I am occasionally asked: Where do the ideas for stories come from? I quote Leonard Cohen, who was asked where the ideas for good songs come from. He said, “If I knew the answer to that I would go there more often.” Not a very helpful answer. But I don’t know that there is a definitive answer. I would answer, perhaps equally unhelpfully: From life. To expand a little on such a vague answer: From life lived and life observed. From personal experience and vicarious experience. We all have personal experiences worthy of writing about, though there is no reason to stick to the facts or the truth of those experiences. As they say, “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” The personal experience may be just a prompt and may even get edited out as the story develops.
Vicarious experience: writers are keen observers of life, of people. They are voyeurs and eavesdroppers. Well known authors have confessed to hanging out in bars just to listen to random conversations to get an ear for the speech of a certain class of people. It is critically important to create authentic sounding dialogue.
Reading is also a form of vicarious experience. One consistent characteristic of writers is that they read a lot. They read for interest, as we all do, but they also study good writing as models of writing. When I read a story that particularly appeals to me, I reread it more analytically to see why it works so well and look closely at techniques the writer uses. I occasionally feel inspired to write myself after reading a good story and strangely the ideas that come to mind are usually quite unrelated to what I’ve just read.
A relatively simple idea or even an image may be a prompt for a story. It struck me one day how much the sharply sculpted bodies of late model Japanese cars resemble the design of Star Wars stormtrooper helmets. This prompted a story about a character who suffers an identity crisis after a painful break up with his wife. The image appears in a brief episode after the breakup, symbolic of the enmity between the estranged couple.
Nigel bought a motorbike, a good British bike, a Triumph Bonneville, and a leather jacket. He rode around the coast road, leaning into the wind, enjoying the freedom and exhilaration, and the acceleration. The machine took off like a Jedi speeder bike with the twist of the throttle. He rounded a bend and came face to face with Helen’s car, a brand new, white Japanese model, with its sharply sculpted lines, that from the front, looked like an Imperial Stormtrooper helmet. It was unmistakable. They passed so close it was a near miss. He caught a glimpse of Helen, grim-faced behind the wheel, but she would not have seen his face behind the tinted visor of his helmet.
In an earlier draft of the story, I had a different word order: “a late model Japanese car, with its sharply sculpted lines, looked like a stormtrooper from the front”. In the revision I moved the storm trooper to the end of the sentence to give it more prominence, and thereby more connection to Star Wars. The title of the story is Star Wars but I don’t include those words anywhere in the story. Nor do I use the words identity crisis. But in the spirit of Show. Don’t tell. I have Nigel trying out various new macho activities/identities to try to break out of the mould of his old self.