where do you get your ideas?

[hermetic]

That question has always seemed silly to me.

For me, that's because the answer is another question: "from where don't you get your ideas?" I mean, I don't know about other people, but lack of ideas has never been an issue

Comments

[ljgeoff]

Or rather, in my successful fiction. I'm still learning how to weave stories skillfully enough that the questions I'm grappling with work when I dress them in the stuff of dreams, and to make that be interesting for others to read.

:pounds arm of chair: Yes!

I just started doing this thing where, when I get a cool image, a cool character, I say to myself - "What is this about? What does it represent?" I *just* started doing this. I feel like such an infant.

[hermetic]

You know how Bear talks about conscious and unconscious mastery of skill and how that process of acquisition of insight and craft is really, well, hard, and (imho) fucked up? Yeah. That.Half the time, I'm forgetting to ask myself those questions you bring up. Partly, it's that yeah, my mastery of craft is still, well, unmastered. Partly, it's that I'm still trusting that my subconscious knows what it's doing well enough to get stuff out to the point that I can consciously tinker with it

[ljgeoff]

Yep, I've done that, too. In fact, thinking about it makes me want to pick up a couple of my stories that didn't sell and look at them again.

Or, like, when we used to critique stories and say "What this story is about" -- we need to go beyond the "this is a story about a little girl who meets a giantess and realizes that she's really one of the fey" -- go beyond that to "this is a story about finding out that who you are is not who you were told you are; there is more to us than what we are told, than what we expect, that we are a mystery even to ourselves."

Or I'll ask myself a question like "What if you had a son who was horrible? What if you had a son who was evil? What would you do? And I could see so clearly the other side of the creative force, the need to destroy something out of love. Now if I can write *that* story, I'll call myself a writer.

[hermetic]

*nod*

Would that be the story with the fierce and terrible mother who rides across the sky on a horse made of the bones of her children? Or a sister story to that?

(Because that one? That one is going to be amazing.)

[ljgeoff]

She had seven sons. They carried her across the sky on their sholders, on their backs and thighs, arms and ribs, even on their knuckles and knees. She lifted her face to the moon and laughed, wild eyes black in the moonlight.

see ya at Wiscon. :)

[lunapalma]

I don't think you should be so hard on yourself about when you realized you needed to be explicit about Eva. Isn't writing a process of making the unconscious conscious? Don't you need to write a draft of a story to understand certain things about your characters, or, better, about how best (plotwise) to show (or crystallize--I'm struggling for a metaphor here) those things