Another important question is, If only…
(If only real life was like it is in Hollywood musicals. If only I could shrink myself small as a button. If only a ghost would do my homework.)
And then there are the others: I wonder… (“I wonder what she does when she’s alone…”) and If This Goes On… (“If this goes on telephones are going to start talking to each other, and cut out the middleman…”) and Wouldn’t it be interesting if… (“Wouldn’t it be interesting if the world used to be ruled by cats?”)…
Those questions, and others like them, and the questions they, in their turn, pose (“Well, if cats used to rule the world, why don’t they any more? And how do they feel about that?”) are one of the places ideas come from.
An idea doesn’t have to be a plot notion, just a place to begin creating. Plots often generate themselves when one begins to ask oneself questions about whatever the starting point is.
Sometimes an idea is a person (“There’s a boy who wants to know about magic”). Sometimes it’s a place (“There’s a castle at the end of time, which is the only place there is…”). Sometimes it’s an image (“A woman, sitting in a dark room filled with empty faces.”)
Often ideas come from two things coming together that haven’t come together before. (“If a person bitten by a werewolf turns into a wolf what would happen if a goldfish was bitten by a werewolf? What would happen if a chair was bitten by a werewolf?”)
All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.
And when you’ve an idea—which is, after all, merely something to hold on to as you begin—what then?
Well, then you write. You put one word after another until it’s finished—whatever it is.
Sometimes it won’t work, or not in the way you first imagined. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Sometimes you throw it out and start again.
I remember, some years ago, coming up with a perfect idea for a Sandman story. It was about a succubus who gave writers and artists and songwriters ideas in exchange for some of their lives. I called it “Sex and Violets.”
It seemed a straightforward story, and it was only when I came to write it I discovered it was like trying to hold fine sand: every time I thought I’d got hold of it, it would trickle through my fingers and vanish.
I wrote at the time:
I’ve started this story twice, now, and got about half-way through it each time, only to watch it die on the screen.
Sandman is, occasionally, a horror comic. But nothing I’ve written for it has ever gotten under my skin like this story I’m now going to have to wind up abandoning (with the deadline already a thing of the past). Probably because it cuts so close to home. It’s the ideas—and the ability to put them down on paper, and turn them into stories—that make me a writer. That mean I don’t have to get up early in the morning and sit on a train with people I don’t know, going to a job I despise.
My idea of hell is a blank sheet of paper. Or a blank screen. And me, staring at it, unable to think of a single thing worth saying, a single character that people could believe in, a single story that hasn’t been told before.
Staring at a blank sheet of paper.
Forever.
I wrote my way out of it, though. I got desperate (that’s another flip and true answer I give to the where-do-you-get-your-ideas question. “Desperation.” It’s up there with “Boredom” and “Deadlines”. All these answers are true to a point.) and took my own terror, and the core idea, and crafted a story called Calliope, which explains, I think pretty definitively, where writers get their ideas from. It’s in a book called DREAM COUNTRY. You can read it if you like. And, somewhere in the writing of that story, I stopped being scared of the ideas going away.
Where do I get my ideas from?
I make them up.
Out of my head.
? 2005 Neil Gaiman.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NEIL GAIMAN is the critically acclaimed and award-winning creator of the Sandman series of graphic novels, and author of the novels American Gods, Neverwhere, Stardust, and Coraline; the short fiction collection Smoke and Mirrors; and the New York Times bestselling children’s books The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls (both illustrated by Dave Mc Kean). His most recent book, written with and illustrated by Dave Mc Kean, is MirrorMask: The Illustrated Film Script of the Motion Picture from The Jim Henson Company. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.
www.neilgaiman.com
End Notes