Eureka!

Ideas. We all get them, sometimes so many of them, we only have time to follow up with a small percentage. That is, ideas for novels or short stories. They come right out of the blue, sneak in during a song, flash into our heads while we’re watching a movie or seeing a clip on the nightly news.

It makes no sense to try and explain this to folks who don’t write – when someone asks you where you got the idea for such a wild novel, or how you came up with the intricate plot you’ve just written – if you told them the entire world you created came to you when you picked up a funny looking pebble on the beach . . . chances are they’re gonna just nod and back up a step.

If I were to tell you that the concept for Ether came to me when I had a dream about an entire Who concert, then woke to the radio playing Who Are You and I realized the long, detailed dream had taken place in the span of a split second, you’d understand. You’d get how, in a convoluted and wild manner, I could come up with an entire new world – a fantastical scenario involving doors that lead to strange places, and a special key that can take you from here to there – a world with wooden ships that navigate the skies, swamps with carnivorous trees, and a fungus that grows in a maze of tunnels that – if inhaled – can make you forget even your own name . . . If I told you all of that and more came to me the moment I realized my dream-state had begun and concluded in an instant, you’d nod in complete understanding. Because this happens to you, too.

You’re pulling weeds in the garden, and suddenly see the entire plot of a murder mystery.

Or sipping coffee and people-watching, when instantly you can see espionage taking place all around you, and only you know where the microfilm is hidden!

You might be out walking the dog, and when you bend over to clean up Fluffy’s deposit, you’re shown the answer to that pressing plot issue that’s been nagging you for days.

Or a calm, quiet day at the beach turns into a mystical land where dragons rule and humans are slaves. That pile of seaweed you accidentally stepped in becomes the cure to the plague you unleashed on society, that the hero has to discover. The barge passing by is a cargo ship flying through space. You’re drifting off to sleep, then whammo! You see an entire novel spread out before you, and you have to get up right then and take notes.  Or you wake from a dream, remembering only a snippet and the deep urge to build a world around it.

It’s not so much these things we see that give that sudden insight. Well, not always. I think more often than not, it’s the fact that we weren’t trying at the time. We were just going about our day, letting the mind wander where minds are wont to go, when we find our creative brain – the writerly part that is neither left nor right – finds a toy and wants to play.

I’m not saying writer’s are special people, who see the world differently than non-writers do. But . . . writers are special people, and we see things differently than non-writers do!

While our thoughts are busy with one thing, our minds are conjuring. And being writers, we have a bent toward creating new worlds – telling stories – so our minds wander in that direction. Whereas your Aunt Betty, who knits, is probably sipping that coffee and thinking she could have made that sweater for a third of the price that cheap tart paid. Your brother Tom, who races remote controlled cars as a hobby, sees that barge and wonders if he should buy an RC boat this summer, for when he takes the kids up to the lake.

You ask him what made him think to buy an RC boat, as you watch him sail that baby around the pond, and he’ll tell you “Went to the beach, saw some boats, and got a hankerin’.”

He asks you what made you think to write a story set five hundred years in the future, where America has been reduced to walled off cities where the civilized live, and the land in-between is populated by criminals and those kept off the grid – and you tell him it came to you when you had to step over the baby gate keeping the puppy from peeing on the living room carpet – just see which of you is handed that last beer.

I don’t think it’s elitist to say writers think differently. I can’t knit, and I don’t have remote controlled toys. I can’t program computers, or sew a quilt.  But I do get ideas from some of the strangest places, at the oddest of times.

Know what I mean?