Story Ideas Quotes

“An idea for a story can be anything. The sky is not the limit, the limit is beyond it.”
― Chrys Fey

“Who, in examining a grain of wheat, could infer intrinsically from it what it will be? And they say now (whoever 'they' are) that even a grain of sand contains the coding from which the whole universe, if it blew up, could be reconstructed, and maybe better." (Which is the plot of my next book after the SCANNER one I described to you on the phone: a girl, crossing a national frontier, is detained by suspicious police; she is "pregnant," but what she contains in her womb is not organic but is in fact the "electronic, technological" seed of the entire future world, which, without her knowing it, is to be blown apart; she is a simple girl, my Kathy again, who genuinely imagines herself to be pregnant, and being Catholic, must bear the "child." And that "child"—can you imagine it? Not the universe, with stars and planets, but the new and better society, of Freedom which the enslavers have tried, and thought to have successfully wiped out, to obliterate. And there it is, in microsize, in her womb, as she placidly waits to be allowed to leave the "U.S.," it could be any "Rome," to enter a small nation. On, as she thinks of it, a Party-time trip.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Selected Letters, 1974

“While I'm writing you I might mention the new novel I'm considering writing; it has to do with the phonograph record business, which I was involved with, at the retail end, for over seven years. I guess I'll make it a S-F novel, though, setting it in the future. My memory tapes (so to speak) have few if any gaps in them about my years in the record business, what with the rip-offs and payola. The small profits for the retailer, the huge chains that are wholesalers-retailers who crowd out the little guy.

Provisionally, I will call the record company DOGSHIT RECORDS INC. (Or DRI, as they have now EMI, RCA, MCA, etc.) In my head I've blocked out the tory of an android who has an agent who is another android, but neither knows the other is an invader. (There is a sort of mutual surprise ending, but the main thing is to lay forth the inner workings of an industry for our readership, in a novel of the sort I tend to write and they tend to read.) The musical artist's agent is named (are you ready?) Skim Morewithit, and so forth. There are rip-offs of royalties, two sets of books, all the usual stuff you find today and yesterday in the record business. As to locale, I haven't decided. Maybe on Jupiter, because it will be a (ahem) heavy novel.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Selected Letters, 1974