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Where to relax is a personal thing. An armchair in a small room; maybe in bed if it is possible to resist the urge to sleep. My personal favorite is to go to a local cafe or bar and amidst the bustle of people find a small corner table and sit, with a hot brew or pint of beer, facing the throngs. With a pad and paper ready I just let the atmosphere of the others around me draw out the tensions and open my mind to any incoming thoughts.

There are writers I know, who will sit with friends and chat freely about their ideas and plots. This kind of chatter can help tremendously but do take a pad and write the ideas down frequently. Otherwise the majority of the stuff spoken about will be forgotten by the time you've left the bar, kitchen or whatever. Be judicious though, one friend of mine was animatedly discussing various ways to kill off the husband in her companion's novel whilst they were treating themselves to a pizza at the local restaurant. Halfway through the exercise they'd

worked their way through a list of poisons, found them boring, tried arranging an accident and found it too risky and were working on murdering him in his sleep when an elderly lady from a nearby table stood up and began speaking very loudly and clearly

"You cold hearted...."

The object lesson is, if you will discuss techniques of murder in public it helps if you let eavesdroppers know it is fictional now and then. This also avoids awkward conversations with restaurant managers.

Wherever it is or whatever you do the universal factor seems to be the need to break away from the computer/typewriter and to let your mind clear from the physical act of writing. This spring clean of the mind allows new ideas to form where the old cobwebs used to grow.

To see or not to see

This may have given you the impression that I'm advocating you do nothing to generate ideas. This is not true. I do believe that ideas are all around us and we need to train ourselves to see them. Terry Pratchett, famous for his Discworld, mentioned in an interview long ago how he was sitting in the airport lounge one day and saw what many of us would see. A tired and haggard tourist pulling one of those suitcases on wheels. This suitcase, like so many, kept going off in the wrong direction as if it had a life of its own.

On the strength of that observation Rincewind's inimitable Luggage was born.

So ideas surround us and we need to observe more. How many potential story ideas have we passed today but failed to see because we haven't actually looked to see if they were there.

For one poignant fantasy I remember driving the coast road. I drove the coast road every day to work. Yet on this particular day they'd been an accident and I was forced, along with all the other drivers, to slow the car to a walking pace. It was one of those particularly dreary, cloud covered, days which gave the sea a kind of grey hue. It occurred to me then that the sea looked lonely. Developing that idea led to my short story The Lonely Sea.

I am embarrassed to admit it took five years and an accident to make me observe, for the first time, the sea in that condition.

Yet we see so much each day. Looking at my notes today, I saw the young couple having a tiff in the town mall with girl leaving rapidly, the young man following. The lost children's balloon scooting along in the wind under the eaves of the buildings. The strange, dragon shaped incense burner and the almost worshipful way that some customers admired it. Each of which have potentials for story ideas embedded in them. For example, the short chase as the young man tries to catch and apologize to his lover, as they step into a doorway or alley way they get transported to different areas of another world and spend their time trying to reunite. The balloon, blown into the presence of something evil, takes on for a moment the visage of that creature and glares at the people below. The incense burner, and the creature it becomes, when it is wielded by the hand of the 'faithful'.

These germs of ideas would easily become short stories and possibly even novels.

Meet the media men

The media men can be the fantasy writer's greatest friends. Nine times out of ten if you are stuck for an idea for a fantasy story you need turn no further than your daily newspapers, news report or magazine.

Although any newspaper will do I tend to go for the ones which aren't so up-market. The ones which contain the little paragraphs of snippet information. These I regularly cut and stick into a scrapbook. Short pieces like:

'Police were baffled today when the missing housewife, XXXXX, was found drowned in her car on a bend off the highway, she had driven through a hedge and into the river beyond. The reason that the search took so long [three days] to find the body was that the car had passed through the hedge without harming or breaking even a twig.'

Definite fantasy stuff.

Then there's the not quite so obvious news item:

'Police today were praising the bravery of a young stranger who prevented the abduction of a child from the local play park. The assailant, described as in his late thirties, wearing a blue duffel coat and dark green trousers was scared off when the young man accosted him and refused to let him put the child in his car. Police are anxious to find the reluctant hero who disappeared soon after the assailant had driven off in a white....'