Where Do Novel Ideas Come From?

The answer is simple, of course: novel ideas come from right inside your head. If you read the previous article - What Are Ideas for Novels? - you will know that they are made up of four basic ingredients: character, plot, theme and setting.

When you start brainstorming in the two-step process for finding writing ideas, you will discover that you are chock-full of ideas for all of these things. But before that, I want to talk more generally about your sources of inspiration as a novelist...

What interests you? What doesn't interest you?

What are you like as a person? What are you not like?

When you read a newspaper, do you turn to the weighty political articles or check your horoscope? Or do you not read a newspaper at all?

When on holiday, do you prefer a day at the beach or a trip to a museum?

When with friends, do you like to have intellectual discussions on the matters of the day or a joke and a laugh?

The answers to these questions, and to hundreds more like them, are an indication of who you are. Not the person you might kid yourself that you are, or the person you would like to be, but the one you truly are.

And when searching for novel ideas, it essential that you remain true to your real self.

• If you are not interested in current affairs, do not try to write one of those "state of the nation" novels (the ones where the authors are said to have their "fingers on the pulse" of society).
• If psychology doesn't do it for you, don't attempt to write a novel full of insightful psychological observations.

In other words, only write about what you are interested in writing about. Don't come up with novel ideas that leave you cold.

The trouble that some newcomers to novel writing have is that they believe novels cannot be set in their own backyards. They think fiction has to be about super-human people doing heroic things in exotic locations.

It is certainly true that a lot of novels are exotic, but just as many are rooted in the ordinary - and in the right hands, the ordinary can still be made to seem extraordinary. So "unexciting" novel ideas are fine.

Suppose you are a farmer in the American Mid-West. You've lived there all your life and farming is all you have ever done, and so you believe that you couldn't possibly base a novel around it because it is just so - well, boring!

But you can - indeed, you must - write your novel about whatever you like. Through skilful writing, you can make even the most humdrum of people and places and events come to life. And just because something is commonplace to you, it doesn't mean that everyone will find it that way.

I'm English and have never ventured further west than New York, so a novel about a Midwestern farmer will be exotic to me, just as a novel about everyday life in Woodbridge, England will be exotic to you.

All of which is a long way of saying that you don't need to step outside your comfort zone when searching for novel ideas, not if you don't want to.

Sticking to what interests you and to what is familiar will still leave you with the raw material for a thousand novels.

Where Does This Raw Material Come From?

Like I said at the top, it comes from right inside your head. Everything that has ever happened to you, from your first memory to the present day, is stored in your mind somewhere - the parts you haven't forgotten, at any rate - and any of these things could find their way into your novel.

Add to that everything you have imagined happening to you, and everything that has happened to other people that you witnessed or read about or were told about, and you have a mountain of experiences, direct and indirect, on which to draw.

I don't mean that these experiences will find their way into your novel exactly as they happened, but small fragments of the experiences will.

It's like when I played golf yesterday: I'm never going to write a piece of fiction featuring that golf game in its entirety, but there were countless mini-experiences within it that I could use in my writing. Here are just a few of them...

• That helpless, frustrated experience of being stuck in slow traffic on the way to the course, wondering if I would ever make it on time.
• The lady I saw in the car park smoking a cigarette with her windows rolled up.
• The way I said, "I think it will just miss us" right before the downpour started - and the way everyone blamed me like the weather was somehow my fault.
• The fact that trees, even ancient oak trees, don't make great rain shelters.
• The image of a man playing on through the rain in shorts and shades and even a spring in his step.

The chances are, of course, that none of these fragments will turn up in a novel, but the point is they will be there in my head if I do ever want to use them. And those fragments were deposited in my memory bank over the course of just four or five hours. Imagine how much potential raw material I have accumulated over 40-odd years.

The bottom line is that there isn't a person alive who is short of novel ideas, no matter how young they are or how uneventful their life has been. And even if 99% of our experiences slip from our memories and are lost to us, the 1% that remains is more than enough.

How do you use all of these experiences? In two ways...

• Once you have an idea and you start planning and writing your novel, you will draw on your memory bank to create characters and plot the novel's events and so on.
• But before that, you will use the raw material inside your head to come up with strong novel ideas in the first place.

All you need is a foolproof, methodical way of bringing raw material that is true to who you are to the surface, and you will find a 2-step method for finding writing ideas later in this section.

Next up, though, you will find an article on Writing Autobiographical Fiction...