“INSPIRATION: WHERE BOOK IDEAS COME FROM?”

GUEST POST FROM SHANESSA GLUHM

 
Like most authors, I’m often asked, “Where do your book ideas come from?”

As a reader, I’ve been curious where other authors got their famous ideas, so I did some research.

Many of the ideas for Stephen King’s books came to him in dreams, including one of my favorites, Misery. On a flight, King dozed off and had a dream about a popular writer who was kidnapped by a psychotic fan. He woke up, made notes on his cocktail napkin, and started writing Misery that night in his hotel.

Author Suzanne Collins got her idea for The Hunger Games channel surfing one night. On one channel she saw young people competing in a reality TV show, and on another channel footage of the Iraq war. Those two things fused together in her mind, and Katniss Everdeen was born.

J.K. Rowling was stuck on a train when an image of a boy starting wizarding school began to form in her mind. She didn’t have a pen, so she spent the rest of the four hours on the train developing the story of Harry Potter in her mind.  

Children’s author Roald Dahl kept idea books from childhood on. I also have a similar book where I keep my ideas, and those ideas come from a variety of places.

The idea of the twist in Enemies of Doves came from my best friend. But the rest of it? Well, I knew I needed to build up to that twist, and I realized the story had to be set in the past or that twist couldn’t work. I knew what I wanted the title to be, so I realized I had to work doves into the plot somehow. And I knew as a theme I wanted to examine the relationship between brothers.

For A River of Crows, the idea struck as I was listening to the radio while driving in Texas with my youngest son. I passed a creek named Crow’s Nest Creek. At that moment, an old Keith Whitley song came on the radio: “I’m Over You”. In my brain, a connection formed between this song and this creek. I imagined a family torn apart by something that happened at Crow’s Nest Creek. Something that left a father and daughter estranged. I knew this father and daughter were huge Keith Whitley fans, and that the father went to prison the day Keith Whitley died. (I had no idea why yet). And even though this song is seemingly about the loss of a romantic relationship, this daughter associated it with the loss of the relationship with her father.

I also remembered a video I’d seen recently about the intelligence of crows and how they can be trained to speak and mimic human voices.

This creek, song, and YouTube video came together to form a story. By the time I pulled into my driveway, I had a basic plot of A River of Crows outlined in my mind.

It should be noted that I also passed a creek called Cannibal Draw on that drive, and thought that too would be a great name for a book. Thankful a story idea didn’t form then because it would be a much different and darker story, wouldn’t it?

Ideas really do come from everywhere— a favorite movie, a nightmare, a newspaper article, our best friend, a childhood memory, an overheard conversation between strangers, people we’ve loved, people we’ve hated, a small creek we pass by, a song on the radio that stirs something inside of us. Ideas present themselves to us every day and all are bubbling with possibility. Pay attention to where your imagination wanders.

But the fact remains, the ideas are the easiest part. Neil Gaiman puts it like this, “The ideas aren’t the hard bit. They’re a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you’re trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.”

But that’s a blog for another time.