Where do your ideas come from?

This must be the question most frequently asked of authors. I believe there are two sources for ideas. The first, of course, is a person’s own imagination. These types of ideas are strongly influenced by our personality type and how we see the world. Someone who is more pragmatic, concrete or attracted to the mechanical might have the sort of inborn ideas that lead to stories about futuristic machines or habitats. My personality type tends to be idealistic and romantic. One of my earliest ideas—which I haven’t actually used in my writing yet—is about a girl with immense psionic powers, the product of a secret breeding program, who saves humanity from itself.

The second source of ideas is other stories. Yes, authors definitely feed off each other’s ideas. Yet it’s not at all derivative or plagiaristic, because the elements we pick up from another’s writing go into a kind of simmering pot in our heads. They cook there for a while, combining with original ideas and each other, and suddenly one day, up pops a fresh new idea with our own unique stamp on it.

I’ll give you an example. Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved space station stories, from Babylon 5 to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Downbelow Station by the great C.J. Cherryh sank to the bottom of my consciousness like a stone, where it still lives to this day. I often thought of the fictional people on that space station, struggling to make a living and raise families in the midst of interstellar war. I thought: what if (yes, this is the essential idea question!) there was a young mother, an asteroid miner dealing with harsh circumstances (quite possibly including abuse by some huge, faceless megacorp) who, while passing through such a space station, just quietly “lost” a kid she no longer was able to support and was too stressed out to cope with? I thought of the dark underbelly of Deep Space Nine, the lowest levels of the station where the law had less of a reach, and I figured such throwaway kids would probably congregate there, trying to avoid station security personnel. And the germ of an idea was born. It expanded when combined with other idea elements, such as super-powers and alien invasions, to create something altogether new and different. I can’t wait to write this one! But you see my point, how ideas feed and spin off each other, merging and changing until a new concept is born—unique, but with many existing ideas feeding into it.

Until next time, happy reading!