Where the Ideas Come From

My Journal has a notation of a friend’s asking me if I read a lot of mysteries for my story ideas. I do read as many good mysteries as I can cram into my 28-hour days, but certainly not for ideas for my own writing. Robin Cook’s suspense keeps me enthralled without my having a medical background. And John Grisham’s thrillers, without my having a legal background. Any writer knows a little about the medical and legal fields, just from everyday living, and one can easily do a little research. But it takes first-hand information or a depth of research to write a great book on any subject. My field is human nature, which I’ve been studying all my life. I can easily detect the male author who doesn’t know much about female characters. Most men cannot write well about women. By that I mean, getting into the thinking of the female brain. However, female writers seem to know male characters fairly well. After all, they probably married one, while husbands say into their old age, “I just don’t understand women.” We expect writers to be all-knowing, of course, and they should strive to present such an appearance. By almost constant research, knowingly or unknowingly. Learning all the time is what I mean.

One of the best-drawn male characters one can meet in modern crime fiction appears in a book I finished reading last night—rather at 2:00 this morning—Nicholas Sparks’s Safe Haven, which shows us a policeman who lives on vodka. I doubt that Sparks ever experienced anything of this sort in his own life. So, how did he know what to write in delineating this character? Most likely, by just looking at life he saw all around him, life he heard or read about, life he dreamed about, life he could imagine. Some people who ask where one gets ideas to write about seem to forget that powerful tool called imagination. A writer should be able to start a story by thinking, “I want a street scene in winter,” and see it in his mind instantly. That’s his imagination on tap.

I recommend Safe Haven, romantic literature to be sure, but one of the best in that category.

♥