What's the idea?
One of the questions I’m asked most often when I do talks or workshops is where my ideas come from. There’s no easy answer. Partly because I often don’t know, and partly because an idea might arise months, or even years, before it’s used. Also, something which prompts a story idea will change as it percolates through the brain cells.
For example, I live close to the River Severn, and one evening I was told that a man had been found in the river, alongside his bicycle. It was reported that he’d possibly been knocked off, or simply rode off, the bridge and must have knocked his head in the water then drowned. At this point, the “what if” of the crime novelist kicked in and a few words went into my notebook.*
I was redrafting a novel at the time and only thinking about the next one, so nothing happened with that note for a while. When I got round to it, my protagonist had moved to France, the man in the water had become a French woman, and the accident seemed like a murder.
Ideas can come from any number of sources: newspaper/magazine articles, random thoughts, overheard conversations, etc.
“All that business with Norman was so unnecessary”
The sight of a person in the street might prompt thoughts of a character who matches a situation already in your head. A phrase overheard on a bus, completely out of context, begins a spiral into a story. The trick is simply to record them at the time, then let them bubble away until you need them.
I once overheard a couple talking in a café and one phrase stuck “All that business with Norman was so unnecessary”. So who was Norman – a friend, a colleague, an ex-lover? And what exactly was ‘unnecessary’? Most importantly, what was ‘that business’? It’s easy after this, isn’t it. I haven’t written that story yet, but I might. If you’d like to, feel free – the words were never mine in the first place.
* Note: As it happens, the story I’d been told was just a rumour, there was no dead man, only an old bike dumped on the riverbank, so I wasn’t intruding on someone’s grief.