Where Do Ideas Come From?
After the appointment at the office of my cardiologist a few months ago, the last such time as she would be retiring soon, she said she would like to ask one question about my writing.
Of course! I was curious!
Where do your ideas come from?
Ah, that question. A different answer pops up on each occasion that it arises.
Are you interested in writing when you retire? I asked.
No, she wasn’t. She went on to say that she wondered how creativity works, where the ideas come from, how they get put into a story so that people want to read it. I didn’t say that I wonder, too.
What interests you that you might do then? I asked.
She told me she always wanted to be a conductor of (not sure where she said that might have occurred, a symphony orchestra perhaps).
I can see you doing that. Perhaps not then, but at an earlier age. No doubt there were
some kinds of opportunities even then in the musical world for retirees as well. I thought of my sister-in-law with her wonderful untrained soprano voice who sang with the Winnipeg symphony in later years.
But thus far I had not answered her question. Where do my ideas come from? At the time I told her how my most recent character, Lyndsay Butt, woke me up at night.
“She insisted I write her story.” And that became the basis of the novel I am now working on. I didn’t mention two stories I wrote during the pandemic, one inspired by it called Dog Walker. Another called The Jewel Thief that started as the result of a visit to a jewellery store in downtown Toronto and grew into something else entirely.
Neither of the two stories are published yet. Although I am working on submitting short stories and on another short story collection. As well as the novel.
Where do ideas come from?
The question led to this piece of rumination.
I will end it now after saying that stories have come to me in many ways over the years. The first novel, Ile d’Or, plagued me for years in the form of a nightmare of a horse drowning in quicksand in a northern Quebec field. There were many other aspects of that time and place I wanted to write into the story, but that was the symbolic beginning of it. I was challenged to write the mystery, The White Ribbon Man, and to set it in a particular church in downtown Toronto. The other novel, Would I Lie To You?, was around a woman who gave up a baby for adoption as a teenager and how this impacted her life. I had heard many of these stories and from time to time felt compelled to write something.
So ideas emerge unwittingly and take over.
That is the short answer!
The long answer might turn into a full-length piece that I don’t foresee writing! Although I will likely read whatever you might write about it.
