That must be the question that all authors across the years
have been asked more than any other. And like many other writers, it’s the
question that I have the most trouble answering. I have several stock
responses, but none of them seem to fit the bill…
·
‘I don’t really know, they just appear’. It’s a very
weak reply, and incredibly unimaginative for someone who allegedly makes a
living from their use of words. And it leaves the asker disappointed in the
answer and the writer giving it.
·
‘The story fairy delivers them to me’; ‘I steal
Dan Brown’s rejects’; ‘I buy them from a little shop in Rotherham’. These are
my standard flippant answers and sometimes they get a laugh, but they all avoid
the question and are disrespectful to the asker. If I give one of these answers
then I can usually expect a response of, ‘No, but really, where do you get them
from?’
·
‘I believe that there are stories floating all
around us, we just have to be attuned to them and let them flow through us.’
This one’s all a little bit California-new-age-hippy-tree-hugger-crystal-gazing-crap
for my liking. It’s also a guaranteed conversation killer.
So honestly, where do
ideas come from?
Well I can’t speak for other writers but for me… I make them
up. I think them into being inside my head. They might try to hide in the
faraway corners of my brain but I force them into the open by asking the most
important question any writer can possibly ask: ‘What if…?’
But that’s just the beginning, the start of the story if you
will. I’ll then take that fragile little germ of a story and work on it for
days, weeks, months, polishing every single word until their collective whole
is as good as I can make it. That’s what all authors do. That’s our job.
The best writers are the ones who can nurture these ideas in
such a way that the average reader thinks the process is so simple that anyone
could do it. And I firmly believe that anyone can have a great story idea, but
the dedication, the natural ability and the learned craft to make it worth
reading? That’s the difficult bit.
So a better question would be, ‘Which are the best ideas to
spend your time following up on?’
And if you have an answer to that one, my friend, you’ll
have taken your first steps on the way to a bestseller.
© Shaun Finnie 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment