The Creative Soup

It's one of the most common question posed to writers: "Where do you get your ideas?"

Most of us have standard, sound bite answers to this question. Mine goes something like this: "I get them from everywhere--TV, movies, other books, overheard snippets of conversation, dreams, newspapers and magazines, an image on a billboard, a song. Anything can generate an idea."

But if an idea for a book could really come from anywhere, wouldn't more people be writing books? (Yeah, I know, these days you can't stretch your arms out wide without hitting a writer. We're everywhere.)

Really. Where do ideas come from? My best non-writer friend might overhear the same argument at a restaurant that I do, but two seconds later she's forgotten it. Me, I'm mulling it over, wondering what came before and after. I'm trying to guess who the conversationalists were, beneath what they show the world. I'm building whole lives for them, giving them houses to live in, histories, families, hopes and fears. I do all of this automatically. It occurs in background mode, so to speak, as I'm living my life. As I drive home from the restaurant, I might see a car accident, or pass an interesting house, or remember that I have a dentist appointment tomorrow. All of this gets added into the creative soup. Eventually it might add up to an idea for a story.

Then there are those other ideas ... the ones that come out of nowhere. Suddenly, it's just there--full-blown characters, scenes playing themselves out inside my head, dialogue jumping into my thoughts. The possibilities jump into my head so fast I can't write fast enough to keep up with them.

The process is so mysterious, to me at least, it defies a real explanation. Are books floating around in the ether, waiting for someone's imagination to grab onto them? Are the characters real people in some parallel universe that we writers have somehow caught a glimpse of? J.R.R. Tolkien maintained that Middle Earth, with all of its hobbits and dragons, is a real place, and that he was simply recording what happened there. Sometimes I wonder.

Maybe we all have access to the creative soup. My soup is your soup is Nora Roberts's soup (except she's a better cook!). Maybe that argument in the restaurant becomes part of the soup, and it will pop into the head of some writer who wasn't there--some writer who will wonder, where did that come from? How else can you explain the uncanny way books and movies with identical plots are released simultaneously?

I've gone pretty far afield here, so perhaps I'd better rein myself in. None of this philosophical navel gazing is helping me come up with the next scene in my current book!