Where do fiction authors get their ideas?
Where do fiction authors get their ideas? Obviously there is a huge variation from author to author but the simplest answer is they get many of their ideas from mining experiences in their own lives. Stephen King got his idea for Cujo, the novel about a killer dog, after encountering an aggressive St. Bernard that came charging towards him at a motorcycle repair shop. King was scared because he knew he wouldn’t be able to out run the dog and there was nowhere to go if the owner hadn’t stopped his dog. King wondered what if it hadn’t been a mean dog but a crazy dog. Then he thought maybe it’s rabid. Once he had written 70 or 80 pages he found out that the incubation period for rabies was too long, so that was no longer an option. As King put it, “You can never bend reality to serve the fiction. You have to bend the fiction to serve reality when you find those things out.”
The ideas for King’s stories start to flesh out more when he starts to consider the ramifications of what happens next. He got his idea for Cell when he came out of a hotel in New York and saw a woman talking on the phone. King thought to himself, “What if she got a message over the cell phone that she couldn’t resist, and she had to kill people until somebody killed her?” This book was derived from the concern of how we communicate with each other today.
While King tends to get inspiration from experiences he observes in his own day to day life other authors get inspiration from observing things from a larger scale. Brandon Sanderson got his idea for the world of Roshar, featured in his Stormlight Archive series, from thinking about the massive persistent storm on the planet Jupiter. The seed that started from thoughts about the power of that storm continued to grow for months and years and as it became mixed with other things eventually lead to the creation of Roshar. For the magic system in his universe he took inspiration from the Shinto religion of Japan that has the belief that every single object has a soul.
When I’ve written fiction stories I also usually start from my own experiences and observations and then let the ideas take a fantastical life of their own. I remember an assignment in junior high school where we had to write about what we did on our summer vacation. Normally I found assignments like that quite boring, so I decided to spice things up by adding a science fiction element to what would otherwise have been a mundane, real life story. I often wondered if we weren’t alone in the universe and who or what could be out there. That lead me to think about just what would have happened if I had been abducted by aliens during my summer vacation. How would I have reacted and what would I have done next? That idea quickly morphed into elaborate tales of government conspiracies, cold alien examination rooms, and out of this world adventures.
I ended up not only entertaining myself, but the other students, and even the teacher. Luckily she had a sense of humor and appreciation for a weird kid, so I even got a good grade after deviating significantly from the original assignment. That’s a common trend I noticed with authors of fiction. They get an idea, often from an ordinary source, but add a what if element to it, and then let their imaginations run wild trying to answer that question.
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