“Where do you get your ideas?” An age-old question. First time I saw it was an Stephen King interview. But I’d thought it myself, I’m sure, over the years and years of reading that began for me at 5.
When you’re young and have that impulse to create, to write because you’re not crafty enough with your hands to paint, you reflect what you’re reading (I was less than a “fair hand” with a brush, average, good at composition but couldn’t etch a straight line to save my life). Comics, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard were my sources so fantasy worlds or post-apocalyptic views courtesy of “The Twilight Zone” television show were the dimensions my muse called home. Then Conan Doyle before High School where students were really allowed to write found me all over the place, Westerns and then King and thrillers by the likes of Ludlum et al, thus my goal to write a best-seller and every genre when I somehow got it into my head I could write.
Long ago I discovered that answer, at least the first part of it.
Write what you know. You have to live your own life to get there, not just read books. Drink in the real world. Love, loss. Failure, success.
Most of us know more than we think. You just relax and your Muse will give you a glimpse of all those thin-sliced dimensions where alternate realities where really, all you do is just watch what’s going on and then put it down on paper, what you see.
Second part though, I thought I knew but really only knew a part of it.
Know the craft. Talent is good, skill is better. But skill is more than characters, plot and pacing. Read about “writing” but really, that’s only gimmicks. The “craft” is all those things writing, literature; where you come from and where you’re going. History, grammer…or the lack thereof. Style, voice. But the skill to know those are not the same as skill. The craft.
I also learned long ago that anyone can write: We all have a story inside us, it’s how you express it that gives you doubts. Relax, just say it. Muse. Then polish it. Skill.
Only a couple years or so ago did I learn that Mr. L actually used skill, legitimate literary techniques with names (I’m sure he’ll deny it - even Hemingway said, “Sometimes a mountain is only a God-damned mountain). While I had always admired and slathered over his words (Muse), I’d never really seen him as something other than a pulp master (skill). Even than does take some skill, but what he does…
I like to think I’m “more than a fair hand” with a pen (okay, computer keys). But to be in the polished realm of a Leonard or Hemingway or Wells or Coleridge or Swift or Shakespeare.
Where do they get their ideas?
Life.
But it’s not the ideas - it’s how you express them.
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