“Where do you get your story ideas from?”
“Don’t you ever run out of ideas?”
“I have a great idea for a book but I’m not going to tell you because I don’t want you to steal my idea.”
Some people think that ideas are in short supply. That we have to hunt for them under rocks, that we have to snatch them from others, or that some day we’re going to run out ideas and there will be no more books left to write.
It certainly seems like we’re running out of ideas, doesn’t it?
Every hollywood blockbuster is a remake of the same decades-old superhero-saves-us all story.
Every new song has the exact same precisely-timed synthetic hook.
Every romance novel features the exact same troubled-but-redeemable alpha male / billionaire / mafia boss / werewolf.
It’s not hard to understand why it seems like we’re running out of ideas. The powers-that-be keep feeding us the same shit in new packaging.
You can’t even call it art. Art should disturb you. Art should force you out of your cushy comfort zones. It should awaken your inner savage.
Most entertainment doesn’t deserve to be called art.
It’s fan fiction at best.
Endless re-mixes of the familiar.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can rebel against the machine and create something new. There’s no shortage of new ideas.
In fact, there’s an unlimited supply of them. You just have to know where to look.
It starts with research. Plundering Wikipedia, trawling through Reddit, watching endless YouTube videos at 2x speed.
Once you’ve filled your mind with facts, you go out into the real world and meet people. All kinds of people. Limo drivers. Instagram models. College professors. Investment bankers. Nannies. Virgins. Strip club managers and butch lesbians.
Each person you talk to is an expedition to a new land, every sentence they utter snowballs into an avalanche of new notions, an infinity of experiences and emotions.
Your mind swirling with primordial gloop, the story ideas start slamming into you a million miles an hour from every direction.
So no, there’s no shortage of ideas. There’s an unlimited supply of them.
In fact, coming up with ideas is the easy part.
The difficult part is sitting down and turning those ideas into stories.
Building worlds, crafting characters, plotting, planning and polishing.
The most heartbreaking aspect of being a writer is deciding which ideas to carry forward and which ones to leave behind.
Sometimes you get emotionally attached to your ideas. You fall in love with them and your heart aches at the thought of letting go of them. But sometimes those ideas don’t fit together, and you have no choice but to cut them loose.
Alas, there are times when you have so many ideas that you must kill your babies.