Where do ideas come from?
This is a question I’ve asked more than once on this blog, and yet, here I am, once again, about to engage in what might be a rather futile attempt at answering it.
Last week I wrote about a chance encounter at a wedding which reinforced my view of social media spaces as little more than digital billboards. Well, on the train to the wedding, having read my Jack Reacher novel for about an hour, I suddenly felt the urge to write, so I reached for my notepad and pencil and started writing. 30 minutes later, I found myself writing the final sentence of a short story. My wife, next to me the whole time, asked if she could read what I’d written, and I obliged. She read it there and then, and after shedding a tear or two, and telling me how much she loved it, she asked where the story came from.
I explained that I was just as surprised as she was that I wrote the story then, but even more surprising, I didn’t have an answer to her question. I couldn’t tell her where the story came from because I didn’t know then, and I still don’t. For one thing, my short story is a completely different genre from the novel I was reading, so I couldn't have been directly influenced by it. For another thing, I couldn't think of anything else I'd read or watched or listened to in the days and weeks leading up to the train ride that could have possibly inspired the story.
Having had some time to think about it, however, I realise the short story I wrote is a kind of melting pot for several ideas and feelings I’ve either experienced first-hand or vicariously through other people (both real and fictional), all of which are represented in the characters in the story as viewed from the vantage point of the narrator. This is all to say that the idea for the short story I wrote on the train came to me because of the people I’ve met, the things I’ve seen, the places I’ve been, in short, the life I’ve lived. In other words, it’s taken my whole life to prepare for the idea that enabled me to write that short story.
So while I may not be able to pinpoint exactly where ideas come from, or for that matter, when and how they make their way to us, I’d like to suggest that it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they do come, and when they do, we should be receptive and ready to receive and execute them. For what it’s worth, this probably isn’t the last time I’ll ask this question, but the next time I do, I hope to approach it with a more nuanced understanding and appreciation of ideas for what they really are – melting pots of our lived experiences.
Someplace, somewhere...
PS: No time for philosophy
P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.