One of the most common questions writers get asked is ‘Where do you get your story ideas from?’ The truth is, they can come from anywhere. And for me at least, they’re often quite small things that grow and evolve into a story. Sometimes they are lost in the process.
In my experience, the beginning of a story is like finding one piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Something about it grabs your attention. So much so that you begin to wonder what might connect to it and you start searching in your imagination for those other pieces.
Sometimes the first piece you discover is at the heart of the final picture. Sometimes it ends up a minor detail almost lost among the other pieces.
I used to love doing jigsaw puzzles when I was young but the difference between those puzzles and putting together a novel is that for a novel you don’t get all the pieces at the start. You have to find them.
Also at the start you don’t get a picture to guide you of what the completed puzzle is supposed to look like. You have to figure all that out as you go along.
Here’s a brief guide to the ‘jigsaw puzzle pieces’ that started my stories.
Beginning: A childhood memory.The first line of the book mentions silkworms. That was the first jigsaw puzzle piece of the story – a childhood memory of looking for silkworms on the mulberry in our backyard. I didn’t find any and I was frustrated and disappointed. That same afternoon my older brother came home from a friend’s house with a shoebox filled with silkworms. It was an Ashgrovian miracle! Somehow that memory grew into a story about a lonely teenage boy, a damaged Vietnam vet and a man bent out of shape by an unbearable tragedy.
Beginning: A picture and a line from a book. I had a still image from the movie version of MOBY DICK on my noticeboard. The famous first line of the novel is ‘Call me Ishmael.” I looked at it one day and imagined a boy complaining, ‘Don’t call me Ishmael! A three book series came from that thought.
Beginning: A movie. I was watching an old film on TV that was set in the Middle Ages and featured a dragon. The dragon looked a bit like a dinosaur. I began to wonder if the fables about dinosaurs could have come from people actually seeing a dinosaur. Question: How would a dinosaur get to the Middle Ages? Answer: Time travel of course!
Beginning: A name. Out on a walk the name Mr Mosely came into my head as a good name for a dog. I don’t know why. But it made me wonder what a dog with that name would look like. It also made me think of the dogs I had grown up with and their stories. Some of them were funny, some were sad and some were weird. There would end up being a particular reason why the dog in the story was called Mr Mosely, but I had no idea what that was at the start.
Beginning: An ending. A scene came to me involving a man and teenage girl. They had a fractured relationship. His was either the step-father or the mother’s new partner. They are confronted in a fish and chip shop by a violent, drunken, aggressive bikie. It’s a dangerous situation and they have to work together and trust each other in order to escape. It heals their fracture. I then wrote a whole story where that would be the final scene. It didn’t work. The ending no longer suited the story and characters I’d created. The final scene of the published novel still involves a confrontation with a bikie but it’s a very different one.
Beginning: A teenage memory. I was out walking (again!) and for some reason I was thinking of a time when I was in my late teens at the University of Qld and I was in the foyer of the Schonell Theatre waiting for a movie to start. I was watching the other students as they drifted through the door to buy their tickets. There was a girl I liked from one of my tutorials and I was kind of hoping she might walk through. Spoiler Alert: She didn’t! I began imagining someone else in that position desperately hoping for a ‘special’ person to enter who ends up with someone entirely different – the ‘wrong’ girl.
Beginning: A typing mistake and a title. Instead of writing ‘epic fail’ in a social media post I wrote ‘eric fail’. My daughter Meg noticed it and said is sounded like a character from one of my books. That led me to thinking of a book title – Eric Vale Epic Fail. Six books resulted from this and I got to work with my son Joe as illustrator.
Beginning: A previous piece of writing. I was asked to write a story for this series, so unlike all the other examples this didn’t start with me just stumbling across a jigsaw puzzle piece that developed into a story. On this occasion I went looking for an idea for a story. I ended up adapting a humorous article I’d written years before for an online writing school. It was about the battles my wife and I had with a very determined scrub turkey. I made it more child centered.
Beginning: A previous story. The very first thing I tried to write was a picture book about a little boy who loved drawing and dinosaurs and who unsuccessfully tries to draw a T-Rex and gets upset. It was based on my son Joe who loved (loves) both those things. The only difference was that in real life Joe could actually draw an excellent T-Rex! That picture book never got published but years later when I was thinking about it I imagined Joe getting upset (losing it) not because of a bad drawing but because he lost his favourite pencil. The double meaning really appealed to me. Then of course, I turned Joe into a rabbit!
Which just leaves the two pictures books due out sometime next year.
The first story was inspired by an illustration on a web page. The owner of that webpage I’m happy to say is now in the process of illustrating the book.
And the second story was inspired by a phrase spoken by a character from a novel. In fact from one of those books shown above.
So yeah, story ideas really can come from anywhere. What about you? Where have yours come from?
Cheers
Michael
Michael Gerard Bauer Author 