Their Secrets Revealed!

Where Ideas Really Come From

an exposé

            Any professional writer will tell you that there is no magic well where ideas come from, no story tree from which to pluck a preformed fiction-fruit, no cave of glittering diamond concepts waiting to be mined.  I’m here to tell you that those writers are full of shit.  They all have some special place where their ideas come from, they just don’t want you, or anyone else, to jump their claim, harvest their fruit, or dip into their sacred well.

            No doubt you are suspicious of my assertion, and I’ll admit, I was skeptical at first as well.  I bought that whole just-write-and-read line my favorite writers have been spooning up all this time.  But now I have inside information and my sources are irrefutable.  Read on, the revelations will shock you to the core.  Read on and I will parade the true sources of some very popular authors before you.  Read on and I will teach you how it’s done.

            Writing has been called a craft.  A practice.  An art.  These terms connote magic and that’s exactly what been going on this entire time; for as long as man has attempted to relate information from one individual to another.  Let’s go all the way back.  To cave man times.  We’ve all seen the images, those paintings of bison and auroch and deer littering the walls of prehistoric man.  And we’ve all heard the explanations for the images.  Depictions of successful hunts, decorations, cataloging of herds.  Utter nonsense.  The truth is that these paintings are stories.  The first stories ever written down. And it was no genius Cro-Magnon whose brilliance was leaps ahead of his large browed brethren.  No, it was some cave dude who walked into an unexplored cavern, saw these pictures on the wall, and said, “Hey.  Look what I did.”[1]

            And from there, the practice continued.  All early mythologies are just fictions the writers of that time happened upon.  In Egypt a beetle shared some tales with a man, this man passed these stories along to some friends, and BOOM… Pyramids and mummies.[2] 

Sea foam on Grecian shores used to spell out cryptic messages in the sand.  Some early morning beach combers read them and BAM… Zeus and golden showers and swan sex.[3]  And then you had the Romans.  They were a bit different.  They stole their ideas from the Greeks.  They were plagiarists.[4]  But still, plagiarism requires its own sort of magic.  How would someone know what idea to steal?  Some sort of device would be necessary.  The word plagiarism is derived from the name of a nefarious implement called the Plagiarspoon?  It’s true.  The Plagiarspoon[5] was a ladle-like artifact one would use to casually dip into the mind of another for the purposes of spooning out delicious ideas. 

The Romans had tons of these things.

I would elaborate on some contemporary religions, but I don’t want to risk alienating my readers unnecessarily.  Let’s just say that there are reasons why Easter eggs and Chirstmas trees exist and you can apply that line of reasoning to any of the more trinkety objects found in the other major faiths as well.  Let us focus on some popular writers of the modern age instead.

            According to my source[6], all authors with any kind of substantial readership have a tried and true method for gleaning stories ideas for publication. Some authors have been brazen enough to flaunt their sources right in our faces, in the guise of metaphor.  Alan Moore proposed a sort of idea-ocean, a collective pool of mass consciousness where all writers draw inspiration.[7]  Those with relatively common ideas are presumed to frequent the shallows and those willing to brave the depths came back with truly unique concepts.  Stephen King described stories as fossils just waiting to be unearthed a piece at a time.[8]

Both of these men were not speaking figuratively. 

They were being literal. 

            Alan Moore frequents the bottom of the sea, a svelte pearl diving Englishman seeking small, glowing, marble-sized orbs.[9]  And, as his idea-ocean metaphor proclaims, it’s not easy.  All that light attracts little critters.  All those little critters attract small fish.  Bigger fish come around for the small fish.  And, of course, large predators aren’t far behind.  Many a writer has been lost to the monsters of the oceanic idea-deep, but Alan Moore is smart man.  You didn’t think all that hair and beard were for show, did you?  It’s for protection.  When he’s in the water it hovers about him like seaweed, camouflaging him from the sharks and the sea monsters while he collects little idea-pearls from inspirational oyster beds, tucking them into and oiled-leather pouch on his hip before returning to safer waters.

            And Stephen King really does dig up his stories.[10]  It’s not what you’d think, though.  When I first became aware of where ideas really come from, I figured that a man like Stephen King would be excavating graveyards as he hunted for his next best selling tale of terror.  The truth is, he finds fossilized books in random locations with the aid of a dousing rod.  In fact, he made mention of this very implement in his book On Writing.[11]  Also surprising is that he doesn’t even need to be in Maine for the rod to work.  He has located some of his best story fossils in England, Nevada, and, for the book It, in a sand box at grade school in Wisconsin.[12]  Honest.  I am not shitting you on this.

            Love the Harry Potter books?  J.K. Rowling pulled them out of an old hat.[13]  How about Mark Twain?  He apparently fed a big catfish on the banks of the Mississippi and then took dictation when the fish got chatty.[14]  Jane Austen had a special flower garden in which Sweet Williams grew.  Tiny paragraphs, visible only through a spyglass, were etched on the petals of these flowers.  The paragraphs formed the novels for which she would become famous.[15]

            One of my favorite writers, Grant Morrison, breaks open glass thermometers and pours the mercury into a puddle.  He perches above this puddle and watches intently as his reflection relates wonderfully odd stories.  There is no sound so he has to read his own lips.[16]  Chuck Palahniuk finds entire books in used vanilla flavored condoms or in the watery blood left on foam trays of particularly well cut pieces of grocery store beef.[17]  Maya Angelou found some of her most famous poems in a bird nest perched in pine tree that smelled of mint.  The most uninteresting egg in the nest always cradled the best idea.[18]

            Neil Gaiman gets all of his ideas from grilled cheese sandwiches.  They sing to him.  Won’t shut up actually.  This is why you will never see him eat a grilled cheese sandwich in public.  Oh he’ll claim that this is because sushi is his first love, but really he just doesn’t want you to overhear his next novel.[19]

            So what about you?  How does all of this help any of you craft stories with artistic and, more importantly, commercial appeal?  Simple.  You, too, can find ideas.[20]  It’s not that hard if you just pay attention.  Here’s a simple exercise.  Most of you take the same route to work everyday.  Occasionally there will be something that impedes your normal progress.  Maybe it’s road construction or a car wreck, a sudden urge to stop for coffee, or even an attractive driver in the car ahead of flashing a provocative smile in the rearview producing an urge in the back of your brain to follow when he or she turns from your normal route.  These incidents are not superfluous, they are stories calling out to you.  Allow yourself to be maneuvered off course.  Don’t worry about work, you won’t miss it when you’re famous. 

Eventually you’ll wind up somewhere unfamiliar or familiar but during a time that seems unusual.  Perhaps you’ll find yourself in the parking lot of an antique store.  Inside you’ll spot on old radio that figuratively “speaks to you.”  Buy this radio.  Take it home.  You will soon discover that during certain phases of the moon this radio will pick up broadcasts of story ideas that critics will later champion for their wonderfully nostalgic narrative.

            If your route takes you past a yard sale… stop.  Buy that old mail box.  The junky one that’s kind of embarrassing.  Proudly replace your current mail box with this old one.  Within a few weeks you will start receiving letters with post marks dated in the future.  These letters will contain powerful novellas.

            And it doesn’t always have to be a car.  Maybe you take walks.  Great.  Try not to pay attention to your destination.  If you end up at a public swimming pool… go inside.  If they won’t let you in without a proper bathing suit, go buy one.  Pick up some goggles while you’re at the store.  Return to the pool.  Swim along the bottom until you find what you are looking for. 

            Here’s one that you can do in your own backyard.  Bury a standard Bic pen under a tomato plant.  Water it on Mondays with pint of apple juice.  One day an apple will grow on that tomato plant.  Eat the apple but save the seeds.  Mix two teaspoons of water with each seed to create a fine black ink.  Blue if you used a blue Bic.  Let this ink use you to write a masterpiece.[21] 

            And if all this seems too indirect then go to the source.  Frequent a writer’s home and rummage through his or her trash or, better yet, the compost bin if they have one.  The story ideas you find here won’t be all that impressive, the previous owner discarded them after all, but take a couple of these throwaways, mix them with some of the half ideas you found with your Plagiarspoon and you’ll end up with something not exactly new but extremely marketable.

            When you’re famous, be sure to make speeches at libraries.  Advise the budding writers you meet there that, to write well, they must write everyday and read a lot of books.  Maintain this declaration publicly, but when you see the face of a little boy or girl droop as their sense of wonder dies, smile at them.  Wink.  Then take them aside and advise them of a rare computer program called Creative Writer that only refurbished-computer stores carry.[22]  Tell them that this software will allow them to type in a couple of key words and it will then calculate the best possible story based upon that input.  Then pat yourself on the back.  Buy yourself a cookie.  You have made a difference, and all of their future contributions to fine literature can be attributed to you.  Much like all of yours can now be attributed to me.

           

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[1] I think this one is in the Bible somewhere, but I found reference to it in the movie Caveman featuring Ringo Star (by far the best thing he has ever done, including the Beatles).  Watch it when you’re running a fever of one hundred and four degrees or higher and you’ll see it.

[2] From an old AOL disc I found at an estate sale.  I put it in my laptop and found all the historical data that follows in a text document entitled Creative Writing.  The Egyptian material appeared on pages 29-34 and page 73 of that document.

[3] AOL estate sale disc, Creative Writing file, pages: 56-69, 88, and 122-125.

[4] AOL estate sale disc, Creative Writing file, pages: 88, 116-119, and 134-135.

[5] AOL estate sale disc, Creative Writing file, pages: 15, 88,  116, 118, 133-134, 156, 159, 167-171, 180, 203, 205, 224-227, and 246.

[6] From a toy I found in a box of Grape Nuts.  There are never toys in a cereal like that.

[7] Eddie Campbell’s EGOMANIA (2002) issue #2 pages 18-22.

[8] On Writing. By Stephen King.  He starts in on this around page 163.

[9] I spent a day writing down the third word of every person who walked past me.  The resultant document detailed Alan Moore’s oceanic methods.

[10] Almost all information on Stephen King came from an old Aldo Nova record I found in my parent’s attic.  It was slightly warped and I thought it’d be interesting to run it backwards on a record player.  Maybe summon a demon.  What I got was biography on everyone’s favorite writer about writers.

[11] On Writing. By Stephen King.  He’s still going on about this on  page 173.

[12] Warped Aldo Nova Album.  Fourth song on the A side going backward from the outside in.

[13] The Morse Code clanking of any British train will rant about this ad nauseam claiming that Miss JK really Plagiarspooned them with that hat, pulling those ideas while riding on trains, actually lifting concepts from the locomotive ether that permeates all railway cars.

[14] I was wearing a white suite and stroking my budding moustache and I just knew.

[15] Whenever I tune out during a chick flick a British-voiced narrator inevitably starts droning on about Jane Austen. 

[16] I mixed a dose of green Nyquil with red Nyquil to see what would happen.  Holy Shit!  Grant Morrison.

[17] I don’t want to talk about this one.

[18] When I’m on my man-period… I just feel things like this.

[19] In dreams.  Where the hell else do you think?

[20] All instructional material on how to find story ideas came from cutting up creative writing books, scattering the pieces on a table, and rearranging them at random.  The result wasn’t anything Burroughs-esque, but according to the resulting text, Burroughs never actually employed this method.  His ideas apparently came from a very different technique, but my book refused to elaborate on the subject.

[21] I just made this one up, but it turned out to be true!

[22] Employees at these stores will claim that they do not have the Creative Writer software.  They will insist, and rightly so, that they have never heard of it.  Be persistent and make them check “in the back.”  They will return, with a stunned look on their face, carrying the coveted software.