Writer's Lodge 2: IDEAS
How to get them and what to do with them
In this Issue:
What IS an idea?
Developing an idea. What if?
Your inner critic, and how to shut it up.
How to tell whether an idea has potential.
Does an idea have to be totally new and original?
What can you do today, right now?
Some exercises to try.
PLUS
An interview with bestselling author Will Carver, who talks about his ideas, where they come from and what he does with them.
Introduction
There can be few published writers who haven’t, at some point, been asked the question. ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
I have, and I don’t like it. I don’t really know how to give a satisfactory answer, because on some days I feel like saying “I have NO idea”, while on others my answer would be, “Everywhere”. Neither are very helpful.
So, in this issue of The Writers’ Lodge, let’s try to break it down.
What even IS an idea?
Look at the dictionary definition of ‘idea’ (here, for example). It’s not particularly helpful. The link above, for example, has eight different definitions of the word, and none of them are ‘the starting-off point for a piece of fiction’.
But something strikes me.
Of those definitions that are available, many people might consider the first (“1. Something, such as a thought or conception, that is the product of mental activity”) to be the most relevant when writing fiction. But in fact, I think the fifth has more to teach us (“5. A sense that something can happen; a notion or expectation”).
A sense that something can happen. Think about that for a moment. A good idea, certainly when we’re considering fiction, is one that suggests possibility. That seems to open the world up, rather than close it down. That feels like it has potential. A sense that something could happen. An idea is a jumping off point, not the end result.
An idea is a seed. It’s not something that we sit and actively come up with, starting from nothing. Ideas exist everywhere, and generally speaking they’re out there in the world, not inside us. We attract ideas by looking outwards, not within1.
So our job is to go out in the world, with our antennae up, to stay open to ideas, to recognise them and when one comes along that gives us ‘a sense that something could happen’ to make sure we capture it in some way.
What if?
These two words can take us to surprising places. A series of What if? questions, one after the other, can really start to open up an idea.
An example: Right now, out of my window, I can see a wall, up which ivy is growing. I can see the sky, my neighbours house. Not very promising, in terms of ideas?
But…. let’s take the wall. What if that wall weren’t there? What if it fell over? Still not that promising. What if walls were banned? Silly, right? How about, what if walls between houses were banned? Well, what would that mean? We’d have no privacy. So, what if privacy were banned? Not just walls, but all forms of privacy? Now, that seems to have some potential. Who’s doing the banning? And why? How are they policing it? What kind of character might fight against that? How?
Or we could easily go with, What if walls starting springing up everywhere? What if someone built a wall down the middle of a city? What if only certain people were allowed to pass? Who’d do that? Why? What if the wall was erected overnight and the person you loved was on the other side? What would you do? How would you contact them? Would you try and get to them? Who would stop you?
Now, maybe none of these are particularly wonderful ideas. But can you see how we’ve taken an ordinary, blank, garden wall, and already we’re talking about a dystopian story where privacy is banned, or a love story featuring two people who find themselves physically separated? And that was without even trying. I could easily have taken the ivy and got to, What if plants were sentient and out to kill us? (“Day of the Triffids” anyone?), or the fact that I can see my neighbour’s window and reached, What if I saw something happen in a neighbour’s house, but no one believed me? (“Rear Window”, perhaps? “The Girl on the Train”?)
Why not try…
Exercise 1
Have a go yourself. Do it now, wherever you’re sitting (though it probably helps to write/type your thoughts as they come). What can you see? Of that, ask yourself, What if? Again. Again. What if? What if? What if? If it’s not promising, so what? Just go with it and see where it leads.
Has this exercise taught you anything? Did anything surprising come out of it? Why not share with us in the comments?
Silencing your inner critic
So how do we keep our antennae up? I think this is actually one of the hardest things. Our lives are full, our brains are full. But the subconscious processes that recognise an idea, see its potential (and, if we’re lucky, work on it while we’re not looking) need space to operate. They need freedom.
Allow me to explain with an example from my own experience. A few years ago I visited a therapeutic fasting clinic (Buchinger Wilhelmi). I spent two weeks there, and for ten of those days ate nothing2. In addition to the physical benefits of this (weight loss, a reduced cholesterol, an increase in energy3), I also experienced a quite profound psychological effect. My thinking felt clearer, my brain lighter, less weighed down. I felt more ‘awake’, and more alive to experiences and what was going on around me. It felt like a reboot of my brain.
And one of the consequences of this was that I found I’d stopped rejecting ideas. Suddenly everything seemed alive with possibility, and the part of my brain that usually went ‘No, that’s a stupid idea’ or ‘No, that’s been done before’ seemed to be on vacation. My notebooks began to overflow4 and it seemed that almost anything (the books I was reading, the films and TV shows I was watching, the view from my window, the therapies I was having, people I saw in the corridors, conversations I overheard in the social areas, thoughts I had while swimming in the pool, the art on the walls, the music I was playing through my headphones) seemed alive with possibility. For a brief, wonderful time, everything seemed to lead to a What if?
Even the worst idea has more potential than a blank page
Now, most of these ideas didn’t lead anywhere, of course. Some were rubbish from the off, others seemed to have potential but then they fizzled, or didn’t grab me when I got home. But the point is, for that time I’d silenced my inner critic, and so when I came to look later, I had pages of ideas that I could at least interrogate, to see whether they’d go anywhere. Even the worst idea has more potential than a blank page. It may still lead somewhere, that leads somewhere else, that eventually leads you to an idea so exciting you can’t quite believe it started from such an unpromising beginning. You just have to trust the process.
But how to silence that inner critic?
It’s easier said than done, I think. We’re so used to that inner monologue, sometimes calm and helpful, but often telling us we’re not good enough, not perfect, we shouldn’t even try. I think the key, perhaps, is to listen to it, but realise it doesn’t always have our best interests at heart. When it says an idea is bad, or has no ‘legs’, gently tell yourself you’d like to spend a few more minutes with this thought anyway, thanks very much, just to see where it might go. This might feel uncomfortable, but sit with that discomfort. Remind yourself that there are no negative consequences here — it’s far better to fully examine an idea, only to reject it, than to not even give that idea a chance. Remind yourself that no idea is ‘stupid’. Ideas are seeds, they’re not supposed to arrive fully formed. The idea for my book, Before I Go to Sleep, didn’t arrive in one blinding flash. And remind yourself, too, that no idea is wholly original (but more on that later…).
Why not try…
Exercise 2
Look though your old notebooks. Find some ideas that you’ve rejected, or decided not to work on, or given up on. Or some that you’ve forgotten.
Take one of these, and write it again on a blank page of your notebook (or a fresh note in your app, if you’ve gone digital). Spend a few minutes writing about why you didn’t think it had legs, or gave up on it.
Now write a counter argument to that. Interrogate the idea, really see where it might lead. Follow every path it suggests, asking yourself “What if…?’ Brainstorm, don’t censor. Write in sentences, or just make notes. Perhaps a spider-diagram is more your thing? Go for it. No one will see this, unless you choose to share it.
If nothing comes, write the idea at the top of another blank page, then forget about it. Tomorrow, try again. You might be surprised at what your brain has come up with overnight.
Has this exercise taught you anything? Did anything surprising come out of it? Why not share with us in the comments?
Does an idea have potential?
Every idea needs developing before it can turn into something that will sustain a work of fiction. But, just as not every seed will germinate, not every idea has what it takes to grow sufficiently. They don’t all give rise to full-length novels, or even short stories. So how can we tell which ones are worth our time?
Some ideas are magnetic*
(*but not all)
Some ideas will attract others to them. An idea for a setting might come along, and you’ll realise that goes with an idea for a character you had last week, or a plot twist you thought of three months ago. The seed has germinated, things are starting to grow.
Here it’s important to recognise what’s happening, and to realise that these ideas, which might seem disparate at first, actually belong together. One or the other (or both) might need tweaking, of course. But something is happening. So go with it. Write the ideas that go together on the same page, and start to gather anything else that seems to belong there.
"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
— John Steinbeck
But, a word of warning. Don’t try to cram ideas together unless they really seem to be speaking to each other. That way madness lies, and if you’re not careful you might end up with a mess. Ask yourself, does the new combination of ideas open up more possibilities, or close things down? If the latter, take a step back perhaps, and proceed with caution. If something seems to almost work, but not quite, maybe it’s time to playWhat if? again.
Does it excite you?
I remember when I was working on my own book, Before I Go to Sleep. I knew I had a good idea, because it excited me. I could see a potential in it, I was eager to find out where the book would take me. I was also convinced that I was not the only person to have had this idea, that someone, somewhere, was probably working on it right now. I felt almost as if I was in a race against time, so convinced was I that this idea must’ve also occurred to someone else.5 The idea excited me.
"When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time. "
— Lady Gaga
Now, I don’t believe that all ideas will grip in the same way, or that being as excited as I was is necessary for an idea to be good. But, just be aware of how this idea makes you feel. There must be some curiosity, some level of excitement to see what you might come up with. If you’re staring at it and feeling no excitement at all (or, even worse, dread, or boredom, or just… nothing) then perhaps this isn’t the idea you thought it was. Put it down for a while. Forget about it. Something else might come along that chimes with it and suddenly unlocks its potential, or it might not. Wait and see, but don’t try to force it. You’re going to be spending a long time in the world you’re about to create, so it’d better be somewhere you want to be. That said…
Beware the desolate world
Some ideas will lead to a world (a world in which women have been stripped of their rights for example, or a world in which a huge shark is terrorising a beach resort). But a world does not equal a story, so once an idea is beginning to form you must ask yourself — am I starting to get a feel for the characters who will inhabit this world? What will happen to them as individuals? How will their struggle play out? What will their struggle be? Like it or not, pretty much every story has some conflict at its heart, something about a character’s life that is not right. So interrogate your idea once more — can you see it giving rise to one of more characters, who have one or more problems, that we can see them (try to) solve? If the answer is yes, go for it. If not, perhaps return to your idea, work on it some more. (And don’t forget, by ‘work on it’, I don’t necessarily mean ‘sit at your desk staring at it’. It can be just as helpful to ignore it completely and trust your subconscious, or perhaps try reading books that are vaguely related to your idea, or watching films or TV shows, or visiting an art gallery or taking a walk). Remember, go out into the world, but keep your antennae up.
Why not try…
Exercise 3
Are you working on a project now, or do you have an idea in mind for a project you’d like to work on? Try the following:
Draft an email, as if to a friend, explaining how this idea makes you feel, how it came into your life, why you’ve been so excited lately.
Try to boil your idea down to the following sentence. “This is a story about… (a person) who… (wants something) but… (something or someone is standing in their way).”
Has this exercise taught you anything? Did anything surprising come out of it? Why not share with us in the comments?
Does an idea have to be totally new and original?
The answer is no. Nothing is totally new, nothing is original. When I wrote Before I Go to Sleep, I thought I had a totally original idea. I hadn’t seen 50 First Dates. If I had, and I’d been convinced that everything had to be totally new, I might’ve seen that film and given up.
The point is, you will bring your own voice to the material. So trust that process.
Copy. Transform. Combine. Everything is a remix
This video is invaluable, especially if you’re struggling with the notion that your idea has to be brand new and utterly innovative. I urge you to take the time to watch it. (It’s in four parts - part 1 is below).
What can I do right now?
In addition to the exercises above…
Generate some ideas. Do it right now. Don’t think about it too much.
Make up ten first lines. Don’t worry about what they mean, where they’ll lead, or even what genre they’ll be in.
Reach for the nearest book you haven’t read. Read the first line and play ‘What if…?’ See where you might take the story. Or do it with the blurb on the back of the book.
When was the last time you felt truly scared? Play ‘What if…?’ (If you can bear it. Some things are too painful. If so, try the last time you felt truly excited, or joyful). Where might it go?
“The only thing she really remembers from that time is the shoes she was made to wear.'“
Play with that line. See where it takes you. Post in the comments if you like. If it takes you somewhere fun, use it.
Have a think about how you capture ideas. Do you carry a notebook? Everywhere? Do you always write in it when something occurs to you?
I struggled with this for a long time. I had a notebook, but sometimes an idea would occur when my notebook was inaccessible or it was awkward to write in it. Then I’d send myself a text message or email on my phone. I also had a whole bunch of digital notes, created using an app on my phone (Evernote, if you’re interested, but there are plenty of others). In here there were countless snippets, all labelled ‘Misc’ or ‘Ideas’, and mixed in with shopping lists and so on.
The end result was chaos. If I wanted to review my ideas, or find a particular note I’d made, I had to look in my notebooks (I usually had at least two on the go, plus one by my bed), my emails, my text messages and my digital notes app. Things got lost and/or forgotten. There was no method of collation.
Now? I use my digital notes app as my primary method of keeping notes. If I can make a note directly on my phone or via my computer I do so. I still keep a notebook handy at all times, but that’s for when something occurs when it’s not easy to get to my phone, or I want to draw something or maybe scribble a spider diagram (or my middle-of-the-night thoughts, when I don’t want to wake myself up fully by reaching for my phone). But, the crucial difference, is I now transfer those notes/thoughts from paper across to my digital app. This not only means my notes are all in one place (and searchable!), but also I often find more thoughts occur when I type a handwritten note up, or a muddy thought clears a little.
But that’s how I do it. Have a think about what might work for you. There’s no right and wrong. Some people like to have everything categorised for easy reference, others thrive on the chaos. Go with what feels right, but if your current method isn’t working, why not try something new?
Why not try…
Exercise 4
Are you stuck on something? Tonight, take a notebook to bed. Immediately before sleep, write down what you’re stuck on, and why. Then close the book and forget it. When you wake up, has your subconscious moved you any nearer a solution? You’d be surprised at how powerful this can be.
A chat with… Will Carver
Will is the bestselling author of the January Series (Girl 4, The Two, The Killer Inside and Dead Set) and more recently Good Samaritans (2018), Nothing Important Happened Today (2019), Hinton Hollow Death Trip (2020) and Psychopath’s Anonymous (2021), all of which have been selected as books of the year in mainstream international press. He has been longlisted/shortlisted for the Amazon Readers Independent Voice Award, Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, Not The Booker Prize and the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award.
I chatted to Will about ideas.
SJW: What is "an idea”?
Will: How high is ‘up’? What a question to start with.
I guess, for me, an idea is a question, that is not fully-formed, and warrants further exploration. It’s a spark. A word or sentence that makes you think. An item that makes you want to discover. It’s the small thing that keeps your interest among the overload of information that is our daily lives.
It’s the thing that, when somebody asks you what your book is about, and your book is about love and struggle and war and death, it’s the statement you use to describe it.
NOTHING IMPORTANT HAPPENED TODAY is a book about identity and disconnection and mental health, but, if I’m asked, I say it’s about a suicide cult where nobody knows they are a member until it’s too late. Because that was the ‘idea’.
How do you work on an initial idea and turn it into a finished draft? How long does that process take?
I tend to get ideas from three different places:
Something that is going on with me. Dealing with my chronic insomnia gave me the idea for Seth’s character in GOOD SAMARITANS. A good friend of mine got to a very dark place and thought the world would be better without him. I used the research/writing of NOTHING IMPORTANT HAPPENED TODAY to help me better understand such mental health issues. (This turned into a very mutated version of that initial idea.)
My own writing. You can do all the research you want but you always tend to discover things as you write. While writing HINTON HOLLOW DEATH TRIP, I was constantly examining what different people consider to be ‘evil’ or an ‘evil act’. But this lead me into thinking more about what is ‘good’. I started to consider faith, belief, Heaven and Hell. I already had the idea for THE BERESFORD but I didn’t know why the things were going to happen in the book - what was the motivation? But the two ideas fed perfectly into each other.
I’m pissed off most of the time. There’s always something that is annoying me or frustrating me – often to do with social media. I find that that anger is a great fuel for starting a discussion and sparking further ideas. And I would like to say that it doesn’t always have to lead to a dark place. For me, HINTON HOLLOW is a book narrated by Evil but it is more about how we can be better, how we can be good.
Often, I have to combine these ideas to come up with a story and then an entire novel. I may get an idea for a character that I see at the train station. I’ll note it down but may not use it for a few books.
I tend to work around three months of research and three months of writing. (A fair amount of the writing can be done in this research period as I ‘flesh out’ an idea.) Once I have my premise, my themes, the characters, I spend a lot of time figuring out the best way to tell a story. I think it’s incredibly important to get this right. Maybe a story would work best as diary entries or from a victim’s point-of-view. It’s not a case of gimmicks, it’s what is right and best for what you are trying to stay. I need all of this in place before I sit down and hammer it out.
Ideas come along the way, of course, but I like to get it all done in six months. (And I have to because I’m contracted to two books a year. Ha!)
I also get a lot of ideas in the shower. I don’t know why.
How do you know when an idea is worth working on?
If it keeps me interested, then it’s worth it. I think that’s really it. I think that’s all you can really do as a writer. I’m not thinking about my editor or the reader or whether it’s a bestselling concept, I just think about me. Is this something that I can give myself to for the next year.
For any writer, it has to start with that. If you want to write about vampires sucking each other’s blood and whatever, do it. If you are passionate about the second world war or Afghanistan or fossils or forensic science or astronomy or time travel, and you have an idea about that, write it. It’s worth working on. You’ll find the readers at the end.
For me, if it holds my anger for long enough, I’ll keep going with it. If it initiates further ideas, I know it’s right.
I do find that when one of my ideas comes to the fore and consumes me, when I’m lying in bed at night and hating my stupid brain for buzzing and making me type notes into my phone that I won’t understand in the morning, that’s how I know. I want it to grip me by the balls and beat me up until I get it to make sense on a page. (Or 300 pages.)
Have you had any ideas die in your hands? (By which i suppose I mean, you started working on a book but then it fell apart…)
I wrote a book called TAKE ME FIRST, I had the idea of writing it in reverse. So, instead of having the crime and then figuring out who it was and why it happened, you begin at the end and work back to see what actually happened in the crime. It was difficult to write but also great fun, an interesting challenge.
My agent gave it to a publisher and they hated it. Thought it was ‘too clever’. So I rewrote it conventionally. (I basically turned everything around the right way.)
All the tension was lost. It was rubbish. The publisher hated it more. And I hated myself for doing it.
It died as a book, but the idea was good…
I wasn’t doing it justice. I wasn’t doing it right.
I deleted the entire book and left it a few years. (98k words)
Then I started thinking about good vs evil and I realised, the best way to tell that particular story was from the point of view of Evil itself. That book became HINTON HOLLOW DEATH TRIP.
The awful writing and structure had gone but the idea was still there. So, while a book may fall apart and get thrown away, don’t let go of the initial spark.
Can you remember getting the idea for Psychopaths Anonymous?
When my dad died, I was clearing out his house and found a book called ‘Steps To Christ’. It’s something that gets given to people in AA. (It clearly didn’t help him.) I kept it. I’m not sure why. I guess I wanted to see what it was about; religion interests me. I didn’t take anything else.
I guess I knew I would use it at some point. I wasn’t ready for it then. I didn’t have the idea, but I had the interest and, like so many of my other ideas, it was something that affected me and I wanted to pursue it.
I had the character of Maeve from GOOD SAMARITANS. She was a heavy drinker but also highly functioning. I wanted to tell her story. So I read the book that I had picked up from dad’s house. (This was maybe eight years later.) Obviously, it spoke a lot about faith and God and I felt like it wasn’t really anything to do with addiction.
So I read 12 STEPS & 12 TRADITIONS. What I thought was a bible for addicts.
And it pissed me off. (One of the ways I get ideas.)
There’s a lot of sense in there and a lot of people have been helped. But there definitely seemed to be an element of recruitment towards the church. I knew how much that would annoy Maeve. I found people who had done the program and it had made their lives worse. That was the spark of an idea. (And it fed on from the good/evil/Heaven/Hell idea I’d been thinking over for a couple of books before.) It also gave me an idea of how I would structure the book.
That was all I needed to get started.
I decided to make Maeve follow the 12-Step Program for alcoholics and give insight on each step.
That made up the first half of the book.
I then stopped, wrote THE BERESFORD almost all in one go and came back to the second half of PSYCH ANON, buzzing.
I’ve researched psychopathy for so many of my other books. The psychology fascinates me. Maeve is clearly psychopathic. It dawned on me that it would be possible to be a psychopath and function in society, much like alcoholics.
What if there were more psychopaths out there? What if you knew one? What if you were one? Could they get together and talk things through?
And the Psychopaths Anonymous group was born.
I also knew that it would offer up some much-needed light to the darkness of investigating alcoholism.
Honestly, I don’t even remember writing the second half of that book. It just came out of me. I guess that’s how you know it must be a good idea. It’s enjoyable to write it.
You write two books a year and they’re always inventive and interesting and ‘high concept’. How do you come up with the ideas? Do you worry you’ll run out of ideas or not be able to find one that interests you?
I never worry about running out of ideas. There’s too much going on, too much to discuss. I’ve been writing things down for years. Collecting things that will eventually germinate into more than just a spark.
My next book, THE DAVES NEXT DOOR, is an amalgamation of several ideas that have been brewing for half a decade. The note I wrote the other day about an evangelical preacher could sit there until 2027 before I have something to go with it that makes it a story.
I have possibly 5-7 books that I know I am going to write, so even if I slowed down and wrote one of those each year, I’ve got enough to get me to 50. If I have no more ideas in that time, I’d be shocked.
The whole ‘high concept’ thing is funny, to me. I’m lucky that I have a publisher who encourages me to write about things that others probably would not. But she also thinks the way I write, my voice, somehow makes everything seem high-concept.
Honestly, if you want to get yourself some ideas, stop talking for a while. Just shut up and listen. There’s so much happening. You can do your talking through the writing.
Do you carry a notebook? Or keep things digitally? Do you write everything down or trust your memory?
My whisky-addled brain somehow cannot recall what I had for breakfast yet also seems to retain a lot of information. It’s all in there somewhere and I think it’s always sparking. But, yes, I have to write everything down. I have pads, napkins, backs of bills, wrapping paper, all with spitty, little doodles and gems of information that could get used one day.
When my nan died, I found a folder that contained old photos and letters written to and from her in the 60s and 70s. There is so much in there that got my brain firing. I would suggest that the homes of dead relatives are a good place to start if you feel the inkwell is running dry…
I do also use the Notes app on my phone. There are years of posts in there. I just did a search for ‘Book Idea’ and found seven posts from last year alone.
Here’s one I wrote on 24th January, 2013 at 11:48. (Probably after a shower.)
Book idea - If Jesus comes back, we’ll kill him again.
Possible second coming. Compound. David Koresh style. Ambiguity in the reader. Research Bible and claims of being Jesus.
I wonder if I’ll ever use it……
To be honest, I’m already thinking of ways I could put it together with my evangelical preacher idea. Watch this space.
Do you have any advice for someone worried their idea isn’t ‘good enough’?
I know it’s been said before but there’s no such thing as a bad idea. But there is an abundance of bad writing. You could have the greatest, most original concept in the world, but if you don’t write it in the way that best gets that idea across, then you have wasted it.
I hear of people never throwing away things they have written, even if they are not good enough. My advice is to BIN IT.
Select all.
Then hit delete.
It sounds scary. But here’s the thing: the bad writing is gone, but the idea still stands. The idea is always there. Reshape it. Tell it in a different way. Keep it interesting for you as a writer and it will be interesting for the reader.
I’m answering that as a writer, of course. I mean, I’ve read The DaVinci Code and loved it. A brilliant idea, but it’s not Hemingway. So, I guess my point is, what do I know?
I have no idea.
For more, follow Will on Twitter, take a look at his website and of course buy his latest book.
Before you go…
Don’t forget to introduce yourself in the comments section! And let me know what you’d like us to cover in future issues…
Happy writing!
Though it could be argued that some are within us, in the form of memories and experiences we’ve had in the past. So looking inwards can help, perhaps. But the general point remains - ideas don’t begin inside us, they begin out in the world.
Actually, about 200 calories a day.
Counter-intuitive, I know, but this was definitely my experience, and there is sound, scientific evidence for it. When we fast, we live off our reserves of fat, and the body is VERY efficient at burning this energy. The end result is, we actually feel better, and more energetic.
Not literally — I wish! — but you get the picture.
This was at least partly because Before I Go to Sleep was triggered by the death of Henry Molaison, or ‘Patient HM’, whose obituary I read. Some (most?) ideas aren’t linked to an event like that, but my point is the same. The idea excited me.