Goodreads asked Mark Laporta:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Mark Laporta Asking where creative ideas come from is like asking about the origin of consciousness itself. Part of the answer will always be hidden. If I acknowledge that my current project includes themes pulled from news headlines, I still can't say why those headlines stuck in my head or why they arranged themselves into the skeleton of a story.

Otherwise, I might point to memory or aspiration, but the former has a funny way of shifting and the latter lies deep in my subconscious — where it has a mind of its own.

So that leaves me with nothing more specific than an urgent need to send a message in a bottle. To whom, I ask, and why? Because there's no clear answer, I gravitate to ideas likely to survive a trip through a dark void.

I'm also driven by curiosity about distinctive character types. “What's X doing now?” I wonder. Then the story I write is about everything I see after I kick over the anthill of the opening premise. With an imaginary camera, I capture snapshots of frantic people racing off to make sense of an elusive world. To that extent, my ideas come from my characters.

Now, much as I'd like to see myself as thoroughly original, it's no secret that writers learn from their predecessors. Especially in genre writing, the trick is to keep inherited elements fresh by adding spin, changing polarity and otherwise elaborating, until old becomes new.

More to the point, I cultivate a unifying thought-process to give my story context, meaning and intrigue. Because when my message-bottle washes up on shore, I need to believe that a wad of waterlogged pages can fire up the passions of a sensitive reader.

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