Where writers don’t get their ideas
– an article by A J Dalton (www.ajdalton.eu), Gollancz author of Empire of the Saviours, Gateway of the Saviours, and Tithe of the Saviours.
All writers get their ideas from the ideas well at the end of Smith Street. It’s sometimes a bit foggy down there, but if you look hard enough you’ll find it.
That’s not true of course (just go check at the end of Smith Street if you don’t believe me). But it’s as good an answer as any when people ask writers where they get their ideas from. You see, people want to believe that they might be lucky enough to stumble across an amazing new idea that will make them rich and famous. They want to believe that once they find that idea, writing a book about it is as easy as breathing. They want to believe they can be Stephen King, Neil Gaiman or A J Dalton. They want to believe they’re as good as or better than every writer out there. They want to believe that other writers have just been lucky and don’t really deserve their place. They want to believe they will displace those authors. They want to believe the world does actually revolve around them.
This is how Neil Gaiman puts it: ‘ ‘I make them up,’ I tell them. ‘Out of my head.’ People don’t like this answer. I don’t know why not. They look unhappy, as if I’m trying to slip a fast one past them. As if there’s a huge secret, and, for reasons of my own, I’m not telling them how it’s done.’
The truth of it is that having ideas is the easy bit. I mean, how does a person not have ideas? Every idea can be made interesting if you express it well. That expression is simply a matter of craft and hard work. Hard work. A lot of hard work. The idea itself is not important. Sounds strange, I know, but it’s how the idea is represented that is important. For these reasons, copyright law does not allow you to have copyright on an idea – rather, it allows you to have copyright on the particular manner of an idea’s expression.
Once you begin to understand that, you begin to understand where originality and the ‘new’ really reside. They do not reside in the idea – and many academics will tell you there is no such thing as an original idea. Originality and the new actually reside in how you represent an idea – they reside in the painting, not in what’s being painted. A perfect example of this is when Stephen King is told that Under the Dome isn’t original because the Simpsons Movie also contains people living under a dome. It’s as if from now on, no one can ever describe an original story about living under a dome. But of course they can. The Simpsons Movie didn’t actually invent the concept anyway! Just about every scifi story or other has a biodome of some sort e.g. John Christopher’s Tripods series. If you actually read Under the Dome, you’ll see that it’s an original human story that has nothing to do with Bart or Homer Simpson.
It’s in the expression. It’s in the creation of the work. It’s the slog and hard work of it. It’s sitting down day after day until you’ve finished writing the epic fantasy that is Empire of the Saviours. It’s dedication, stress-related hair loss, and all that. But people don’t wanna hear that. I can’t blame them, I suppose. It’s ugly and a bit upsetting to hear about.
So, it’s not about finding an idea. But sometimes it’s about finding a stimulus, no matter how mundane. You can provide your own stimulus – just writing an opening line that sounds cool and going from there, having a mental image, seeing something, going for a walk, reading something, and so on. So going out and looking at the world and its people does help. And reading helps. All I read is fantasy. I’ll often read something and think: ‘Hmm. I wouldn’t have written it like that. I’d have written like this. Oo, that’s a good idea! Maybe I will write it!’ It’s like writing the photonegative of what you’ve just read. Or writing the opposite. It’s not copying – quite the opposite.
Let me give you an example. I’ll write a cool opening line off the top of my head. Ready? Er… okay… ‘I’m not sure demons exist.’ There you go. I’ll now make up an interesting sentence in response/opposition. Ready? ‘My mum says they do, but John at school laughed when I told him what mum had said.’ And then: ‘My mum now says John is probably a demon too! She’s going to tell the local priest. Oh no, I hope I haven’t got him in trouble.’ And there you have a 50-word mini-saga/piece of flash fiction. It takes practice, but it gets easier. Practice. If you practice your craft, you will get better at it.
It’s not a case of simply presenting the stimulus through words either. It gets filtered and worked on by your mind and personality. It’s best described by Ursula Le Guin: ‘I don’t believe that a writer “gets” (takes into the head) an “idea” (some sort of mental object) “from” somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn’t work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.’
So if you want to gather ideas inside yourself, you first have to work on developing yourself. Maybe the world does revolve around you after all. Cool!
What a good idea for an article! I was skeptical when Mr. Dalton let us in on the secret of the Smith Street Well because such an enormous monopoly could not be kept secret for long. Overall, just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek for covering a subject like this.
I think one of the key points made was that aspirations to have fame as an author or be the next King are not useful when it comes time for the hard work. You have to be driven to really make whatever idea you have as your own.
I must insist on giving “the idea” some importance, however, otherwise the good becomes indistinguishable from the bad or mediocre.