Author Insights: Many authors struggle for story ideas, what do you do to develop yours?

L. J. Bonham: Sometimes I wish I had that problem since I often have three or four ideas rampaging through my brain at any given moment.

AI: Where do you look for inspiration?

LJB: I look everywhere. A great place to start is one’s own writing. Did a book or short story have potential to grow? Ask yourself what your characters would do in the aftermath. How would they change? What new challenges await them? That process led me to envision the follow on books in my “Shields of Honor” series. Although the first book, “Shield of Honor” ends with the battle of Agincourt, the protagonist, Edward, has many unanswered questions and challenges ahead of him from the subplots.

I fully develop my character’s biographies. If you know their past, you can extrapolate their possible futures. It’s a great opportunity for spin off stories as well. “The Debt” follows Edward’s father, Sir William de Clopton, on an adventure when Edward is still a toddler. I also have a story idea for Edward’s illegitimate son, Richard, that I’m fleshing out. I’d like to do a “what if” story on his uncle, Sir Thomas Erpingham’s early life as well.

AI: Those are fantastic ideas, what else do you do?

LJB: I’m a news junkie and I find current events are filled with potential. My primary method is to take a news item and stretch it out, or more accurately, push it down a slippery slope. What would happen if person X did the opposite of what they actually did in the news story? How could things have been different if this or that had happened? I particularly like science and technology news and I extrapolate what might happen if some new device or discovery was misused by evil people. There are many stories lurking in humanity’s darker nature.

Another favorite mind game it to take trends that seem unrelated and put them on collision courses, then see what happens after they collide. I developed the idea for “Sector 12” that way.

AI: Anything else?

LJB: Look for non sequiturs in life. Mix and match things that don’t normally go together. That’s what I did in “Wolves of Valhalla.” I wanted to write a zombie short story but needed a twist. I spent a week jamming odd ball things into a zombie context and one day I wondered who or what would could give zombies a real fight? History’s fiercest warriors, the Vikings, popped into my head and I was off at a dead run to write it down.

I think the best thing one can do to generate ideas is open the mind to the unusual. Take ordinary things, twist them around, and look at them from different directions. Don’t discount an idea because it seems farfetched. Literature would be very different if the idea for “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” had leapt into Jules Verne’s mind and he had said, “Nah, who would ever believe that? That’s crazy.”