The Ideas Factory

As I approach the publication of my second children’s book (cue humble plug: The Mermaid Call), I’m being asked to go back to the beginning and pin down my inspiration for the novel. So long in the writing and editing, I sometimes find I have to stop to think about a book’s origin, to recall what exactly formed the idea for a story.

It’s probably one of the most common questions a writer can get asked: Where do you get your ideas from? (Alongside, how many have you sold? Best to ignore that one.)

So, where indeed? 

Gah, story ideas, they can be slippery creatures, full of fool’s gold and emperor’s new clothes. In the same way The Supremes found you can’t hurry love, I’ve discovered you can’t rush an idea. Like love, ideas tease, play hard to get, disappoint you. And when you finally find ‘the one’ idea you love, beware: writing the story can ruin the relationship.

In the past, I would relish some time in my ideas factory. I’d book time off work; fresh pad, fresh coffee; fresh-faced. I’m ready, brain, show me your best. And nothing. Nada. Not a nugget. I soon came to realise that - like my cat - story ideas won’t come when they’re called.

Why? (the story idea not the cat)

My theory is this. The core threads of any story idea already exist in your mind, lurking there like spectres, unseen but shadowy. To knit these threads together into a potential story idea is a process that often requires a random spark. An external source, from the banal to the unusual, that sets alight the fuse, gathers those elusive spectres together and presents you with: THE PERFECT STORY IDEA. Or something nearly like that (N.B. see above, writing can ruin the relationship).

Back to The Mermaid Call (2nd humble plug) and its origin – I can clearly recall said spark. It was a visit to a shell grotto at a charity open garden; this magical outside space that was plastered floor to ceiling with all kinds of shells. 

I stood there in wonder and - without warning - the fuse lit in my cerebral cave, spotlighting disparate threads around my brain. Threads that had previously been swimming solo; threads that had no idea they could synchronise to form a story idea. They included:

• My love of a good legend, mermaids particularly, and the stores of tales I’ve collected
• Growing up with the pressures to be pretty and being different
• The Lake District and Matlock Spa, close to my heart, and settings that both combine stunning scenery with the fun of seaside attractions, but inland!
• The Suffragettes and their campaigns 
• A childhood fascination with the mystery of Loch Ness monster – real or not?
• My teenage hatred for my very curly hair and how it seemed to set me apart
• Gender stereotypes I’ve watched my children and others continue to endure
• The tragedy of Andersen’s Little Mermaid 

Threads that, for whatever reason, wouldn't present themselves together in the Ideas Factory. I needed that spark to unite them. A spark that went from the wonder of a shell grotto...

... to a mystical queen conch shell

... to village tourism 

... to a lake mermaid myth 

... to hair that doesn't fit 

... to young entrepreneurial Suffragettes

... to a secret diary and a missing girl

... to real-life monsters

... to personal truths.

-        Course, I still continue to make regular trips to my Ideas Factory on my days off; why not: fresh pad, fresh coffee (less fresh-faced these days), there’s a lot to love about a creative brainstorm. But I also try (I say, try) and practice patience, to wait for the spark that might light up those lurking spectral threads. In the meantime, I'll remind myself to keep filling the well, with interesting people and places and objects - because who knows what, where or when that spark will set the threads a-spinning?

      Alex Cotter’s middle-grade novel THE MERMAID CALL will be published with Nosy Crow on 7 July 2022. Her previous novel, THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE, came out in July 2021. Find her at www.alexcotter.co.uk or on Twitter: @AlexFCotter

Getting inspired... by myself aged six - Alex English

At a recent writing for children workshop, we were invited to think about ourselves aged six. What did we like? Who were we friends with? What did we read? What happened in the world that year (I had to look this up on wikipedia)? Which of these events had an impact on us?

It was a very enlightening exercise, but for some of the questions I found it difficult to remember. I was a huge bookworm as a child, but I had phases of reading Blyton adventures, horse stories, school stories (The Chalet School and Trebizon series were huge favourites at various points in time), sci-fi, and all sorts of others. Trying to remember which books came when was tricky.

Fortunately, my mum had kept all my writing books from school. They made enlightening reading and it was inspiring to get back into my own head circa 1980-something.

You could perhaps have predicted that I was going to make a picture book author by reading my first piece of published writing, aged five, complete with Pop! Bang! Whizz! 

I love the fact that the school magazine was typed on an actual typewriter and photocopied. The line-breaks also make this little tale strangely poetic. 

I read the whole magazine from cover to cover and found lots of little gems like this one above. It was a great way to get back to thinking like a child. A boot getting sucked off in the mud! What a story.

I'd forgotten those hairbands with windmills that go round. Love the last line. I'm never one for a completely happy ending.

Getting older now, I think I was six or seven when I came up with this cracker of an inciting incident. Suddenly a flying saucer landed in the garden! Wicked aunties featured in my stories heavily circa 1986. As did Sarah W, best friend of the moment.

My favourite foods haven't changed much since age six. Fish and chips is a solid choice, plus who doesn't love ice cream with sliced strawberries?

Once upon a time there was (sic) four children and their names were Edmund, Lucy, Peter and Susan.... 

Hmm, this story sounds somewhat familiar. I can vividly remember picking The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe from the school library at the end of term, and from this excerpt it seems that I got hooked on C.S.Lewis around age six. Interesting to note that I thought the Pevensies went to stay with the professor during their summer holidays, rather than being Blitz evacuees.

"A punk has colourful hair. She goes to the disco every day." 

I have no memory whatsoever of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson's wedding. However it obviously had enough impact on me aged six to inspire the names for two gerbils in this story!

Do you ever re-read your childhood writing? Maybe you should give it a try, I really found it helped me tap into young me and gave me lots of ideas in the process.

Alex English is a graduate of Bath Spa University's MA Writing for Young People. Her picture books Yuck said the Yak, Pirates Don't Drive Diggers and Mine Mine Mine said the Porcupine are published by Maverick Arts Publishing and she has more forthcoming from Bloomsbury and Faber & Faber.
www.alexenglish.co.uk

Ideas in 60 Seconds by Claire Fayers

This blog post is dedicated to my mother-in-law. Who, on learning I was planning more books said, “I don’t know where she gets all these ideas from. I’d have to sit down and think really hard.”

I’m not entirely sure what people think authors do all day, but sitting down and thinking really hard is a large part of the job. And also walking about and thinking really hard. And doing the gardening and thinking really hard. And eating cake and thinking really hard.

I spent a most enjoyable time teaching a writing masterclass at the inaugural Pontypridd Childen’s Book Festival last Saturday. (A quick plug to Scott Evans who blogged the entire day.) I’ve been playing about with story prompts recently, so I led a series of 60 second exercises on making ideas.

I’m sure you all have your own favourite exercises (if you do, please add them to the comments) but here are mine.

1. The 60 second List

Set your timer for one minute and write down anything and everything you’re interested in. There doesn’t have to be any particular theme or pattern to it – in fact, a random collection may spark off more story ideas.

My list today included:

Ghosts

Music

Gardening

Cats

Baking

Buried treasure

A mysterious tree

A heist

2. The 60 second Premise

My husband bought me this little gem of a book for Christmas.

Inside, you'll find pages divided into strips which you can mix and match to create stories.

 

After playing with the strips for a while (all right, for hours, until my husband begged me to stop), I realised the pattern is always the same. The first strip sets when the story happens, the second strip gives you the main character and the third strip sets out what happens.

I’m really quite bad at writing complete premises, but I reckoned even I could manage a third of a premise.

And so...

Set a timer for one minute and write down as many ‘when’ phrases as you can.

Repeat with ‘who’.

Rpeat again with ‘what.’

Then mix and match and see how many new stories you can come up with!

3. The 60 Second Character

Ideally, your characters will drive your story forward with their choices and actions. For this to happen, they need a clear goal, strong motivation and plenty of obstacles to overcome.

Take one of the characters from exercise 2, give yourself another minute, and ask:

What do they want?

Why do they want it?

Why can’t they get it?

This proved the most challenging exercise for my class and we all agreed that it will take far more than one minute to come up with a believable character.

Still, the one minute rule was generally a good thing. The time limit made the task feel manageable – we can all concentrate for one minute. And because we only had a minute, there was no time for thinking really hard and rejecting every idea as not good enough. Anything and everything had to go down on the paper. The results might not be the world’s best literature, but they’re all starting points, and that’s what really matters.

Thanks once again to Ponty Book Festival for having me on Saturday. Here's to many more festivals, and many more story ideas.

But a dream - Clémentine Beauvais

Once again I found myself the other day in that situation where someone tells me they're writing a novel for which the idea came to them in a dream. Every single time, I have to stop myself from rolling my eyes so hard that I get little tingles in my optic nerve or something. A dream! What are you, the oracle of Delphi ? Who on Earth has ever published an interesting book from an idea that came to them in a dream?

(Apparently Stephenie Meyer did, for Twilight. Hmm.)

Maybe I get a bit annoyed out of petty jealousy, because, well, I hate to brag, but I've always considered myself to be a pretty good dreamer. I mean, everyone dreams, sure, but some of us are simply better at it than others. Yes, there are some elite dreamers out there, who rise above the mediocre norm, though our secret is generally hidden and, to be honest, worth relatively little as social capital or any other kind.

Many of us better dreamers are so partly because, of course, of strenuous practice. Not just of dreaming (the conditions of which I do enjoy very much and strive to adopt as often and for as long as possible) - but also of writing the dreams down, pinning them into place firmly for the purpose of meticulous study.

Thus when I was a teenager I dutifully noted down my dreams, and I even still do sometimes today, in my diary, when I find them intriguing.

some of those teenage notebooks

At the time I was an intensive, competitive dreamer - much more than today, for I had hormones and strong frustration against parental authority on my side, as well as a healthier diet of fantasy and science fiction.

I even kept close accounts of how many dreams I had per month, and looking back I can now tell you that no year rivalled the great annus mirabilis of 2006 (I was 17 years old):

Yeah, yeah, look at you with your novel you got the idea for in a dream! Did you have 59 dreams - fifty-nine dreams! - solely during the course of April 2006? Did you? Did you?

Clearly my philosophy was that if you're going to do something as important as this, you might as well do it seriously. The activity of noting down dreams was so time- and brainspace-consuming, and it was so important not to miss a dream (59 dreams, as the best calculators among you will have noticed, is almost 2 each night) that I got into the habit, whenever I woke up even slightly in the middle of the night, of scribbling down notes from the dream I'd just been having, so as to remember it in the morning.

The last page of each notebook was used for that purpose: the notebook would be left open all night, a pen at the ready, and in the morning I'd squint my eyes to decipher my night-time squiggles:

Yes, this page includes things such as 'Halle Berry', 'Queen of Wales', 'house with people who kill each other little by little', 'glue for organs', 'redhead', 'Pig and Pag', 'scout leader dead plane' and 'Nutella crêpe'.

So, with the help of those notes, I wrote down the dreams every morning, extensively, between 6.30 and 7, and also added elaborate drawings and maps in order to remember exactly what everything had looked like:

'View from the cliff', as the caption says, and I believe the girl on the left is me, alongside another 2 girls, waving goodbye to Father Christmas and his reindeer. In the background, horses are throwing themselves down another cliff.

Now that's vaguely interesting, because in one of my novels (Piglettes), there are indeed horses who jump off a cliff. Unfortunately, I don't think it's extremely meaningful, because I had literally hundreds of dreams so one such coincidence isn't statistically significant.

All that to say: why did you get the idea for your novel in a dream, when I, doubtlessly by far a superior dreamer - I'm sorry, you protest? May I see your dreambooks? where are your 4pm notes on your nightmare involving Halle Berry and Nutella crêpes? - when I, then, have never had a shred of a worthwhile idea for a short story, let alone a novel, in a dream?

OK; show me that idea. What? Really? A coherent one like that? With armies of well-behaved characters, dramatic irony very much in place and a narrative arc of Joseph-Campbellesque perfection? How is that possible, pray?

I'm not sure I understand. If I were to write a novel from a dream I'd had it would be probably quite inappropriate, and also boring, and probably bits of it would be considered slander, or at least an elaborate lie involving famous people, and if it was funny it would only be so to me and maybe six other people, and many parts would be sexually frustrating but not in a titillating way, more in an annoying way, and there would be very, very many toilets that don't work properly and trains that lead nowhere. Also many forgotten babies, whom I attempt in haste to gather into my arms as I flee from some danger.


There would be no plot. Sometimes I would try to kill people with a gun I'd found somehow lying around for instance on the office photocopier - but bullets, made of a kind of chewing-gum-like substance, would repeatedly pepper their cheeks and foreheads without even blistering the squishy surface.




The setting would be, at best, unpredictable. There would be very limited characterisation. Friends I know quite well, as well as vague acquaintances and random people I sometimes see at the bus stop, and also legions of made-up people, would try to kiss me, which would be most of the time perplexing and scary but sometimes also furiously enjoyable.




It wouldn't be a novel for children. 

Really? It came to you in a dream? Just how tidy is your dreamscape? How much do you comb your brains into perfect little plaits before going to bed?

The other day, then, I asked, as always, 'What, like - like that? In a dream - the full idea? Or just seeds of...?'

'No, pretty much everything.'

'But did you, like, rework it or something?'

The other person: 'No, it was pretty much all there.'

Who are they, those über-competent dreamers whose unconsciouses are impeccably aligned with the demands of the fiction industry? What kind of daemon team of Hollywood scriptwriters do they host in their temporal lobe?

Are you one of them? Have you ever had an idea for a novel that came to you in a dream? Tell us in the comments. And about your whole childhood, so I can see where mine (or yours) went wrong.

I promise to get only moderately irate. You might reappear in a dream of mine at some point, but don't worry too much. As mentioned earlier, my dream rifles are inefficient.

--------------------------------
Clémentine Beauvais is a children's and young adult author in French and English, as well as a literary translator. Her latest YA novel, Piglettes, is out with Pushkin Press. 

Facts, Fiction & the New Scientist - by Rowena House

Among the many joys of meeting fellow writers is the discovery of yet another fan of the New Scientist magazine who, like me, finds inspiration for fiction from its tantalizing summaries of the latest discoveries at the very edges of human knowledge.

Week-by-week we lap up articulate rejoinders to the myriad sceptics of scientific method, and wonder at remarkable revelations about our scarily breakable natural world. It is a lifeline of rationality in this supposedly post-truth era.

According to my first fiction editor, being a fan of the New Scientist isn’t uncommon among writers for young people. She didn’t just mean Science Fiction writers; apparently our number includes authors working across the whole spectrum of genres. Which rather begs the question: if we’re so keen on scientific truth, why are we also wedded to lying, AKA creating fictional worlds?

At some other time – when I’ve organised my work-life balance rather better than it is now – I’d love to ask fellow New Scientist reader/writers for their take on this apparent contradiction. I’d also be fascinated to read your views on the subject if you felt inclined to share them.

In the meantime, this from New Scientist caught my eye.

In a special feature about knowledge (in issue no. 3119) , the magazine addressed ‘the biggest questions about facts, truth, lies and belief’. Among its many insights was this: ‘Brain-imaging studies show that when we answer trivia questions or look at blurry images designed to pique curiosity, areas associated with our response to food and sex light up. That suggests we treat knowledge as a similar primary reward.’ Knowledge, it seems, can be addictive.

 

For me, this surprising fact prompted an immediate question: are writers who love the New Scientist likely to be happier when writing stories that require plenty of factual research, rather than the sort of stories which rely more on inner explorations of the imagination and memory? And if so, is that why I’m still hankering after the kind of in-depth historical research I did for my debut novel, rather than knuckling down to finish Book 2?

In the serendipitous way of these things, the topic promptly popped up again when author Kathryn Evans of MORE OF ME fame posted a fascinating blog about Second Book Syndrome over on Notes from the Slushpile, which in turn encouraged lots of interesting comments. Here's the link:

http://www.notesfromtheslushpile.com/2017/04/second-book-syndrome.html

This discussion reminded me of something I’d heard David Almond talking about several times. He called it, ‘the freedom of knowing your limitations.’ That is – to paraphrase – finding a setting or subject that will define you as a writer, and weaving the threads of each story around this central creative core.

This idea appealed to me from the first time I heard it, but how to discover that core without spending years exploring dead-ends remained a conundrum. The New Scientist article on knowledge had some helpful words about this, too.

As Anil Ananthaswamy put it, the question ‘Who am I?’ has resonated since antiquity. Science and philosophy distinguish between a ‘phenomenal self’ – through which we experience ourselves as distinct bodily entities living in time and space – and the ‘epistemic self’ which is capable of observing, understanding and modulating our motivations and behaviour.

 

Such a duality in perception is, of course, familiar territory to the fiction writer. Our characters are endlessly going on inner and outer journeys towards greater self-knowledge. Logically, then, this process ought to be able to help us find our own creative cores, too.

For some writers, no doubt, it is easy: guided by instinct, they just get on with it. But if, like me, you’re still wondering what it is that is truly worthwhile writing about, a good hard look at ourselves (rather than the fickle marketplace) is probably the best starting point.

If we’re enthralled by family dynamics, that’s what we’ve got to write about. Ditto if it’s the emotional turmoil of first love – even if we might have to wait a while for the YA market to pick up again. But if it is factual research that floats our boat, I guess we have to be true to that in our fiction too.

Rowena House

Twitter: @HouseRowena

My life as a whale - Anne Rooney

Being a writer is a bit like being a whale. One of those big whales that swims around with its mouth open catching krill in its feeding filter (baleen whales, or Mysticeti). I think I'll be a blue whale. It's how we catch ideas. We go around with our minds open and the ideas just get caught, from the aether. They drift and get absorbed. Sooner or later they are recycled into books.

I've just been away for a long weekend in Northern Ireland. I went to see my bigger daughter, who's doing a PhD at Queen's, and she took me, and a group of family friends, on a grand (as they say in Belfast) trip around her city and its outside world. 
Belfast was pretty good for a mind-whale. There are legends and there's history. The Titanic, the murals, Giants' Causeway, a dodgy rope bridge (not very dodgy at all, actually), trying to follow the boat race on an iPhone as we drove back across Ireland, hunting for chitons under rocks on the beach, watching the birds that nest on sheer cliffs, hoping to see puffins (but not - never mind, I've already written about puffins). Then there were all the anecdotes from the other members of our party. From one, I learned how virologists trap samples of whale sneeze to test whether they can get flu. They can. But I'm not going to tell you how to trap a whale sneeze as I really *must* use that in a book!

Whale sneeze?

I wrote the first Belfast-inspired outline on Sunday morning before breakfast and I'm meeting an editor on Thursday at the London Book Fair to talk about it.

Whales ahoy! (Oh, perhaps I should go to Wales...)

Anne Rooney also blogs as Stroppy Author
Latest book - The Colours of the Day in Daughters of Time, edited by Mary Hoffman, Templar, March 2014

"Where Do You Get Your Ideas?" - by Emma Barnes

It’s lovely to be back, blogging regularly with ABBA. I’ll be here on the 17th of each month, sharing my deep (and not so deep) thoughts. 

For this first post of 2014, I am launching into verse. Bear with me! I don’t pretend to be a poet. But, like many writers, one of the most common questions I’m asked, especially when visiting schools, is how I get my ideas. So here is a poetic answer directed at aspiring writers and school children alike (not that these are mutually exclusive categories). 


On Being Asked: Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Real life can sometimes be quite helpful
Especially when it gets most dreadful
Fights and quarrels, things forgot,
Muddles, mix-ups fuel the plot
In fact any kind of disaster
Will make the writer’s pulse beat faster.
And BAD children are just the thing
To make the plot go with a swing.

Eavesdropping is a nasty habit
But for an author it’s well worth it.
Buy a notebook and jot down
All that makes you laugh or frown:
Your teachers’ funny little ways
The strange thing that your granny says
Can lead to something quite stupendous.
And if all else fails, steal someone else's.

But the truth is far deeper
Ideas grow like virginia creeper
From a deep productive soil
Of many years, the golden spoil.
A thousand books have bedded down
To make that rich and fertile loam.
Dreams and visions of many kinds
Make up the compost of the mind.

By now you’re probably past caring
In fact the whole thing’s a red herring
It’s not getting ideas that’s the problem
It’s what you do with them, when you’ve got them.

(P.S. I bet you wish you hadn’t asked that question now!)

So, where do you get your ideas? 

I even wrote a book featuring compost! Illustration: Emma Chichester Clark

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Emma's new book, Wild Thing,  about the naughtiest little sister ever, is out in February from Scholastic. It is the first of a series for readers 8+.

 Wolfie is published by Strident.   Sometimes a Girl’s Best Friend is…a Wolf. 
"A real cracker of a book" Armadillo 
"Funny, clever and satisfying...thoroughly recommended" Books for Keeps - Book of the Week 
"This delightful story is an ideal mix of love and loyalty, stirred together with a little magic and fantasy" Carousel 

Emma's Website
Emma’s Facebook Fanpage
Follow Emma on Twitter - EmmaBarnesWrite

Seeking Inspiration. Ann Evans

Harbury Library recently

Whenever I do a school visit I'll inevitably be asked 'Where do you get your inspiration from?'

Before I tell them, I usually turn the question around and get them thinking about where their story ideas come from. 

After that discussion, I'll usually tell them how I came to write this book ot that book. In almost every instance the idea is based around something that I've done, seen, heard or experienced in real life. 

However, the more often I repeat these anecdotes, the more easy and obvious it all sounds. Probably because I'm looking back, and time and distance seems to have put it all into some clear-cut logical sequence. In reality, when considering where inspiration came from for a particular story I'm pretty certain I've lost track of the actual time factor between getting that spark of an idea and actually getting organised enough to write something on it. Perhaps weeks or even months have slipped by before a few words get woven into a first draft of a story. So in retrospect, when we (or at least I) talk about finding inspiration, it sounds a lot easier than it actually is.

I know that with The Beast I was deliberately seeking inspiration for a thriller. I'd finished writing a series for Scholastic which had taken a lot of plotting, as they were whodunnits. But then I was free and I wanted to see where my imagination would take me.

Holidaying in Scotland was the perfect location to set a story with those majestic mountains and deep forests – plenty of scope there for an adventure. And just as I advise other budding writers to do, I asked myself all those 'what ifs'  which eventually led to a storyline and characters. (At least I practised what I preached there!)  

So actively looking for inspiration can work. But generally  it strikes when you least expect it, and sometimes the more you try the harder it gets.

A general piece of advice I give to students is to keep an 'ideas notebook' because those elusive ideas can flit into your head and vanish just as quickly. But where's my notebook? Well actually, I either fill up my notebooks and the ideas are lost somewhere between the pages; or the actual notebooks get buried under the other papers and 'stuff' on my desk. 

Although I know when an idea has really taken hold, because I'll start typing it up. Sometimes though, it gets forgotten or overtaken by more pressing jobs. Then, months (even years) later I'll come across that sketchy idea again by accident and decide that it's not too bad – or alternatively, wonder what on earth was going through my head.

Inspiration is a funny old thing. Here's what a few well known writers have said on the subject. Do any of these quotes strike a chord with you?

Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy. Pyotr Tchaikovsky

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work. Stephen King

I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning. P eter De Vries

If you wait for inspiration to write; you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter. Dan Poynter

A writer is working when he's staring out of the window. Burton Rascoe.

Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you are going to say. Francoise Sagan

And this quote from Raymond Chandler made me smile, because it's exactly what I've done in the book I'm writing now. Trying to decide how my protagonist should first encounter his pretty unpleasant cousin, I did exactly what Chandler suggested...

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand. Raymond Chandler

Thank you Mr Chandler.

And finally, Inspiration is the act of drawing up a chair to the writing desk. Anon.

How about you, do you wait for inspiration to strike, or just knuckle down and write?

Feel free to take a look at my website:  http://www.annevansbooks.co.uk

Latest books: (under the pseudonym S.Carey) http://www.penguin.com.au/products/9780143306986/eerie-trunk

And

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Become-Writer-Step-Guide/dp/1907670246