulla oblongata. An opening line, maybe, or something to catch the imagination, something that doesn't involve a bunch of checkboxes. It just depends on what floats your goat, creativity-wise.

So I wrote StoryPrompts.

StoryPrompts is a collection of 300 or so opening lines, bits of dialogue, and situations to get you started. See the accompanying screenshots to get a good idea. Again, this particular program is more about random things that you can keep choosing from to get something--anything, really--started.

Storyprompts-1

You might get the prompt about the boy who pulls a ring of power from a box of cereal and think, maybe, "Hey I have this idea about a girl who finds a mysterious object in the park while she's out playing, and I have this other story about a girl who leaves 11th grade a big fat loser and comes back her senior year a curvy beauty, and maybe JUST MAYBE the two could work together -- the ring of power is responsible...."

Aaaaaaaaaand off you go. The story pretty much writes itself, or at least a huge portion of it does, and all you needed was a situation, not a detailed plot outline.