How I write: where I get ideas

This is going to be the first of a three-part series about my writing process. If you have no interest in looking under the hood at how a writer goes from idea to final product, move along! There’s lots of other stuff out on the intrawebbies to keep you occupied in the meantime.

If you are interested, read on.

The question I (and every writer I’ve ever spoken to) get asked the most, is “Where do you get your ideas?”

There’s an easy way and a hard way to answer this. The easy way is to say, “From everywhere.” And there’s a lot of truth in that. Writers get ideas from our friends, from family, from articles we read in newspapers and magazines and journals and blogs, from websites, from other books, from movies, from shit we see going on at the mall, from sitting down and actively brainstorming … from everywhere.

But that doesn’t really answer the question in a meaningful way for the person asking it. My hunch is that they really want to ask the question, “Where did you get your idea for this particular book/story I read?”

With that in mind, I’m going to talk about the gestation of my current project, an adult urban fantasy novel called The Ruthless Dead. This particular post is going to talk about how I got the original kernel of an idea and how that developed into a story.

That’s an important distinction to make. An idea is not a story. An idea is where a story begins, but it can go any number of directions on the road to becoming a story.

Here’s an idea: aliens invade the Earth.

Here are some movies made from that idea:

• The Day the Earth Stood Still
• The Thing
• E.T.
  
• Independence Day
• The War of the Worlds
  
• The Man Who Fell to Earth

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. These movies are entirely different from one another. They have different types of characters, different stories, different motivations, different themes. Some are war stories, some are character studies, some are cautionary tales.

I’m going to talk about how I go from an idea and develop it into a specific story. There’s no right or wrong. The writers of the movies listed above (and I could have done the same thing with books, or even the simple idea of “revenge” — think about how many stories that would cover) made different choices as they developed the idea, which allowed them to tell the story they wanted.

How I got the idea for The Ruthless Dead

The motivation for me to write an urban fantasy is simple: my editor at HarperCollins asked for one.

I didn’t have an idea for an urban fantasy at the time. I had plenty of notes for other books, and one of them was a vampire novel called Breathless. I had notes about the vampire’s creation story in ancient Greece, some character sketches of the modern day protagonists, and a few story beats, but I didn’t have a story. And so it sat.

When I started thinking about an urban fantasy, I first tried to come up with a title. One of my own writing quirks is that I like to have a title in place before I start. That doesn’t mean it can’t change before all is said and done, but I invest a lot of effort into titles and having one helps me figure out the story that will eventually emerge.

I brainstormed one evening, just banging out ideas into the keyboard, and finally arrived at The Ruthless Dead.

I liked it a lot. I didn’t know what it meant — who is dead, and why are they ruthless? I didn’t know if this was going to be a zombie novel or vampire novel or some other lesser known ghoul. I didn’t have anything other than the title.

I wondered if there was a way I could incorporate some of my vampire story idea into The Ruthless Dead that at least attempted to do something different with the idea of immortal undead bloodsuckers. I didn’t want to write just another UF with sexy vampires. They’ve been done, and done well, and now have been done to death. So one of my goals was to go back to the idea that vampires are really fucking dangerous — they’re not someone you would be involved with in any kind of romantic relationship.

But what else? That’s still not a story, it’s just more ideas layered onto a title. Who are the characters? What are the stakes in the story? What’s the danger? Who are the bad guys? What’s their motivation?

I decided that for urban fantasy I needed a character who was a little bit fantastic himself. I created John Simmons, who’s mother was raped by a fallen angel. This has given him some unique abilities, but it’s also made him a little fearful of himself and what he may become because of his father’s contribution to his DNA.

So then I thought: what would this guy do? He’s smart, a little paranoid about certain things … why not security? But not like a bouncer. He would start his own security company that installs security systems. That led to me thinking he could add some supernatural security on top of the mundane security, which led to me realizing he would probably be doing some contract work for the government.

Which led to me thinking, what part of the government? Which led to the realization that there would probably be a secret branch of Homeland Security that dealt with supernatural creatures and keeping the public safe from them. Which led to me thinking about the kinds of agents this department would employ, and how they would interact with John Simmons.

Then I wondered what kind of friends he had. Did they know about the deal with his father, or was that something he kept close to the vest? Were any of them supernatural, and if so, in what way?

Then I wondered who the bad guys were, and what they wanted. And after I figured that out (sorry, I’m not going to give away the entire story here), I had to understand how they intersected with John, and what would motivate John to try to stop them.

Do you see what’s happening? Once a writer decides on a few initial conditions, asking questions about those conditions leads to more of the story. I write all of them down, pages worth, until I’ve built up enough momentum to have a story with a beginning, middle, and end. More than half of the ideas I write down will never get used in the resulting novel, but that’s okay. I had to ask them to get where I needed to go.

So what’s next?

Once I have a critical mass of ideas and notes, I begin to write an outline, which I’ll cover in the next part (with an example from The Ruthless Dead).