PLUCKING STORIES FROM THE ETHERSo, where do your ideas come from?
Writers get asked that question all the time. I’m not sure why, really. Maybe it stems from a fascination with the creative process. For instance, I’m curious about how the idea for Velcro came about. A Swiss man got tired of removing burrs from his clothing and actually looked at one under the microscope. From there, he began to see the possibilities. That’s how writing is, at least for me.
My story ideas come from all over the place. Usually I’ll come across something that will suggest a premise. For On Her Trail, my first Carina release, the idea came when I saw a bench perched on top of a cliff overlooking the Yukon River at a distance. I wondered who would use that bench and why the bench was so far from the edge and the best view. Thus Fay, the haunted mother of my heroine Laura, was born.
My next Carina release, The Shoeless Kid (May 2011), started as idle speculation. Where do all those singleton shoes come from? You know the ones I mean. You’re driving down the highway and suddenly there’s a boot or a shoe in the middle of the road. In the middle of nowhere. How can you not speculate about what happened? In Shoeless Kid, a homeless man finds a kid’s shoe on the highway and it’s up to Chief of Police Kate Williams to figure out if the kid really was kidnapped, or if it’s a figment of the old man’s troubled imagination.
I once wrote a whole novel based on a trick of moonlight that had me thinking there was a man sitting in on my deck with a sword resting across his knees. I kid you not.
I love hearing writers’ “origin” stories. A lot of writers’ stories come from a character that just won’t leave them alone until they write his or her story but that’s not my way. How about you?
Writers get asked that question all the time. I’m not sure why, really. Maybe it stems from a fascination with the creative process. For instance, I’m curious about how the idea for Velcro came about. A Swiss man got tired of removing burrs from his clothing and actually looked at one under the microscope. From there, he began to see the possibilities. That’s how writing is, at least for me.
My story ideas come from all over the place. Usually I’ll come across something that will suggest a premise. For On Her Trail, my first Carina release, the idea came when I saw a bench perched on top of a cliff overlooking the Yukon River at a distance. I wondered who would use that bench and why the bench was so far from the edge and the best view. Thus Fay, the haunted mother of my heroine Laura, was born.
My next Carina release, The Shoeless Kid (May 2011), started as idle speculation. Where do all those singleton shoes come from? You know the ones I mean. You’re driving down the highway and suddenly there’s a boot or a shoe in the middle of the road. In the middle of nowhere. How can you not speculate about what happened? In Shoeless Kid, a homeless man finds a kid’s shoe on the highway and it’s up to Chief of Police Kate Williams to figure out if the kid really was kidnapped, or if it’s a figment of the old man’s troubled imagination.
I once wrote a whole novel based on a trick of moonlight that had me thinking there was a man sitting in on my deck with a sword resting across his knees. I kid you not.
I love hearing writers’ “origin” stories. A lot of writers’ stories come from a character that just won’t leave them alone until they write his or her story but that’s not my way. How about you?
