Where Do Ideas Come From?
BY JL COPELAND
Alright?
September was slow. I was mad busy and yet the month dragged like an anchor-carrying child being led to a kissy grandmother.
Maybe it was the Nicksgate rejections beginning to pile; maybe it was because I didn’t write a single word of prose (more on that later), or some similar overlooked matter of deep inconsequence.
Music this for this post? I listened to this classic the other day,
and the line, “Hey, been trying to meet you,” stuck.
It was as if I wanted to say that line to myself. I spent the whole month trying to meet me: the person who has ideas, the one who writes. And trying to escape the one I become through inaction: that anxiety-plagued, doomy, defeatist dick.
Because, as mentioned previously, it’s high time to begin the next novel. The question is: Which one? And where do ideas come from?
Over the last few years, I have accrued half a dozen (or more) ideas for novels, across a dizzying variety of genres. They include:
The dark dystopian social commentary on excessive competition in Korean society one.
The working-class rural werewolf one.
A grim Korean cli-fi epic.
A near-future romantic noir.
A psychological horror (think The Woman in Black, but modern day, and with men—no, not those shade-wearing shitheads).
A comic post-apocalyptic adventure.
And last, but not least, the female survivors of a Spanish Armada shipwreck go on a Tarantino-esque rampage across Elizabethan Ireland one.
None of them jumped out at me, and I was anxious about choosing wisely.
Although I effectively learned to write as I wrote Nicksgate, knowing what I know now, I still wasted a lot of time.
I was determined not to let this happen with the next one (I don’t have many good writing years left before the cheese inevitably slips from the cracker).
For example, this time I would start with a character and their motivation (story is character, The Advice says), instead of my usual style of determining the ‘situation’ or ‘background’ and then groping around for people to populate these with.
A hidden entrance to a mine (discovered by my dad) inspired Nicksgate. Next came tone/atmosphere, then the ending, and finally a rough plot and the main character.
Now, there is no one right way to write a novel, but I only really got to know my main protagonist after about the seventh draft and then I had to completely rewrite the novel to reflect them. It felt back-to-front.
But this knowledge still wasn’t helping me settle on an idea.
When I went online for help on choosing, The Advice told me it was important to write about what interests you.
I spent two weeks asking myself, ‘What interests me?’
Answer?
Nothing.
Pretty bleak, huh?
I searched ‘Writing Inspiration.’ Google claimed the five main sources are:
Personal Experience: I’ve lived a pretty uneventful life (touch wood). I was once in a tribute band with my youngest sister called The Shite Stripes, which I thought might be a sound basis for a light-hearted coming-of-age tale in the style of Napoleon Dynamite. No, I wouldn’t want to read that either.
People-watching/eavesdropping: I’m not about to start staring at people and making notes. As a foreigner in Korea, and a bald foreigner (Koreans are so image-conscious that they pity baldness in the same way you might a person missing an eye), I try to keep a low profile to avoid people watching me.
And as for listening in on conversations, if they’re not introducing themselves, discussing their favourite food or practicing counting to ten, I struggle.
Other media and art: I put a few dozen movies and book titles in a bag and drew them out two at a time to see if any interesting mashups occurred. Results like this weren’t particularly inspiring:
Current real-world events: Are you kidding? As if I need to make everyone even more depressed.
The subconscious: And you definitely don’t want to go there.
I’ve also found that I’m not the kind of writer who likes to play with an idea for a novel by, for example, exploring it as a short story or getting to know a character through an imagined interview or a random conflict-ridden scene.
When it comes to a novel, I am all in or not at all. Think of me like one of those wind-up monkeys; when my key is turned, I keep crashing my cymbals together (and can do nothing else) until the novel is finished (or I fall over).
So, I’m going to knuckle down and trust in this old chestnut from artist Chuck Close:
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
I just need to trust myself (and Chuck) and begin, no matter what wisps of an idea exist.
So, I’m going to run with the cli-fi epic mentioned above. All I have is:
South Korea, thirty years in the future,
a border dividing the ‘haves’ in wealthy Seoul from the ‘have-nots’ in the drought-ridden south,
tone is Western noir (think High Noon, No Country for Old Men),
two female protagonists: one thirty-something, one fifty-something.
No outlines, no character bibles, no idea of any plot. That’s it.
Every little shoot starts from somewhere, I guess.
I also work well to deadlines and word count goals. I’ll put my word count at the bottom of upcoming newsletters again, so you can beat me if I slack off.
If I stick to a minimum of 1000 words a day, I should have a first draft by the winter vacation.
Some of my writer peers would look at the above ‘plan’ and total get it. Others would think that I’m mental.
That I’m making the same mistakes all over again.
Possibly.
And what if I’ve chosen the wrong novel?
Maybe I have. But at least I’ll know and can cross it off the list and pick another of those ideas above.
The alternative is, for the next three months, to continue to get up at 5 AM and stare at a blank screen for two hours whilst ruminating/fretting over the ‘perfect’ idea (and probably never find it).
And by the end of those three months, I’ll probably be repeatedly typing All work and no play makes JL a dull boy and chasing my family around with an axe.
At least with my ‘plan,’ I’ll have a first draft. Hopefully in the drafting trenches I’ll finally meet me; or at least the me that I like.
We’ll see. Worst case scenario: much pain, much pulling out of non-existent hair, and I crash and burn the draft into a mountainside. But I’ll probably get a blog post out of it.
Wish me luck.
Where do your ideas come from? Are you fortunate enough to have ideas boomeranged into your brain out of nowhere? If not, where do you find inspiration?
Speak soon,
JL
PS: For more writing ‘tips’ (tips used very loosely), check out my five-part series that begins HERE.
PPS: And for more freebies, fuck-ups and frustrations from a poor sonuvabitch stranded in Seoul, sign up for the newsletter: