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Ideas: Concepts and Generation

(or:- What would happen if the buttered toast landed edgewise down?)

 

Welcome to the literary crucible.

There are two definitions of an idea

Idea:- Conception, plan of thing to be aimed at, discovered.
Oxford English Dictionary

Idea:- That concept which after indeterminable hours; gallons of coffee and sleepless; sore-eyed; computer staring nights; still evades the probing mind of the frustrated author.
Author unknown

The frustration of an elusive idea is intense. The need to create and produce a specific piece of work is tantamount to the author's psyche. Plus, in a lot of circumstances, can provide the check to pay the bills. It is at these moments that the true nature of an author is refined, the literary crucible that will either forge a true all weather author or break the writer down into a motionless, staring mass of idealess jelly.

So how, as authors, can we keep up an almost endless supply of ideas to feed into our clicking keyboards. There are as many answers to this as there are authors on full time pay roll and no one way is particularly right. What I've written below is how, over thirty years of writing, I've developed a system to generate ideas for any given fictional situation. I've concentrated here for fantasy work, fantasy being my love and my fascination, but most of the ideas and exercises can be translated to other genres and even non-fiction writing. The technique was used in the production of this article. Also although I tend to discuss the issue in terms of a new idea for a fresh story, the system applies equally well to situations in the middle of novels and other long pieces

I hope you find this process as useful, and as enjoyable, as I have over the years.

Spend some time in the mad cafe

Regardless of who you are the creative human brain works best when alert but relaxed. Music often helps as some people find it tunes in the creative nature of the brain, though this is indeed a personal thing. It is possible to find many authors who will listen to music as they write for just this reason.

A similar kind of tuning needs to be done for finding and creating ideas. It is very important to find somewhere where you feel relaxed. I've always found that being uptight - fighting through piles of words and papers - and forcing myself to find an idea for a particular piece is the most counter-productive thing I can do. By focusing on the fact that I can't find an idea, the solution rapidly become more distant.