Filling Your Well of Ideas

By Michael Ehret

Sometimes I think my idea well has run dry. The plots I dredge up are so spare they couldn’t even flesh out a flash fiction story.

What's in your Well of Ideas?
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net and cbenjasuwan

Can you relate?

Usually what this means is I need to switch from “creative” mode to “ingestion” mode—I need more raw material to draw from. Some writers can create a story idea from nothing except their own imagination.

That is not me. And if that’s not you, too, maybe this trick will help you fill your well.

Feed Me, Seymour!

Much like the carnivorous plant in “The Little Shop of Horrors,” I need constant feeding. Often I chow down on a great novel; less frequently nonfiction fills my gullet.

Maybe it’s my background as a newspaper reporter, but some of the best food for my imagination comes from the news—including quasi news sources like blogs. Because, as Mark Twain said, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

When I read news, online or print (broadcast doesn’t work for me), invariably I read an article that sparks an idea or two. Now, I freely admit not all of them will produce even a flash fiction piece, let alone a full-blown novel, but the important thing is I’m filling my imagination. At the appropriate time, several of the ideas will likely congeal together and produce something workable.

But I can guarantee that nothing workable will be produced if raw material isn’t imported into the processor.

Is he talking about you?

What are the costs of living together?
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net and Ambro

For instance, I read this commentary from Regis Nicoll the other day called “The High Costs of Living Together.” It included this gem:

In 1969, although the vast majority of people, 82 percent, reported having had sex before marriage by age 30, only 21 percent felt that was morally acceptable.

… Over the next 40 years, as public acceptance grew three-fold (to 63 percent) and (more) people (94 percent) admitted to having “done it,” there was far less social pressure to restrain it or keep quiet about it.

This sea change in attitudes and practices can be attributed to two things: “no-consequence” sex and a morally-compromised Church.

… With roughly 80 percent of the U.S. populace Christian and 94 percent admitting to pre-marital sex, that means that a lot of Christians—very likely the majority—are guilty of sexual sin.

Woah … right? I know a lot of people who will take offense at a study like this. But that’s what makes great fiction!

Is that giving you ideas? (Story ideas, guys, story ideas.) It sure did me. My oeuvre, the framework within which I write, includes marriage, fidelity, trust—and all the antonyms of those, of course. I took the entirety of Nicoll’s piece and fed my imagination with it. Who knows where it may lead, but now that information has been uploaded and is available. (And also stored electronically.)

Fill your well

The point is there are ideas for fiction everywhere if you open your eyes, your heart, and your mind to them. If you read something that sticks with you—good or bad—file that away in your Well of Ideas. Maybe you’ll use it, maybe you won’t. But you for sure won’t use it if you don’t have it stored away.

Obviously our world is ever in need of the transformative power of story—and of Story. What ideas have you picked up from news sources and used in your stories?

Want to play?

Screenshot from Jan. 25 FOXNews.com home page

Go to the front page of your local paper (or to the home page of CNN or Fox News or your favorite online news source) and read the main story—no cherry picking. Choose one fact or one quote or one idea from that story as your idea seed and freewrite a paragraph or two in the comments.

Here’s my example. I wrote this on Jan. 25 based on this story, but the story has changed since that day and my idea seed is no longer in it.

My idea seed from that story: The scene was “believed to be secure” police said in a tweet issued at about 12:36 p.m.

Ethan was dead. True. He’d been an effective triggerman. Also true. But there were others. Many others.

Captain White’s tweet that the mall was “secure” made Gaston—almost—laugh out loud, but he did not "LOL." When he laughed, and it was rare, it was real not some fake social construct. But that “out loud” part was a luxury he couldn’t allow himself right now. Later? Most definitely.

Stupid twerkers. Ethan got a few, but they’d be back prancing through the mall in their tight clothes and loose morals soon enough. It was “secure,” after all. White said so. Truth. 

So not true.
 
And then he did chuckle—but quietly. After all, the shoppers trapped in his store from the lockdown were still shook up and hyper aware—no sense in giving them something odd to remember if the police did questioned them.

They’d soon enough embrace again the fragile cloak of security they thought protected them. True, always true.

So, if you want to play leave a comment. Or, if you want to talk about where you get your ideas from—how you fill your Well of Ideas—leave a comment.

Michael Ehret loves to play with words as a Marketing Communications Writer for CHEFS Catalog and as a freelance editor at WritingOnTheFineLine.com. Ehret is the former editor of the ACFW Journal and has edited several nonfiction books, proofedited for Abingdon Press, and reported for The Indianapolis Star.

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Getting Ideas from Wisdom

Dale Cramer has written seven novels, garnering two Christy Awards and several listings among the Best Books of the Year at Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal.  He lives in Georgia with his wife and two sons.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Writers hear this all the time. Take questions at a book club get-together and somebody will always ask, "Where do you get your ideas?" I never knew what to say, and frankly I never took it seriously until one night when I answered with, "I get mine from a company in New York. They have a website."

The lady didn't think it was the least bit funny, and that was when it dawned on me that these people are serious. They really want to know where ideas come from, or, more accurately, how an idea germinates into a novel.

So I gave it some thought. I can't speak for everybody, but for me the idea for a book usually begins when a bit of wisdom sticks in my mind. It doesn't happen often, and for the record I don't originate a lot of wisdom because I'm not particularly wise. 

A writer doesn't have to be wise, he just has to be (A) able to recognize wisdom when he sees it, and (B) unscrupulous enough to abscond with it and wrap a book around it.

 

My first novel was wrapped around what I call the Sow's Ear Principle: If God wants to make a silk purse he'll start with a sow's ear every time; he'll use the foolish to shame the wise. Being foolish myself, I was comforted by this thought, and it took up residence in the back of my mind. 

Then the idea began fleshing itself out, building a landscape out of places I had visited and populating the countryside with characters cut from the fabric of people I have known. After a while curiosity got the better of me, so I started following these characters around and writing down what they did. Turns out, the things they did illustrated the Sow's Ear Principle. Three years and a half-dozen rewrites later I had what I thought was a viable novel, so I sent it to an agent. She made me rewrite it.

My second novel wrapped itself around an idea that had nagged me for years: the fact that the worst thing that ever happened to me turned out, eventually, to be the best thing that ever happened to me.  God gives us the brightest gifts in the darkest places. The setting, a tunnel project I had worked on for a couple years, was already etched on my mind in great detail. The characters, a bunch of miners and construction workers, were second nature to me. They just walked into the scenes whole, begging for attention. They were full of the grandest lies and the simplest truths, and I had a fine time telling their stories.

My third novel was different because it was the first time I knew the story before I knew the theme.  Levi's Will was based loosely on my father's life, and I was well into the writing of it before I stumbled across a scrap of poetry by William Carlos Williams that shed light on what the story was about: Love is the proof of God, and forgiveness is the proof of love. It's what I'd been trying to say all along.

But Levi's Will was a heavy book, so for my next project I wanted to write something light, something fun. Having gone, entirely by accident, from full-time construction worker to stay-at-home-dad to published novelist, my own experience gave me a theme: You never know what the day will bring.  Again, characters showed up on their own and started doing strange things but, to be honest, an uncomfortable portion of the absurdities in that book were taken from actual experience as a redneck stay-at-home-dad.

The last three books I've written comprise a trilogy, and the story thrust itself upon me. I was watching a ball game with my dad one evening and he mentioned being born in Mexico. Now, I've known this all my life, but my father was a quiet man. He only said two or three words a year, and though I had always wondered about it I had never asked him how an Amish family from Ohio came to be living south of the border. So I asked, and this incredible story emerged.  Religious persecution in the 1920's forced a group of Amish to move to the mountains of Mexico where, according to my father, "Bandits robbed them blind for several years, until they got troops in there, but the troops were worse than the bandits."

I knew I had to write it, and I knew the story was too big for one book. Once I started work on the trilogy the theme presented itself immediately and became the backbone of The Daughters of Caleb Bender. It's a simple question, but one we all grapple with every day:  Where do you put your faith?

I guess it doesn't really matter which comes first, the theme or the story, because I need both. I can't write a book until I see characters who live and breathe, and they don't live and breathe until they have something worth saying. There is wisdom all around us in our lives, we just have to be still enough to see it. When you find it, keep it. Cling to it. See who shows up to help you illustrate it, and write down what they do.

That's where stories come from.

Though Mountains Fall

(Book 3 in The Daughters of Caleb Bender series, due out in December)

"I want you to promise you will always be my sister."

There were tears in Miriam's eyes as their foreheads touched and Rachel whispered, "No matter what. Always."

Now in its fourth year, the Amish settlement in Mexico is thriving. But as new settlers arrive, sons and daughters marry, babies are born, and crops grow thick, a storm looms on the horizon. And Caleb Bender knows--perhaps better than anyone--that the worst of storms don't come from the western skies.

They come on horseback.

When their very existence is threatened, the Amish turn to the Mexican government for help, only to discover that the rulers of men are fickle and security is an illusion. Tried by fire and riven by war, Caleb and Domingo come to understand that the kingdom of God is not to be found in land or buildings or gold or armies, but in the hearts of peaceful men trying to feed their families.

Watching helplessly as daughters Rachel, Miriam, and Emma are drawn inexorably toward their separate destinies, Caleb is forced to confront the most important decision of his life.

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Turning Your “Idea Factory” into a Writing Career

Ramona Richards, fiction editor for Abingdon Press, started making stuff up at three, writing it down at seven, and selling it at eighteen. She’s been annoying editors ever since, which is probably why she became one. She’s edited more than 350 publications, including novels, CD-ROMs, magazines, non-fiction, children’s books, Bibles, and study guides. Ramona has worked with such publishers as Thomas Nelson, Barbour, Howard, Harlequin, Ideals, and many others. The author of eight books and an avid live music fan, Ramona loves living in the ongoing street party that is Nashville.

This morning, I had a new idea for a book. I scribbled down the 50-word pitch for it, then went back to work. Yesterday afternoon, same thing – and I was sick as a dog.

In my storage bin, I have more than 300 unpublished short stories – unpublished, in part, because those wild writings weren’t really short stories. They were ideas for novels I didn’t have the guts to write.

I can get an idea for a new novel by walking around the parking lot at work. The numbers go up if I read bumper stickers and peer into backseats. Good ideas bounce around in my head like ping-pong balls on a daily basis.

 This is why editors, and a lot of writers, cringe when they’re approached by a non-writer who glows with excitement, announcing gleefully, “I have an idea for a book! Want to help me write it?”

Uh, no. To be blunt, having a good idea is the EASY part.

In fact, this has become a recurring joke between my agent and me. She’ll call and I’ll exclaim, “I have a new idea!” Sandra will then make a noise halfway between a scream and a growl, finishing with it, “Will you PLEASE focus!” Then we both laugh, in part because she’s learned that I really can.

Focus, that is. But that wasn’t always so.

House of Secrets is my fifth book for Love Inspired Suspense. The first book, A Murder Among Friends, was submitted along with a complete manuscript for a Love Inspired, as well as ideas for two single titles and seven ideas for other series books. In other words, my editor thought she’d opened a flood gate. Within a month, I hit her with two books and NINE pitches.

Needless to say, Sandra wasn’t the first person to beg me to focus.

The problem is that I want to write EVERYTHING. I read it all; I want to write it all. Mysteries, romance, women’s fiction, mainstream, science fiction, etc., ad nauseam. Problem is, that’s no way to build a career. Wanting to do it; being able to do it, is not the point.

The real point, for me, was finding the best way to share this incredible gift God had dropped in my lap. And hitting readers with a shotgun blast of ideas isn’t the best way to achieve this.

With a lot of prayer and even more guidance from the wise folks who’ve been down this path before, I began to, ahem, focus.

Find Your Best Voice

Because of my background, I can write in a lot of different voices. I’ve studied and loved most genres. Each has its own tone and structure. My own personal “voice,” the one I use to interact with friends and family, is a cross between lightly serious and snark. Anyone who’s heard me speak knows that as passionate as I am about craft and professionalism, I don’t take myself seriously. Life is too short not to laugh a lot along the way.

Thus my best writing voice has a lightly serious tone. Too serious for ChickLit; too light for most women’s fiction and mysteries. Best for suspense, science fiction, romance, and some mainstream.

Find Your Best Brand

After trying to sell more than 300 short stories, I finally got the message that science fiction isn’t my forte, no matter how much I love it. Mainstream fiction is the hardest field to break into and the hardest to brand. I couldn’t seem to sustain the plot of a straight romance because, well, dead bodies keep showing up.

In fact, every time I get another plethora of ideas, dead bodies appear . . . in barns, cars, houses, creeks. Even when I attempted a mainstream book, it usually started with a demise of some kind. I love great villains, too, the kind that make you cringe if you turn out the lights while reading. So…suspense. Or a romance with dead bodies.

Ah, she said, the light dawning: romantic suspense.

Find the Reader’s Expectations

Once I had my voice and my brand, I turned outward, toward editors and readers. Who buys romantic suspense? Who reads it? What do they want from it?

Ever wonder if Karen Kingsbury once wanted to be the next Tom Clancy? What if Jan Karon’s fans picked up her latest and found that it was a rip-roaring suspense tale set on a cruise ship and in downtown Miami. I suspect she’d find herself faced with many miffed fans.

The writer/reader relationship is an incredibly powerful one, and if you decide to write in a particular genre, then you need to remember what the readers want as well as following the story in your heart. They’ll be there for you if you do, every single time.

The Story of Your Heart

Does this go against the sage advice of “write what’s in your heart, then find a place for it” and “don’t write to the market”?

Not really.

You see, the story in your heart drives your voice, and your voice will show you the brand and the market…the path to your reader. The rest is the nuts and bolts of craft, of polish, of pushing your heart song to the next level: publication To be a successful writer, heart art must blend with business craft. When these two blend smoothly, your words can reach the world.

HOUSE OF SECRETS

THE LAWMAN’S UNLIKELY SUSPECT

Sheriff Ray Taylor always had a soft spot for the former minister’s widow, June Eaton…until he found her standing over the current minister’s dead body. She claims she’s innocent—and after a string of attacks against Ray and June, he’s inclined to believe her. So who is the real killer, and what is he after? Ray knows that the parsonage has to be the key. The old house is hiding a dark secret, something the pastor’s murderer is convinced June knows. Something that murderer will do anything to keep buried.

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Story Ideas by Robin Caroll

All her life, Robin Miller, writing as Robin Caroll, has been writing. Whether in diaries, journals, short stories, poetry, or fiction, she's been drawn to the storytelling aspect in life. She loves everything about books--the way they look, the way they smell, the way they feel. The author of 11 books and counting, Robin and her family proudly live in the South, with all its hospitality and days-of-ole traditions.

Story Ideas

I get asked all the time where I get story ideas. Most authors will tell you that they get ideas from everywhere…newspapers, magazines, newscasts, people watching, etc. One thing I’d never really considered is how to use the bad facts.

Point in case: One night, my husband and I were watching Dateline on NBC and they began a segment on child trafficking. Now, as a mother of three daughters, what I saw shocked and appalled me. I wanted so badly to change the channel, but I couldn’t. These poor girls’ plight ate at me. Made me raw. Made me physically sick.

Even after the show was over, I couldn’t get those children out of my head. I tossed and turned for the greater part of the night. Prayed. But my spirit was still at odds.

The next morning, I began some internet research on child trafficking. And got sicker. This was happening with such frequency and so many—right under my nose, and I’d had no idea! Talk about making me angry. Aside from the Dateline special, there weren’t reports every night on the news. There weren’t huge write-ups in the papers. This modern day slavery was silently happening every single day, and the vast majority of Americans were totally unaware.

At that point, I knew I’d have to write a book about this travesty. Since I write suspense, I knew that at least in my book, there’d be some justice for these children. And if a publisher would contract the book, maybe, just maybe, I could help raise awareness of this horror occurring. That was back in 2005 when I began writing Deliver Us From Evil.

The book was contracted by B&H Publishing in September 2008, and was released February 2010. In those five years, a lot of awareness has been raised regarding human trafficking. A lot of celebrities have gotten involved and speak out publicly. Several wonderful organizations have been formed and are making a difference. Just this past December, President Obama announced January was human trafficking prevention month.

So strides are being made to overcome this heartbreak. People are banning together to make a difference. And I’m very honored and pleased that my publisher has taken a chance on a book with such a hot and heartbreaking topic to allow me to tell a story and help keep raising awareness.

And I learned through the experience. Sometimes, story ideas aren’t always the unusual to have cool plot twists. They aren’t always a germ of an idea to teach a lesson. Story ideas aren’t always warm and fuzzy. Sometimes, just sometimes, a really horrifying and sickening fact can be turned into a book plot that will ultimately help in raising awareness of a global problem. At least in my instance, I pray that’s the case.

Deliver Us From Evil

A beautiful yet tough woman working in a beautiful yet tough setting, Brannon Callahan is a search and rescue helicopter pilot for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Strong faith and a decorated history of service have kept her one step ahead of on-the-job dangers, but there’s no precedent for what’s about to happen.

After a blizzard takes down a small plane carrying U.S. Marshal Roark Holland (already haunted by a recent tragedy), Brannon must save him in more ways than one and safeguard the donor heart he’s transporting to a government witness on the edge of death. Otherwise the largest child trafficking ring in history—with shocking links from Thailand to Tennessee—will slip further away into darkness along the Appalachian Trail.

---"The kind of novel 'Ripped from the headlines' was meant to describe. Compelling."--James Scott Bell, author of Deceived and Try Fear

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