Writing Fiction: Where Do the Ideas Come From?
When discussing my writing with the book club of Cardiff, Wales I was asked where my idea for Please, Call Me Barbara came from. The question was an easy one to address because I distinctly remember waking from a dead sleep (yes, I used to have those nights) with the realization that I had never used a female as the central character of any story I had authored. So resolute that I needed to experiment and determine if indeed I could write from the other side of the plate, I set off to decide which woman of note I could use as my initial model for a character of a fictional work. Just days earlier I read in USA Today a story focusing on the 50th birthday celebration of the iconic doll Barbie. And voila! A story was born.
Next came the plot and additional characters and the point of view from which to tell the tale. It was a natural; Barbie would reflect on her life as a doll. That made the plot easier as I could draw on highlights from those fifty years. I decided that one of the central themes would be her frustration at living with the stereotype of a dominated woman and the frustrations that accompanied such an existence. I used reference to Ibsen’s A Doll House as a literary comparison. The ideas flowed, the plot line grew accordingly and soon all I needed was a concluding happy ending. Throughout the story Ken is her whipping boy, the basis for her frustration at being paired with a pretty face and an empty head. So for a happy ending Ken must be replaced and voila encore! GI Joe emerged as the savior. (Please, Call Me Barbara is available in Morning Wine)
One of the most popular stories from either of my collections is Morning Wine, the tale of an old man sipping wine early in the morning and reflecting. His thoughts are triggered by small incidents within his environment. The beauty of being a writer of fiction is that ideas important to me can be included without the reader feeling like sitting through a sermon on Sunday morning. In this story, I used his time spent sipping wine in the morning to think as the pause that all leaders need to maximize their ability to make wise decisions.
Ok, now for the more bizarre idea origins. Feline Meanderings came from observing a small cat who adopted us in our Michigan home. She just showed up one day and refused to consider any other alternative arrangement. We later discovered that Christopher, who was home on leave after seven months in Afghanistan, had been secretly feeding her tuna. She was independent as all cats seem to be and the character of a cat with an attitude was born. I am a devout dog guy, but for a while I needed to don the mask of a cat man.
Another rather outlandish idea grew from the belief that mankind must always be at war. The plot and characters for The Shuttlecock Wars grew from my desire to make the means of settling differences the simplest of all methods-play a series of games, winner take the prize. Badminton seemed a simple solution.
Other stories have been triggered by song lyrics, poetry, stereotypes, incessant commercials on TV, generational conflict and even news events.
At present I am promoting my first novel Trapped in the Inferno. It was a monumental undertaking (don’t say undertaking to an old man), one which when I began I never guessed the task ahead of me. Now I have completed a sequel Escape from the Inferno and am several chapters into a third, a story based on the resistance fighters of the Haute Valley. It will be entitled The Seventeenth Paratrooper and the plot follows a young man who receives a Dear Jimmy letter and decides the best way to get even is suicide by combat. So he enlists, volunteers for a hazardous mission and is dropped with his comrades into the nearby forested mountains. The plot is inspired by the story of Lieutenant Paul Swank whose body rests nearby and the settings will be familiar to all of us.
I guess the simplest way to describe how an idea for a story is born is that I live a life filled with people and places. Each one of you is a potential character and each place is a possible setting. After the last few months I have experienced I have much more material available from which to draw.