Ideas

Based on my limited experience, it seems like ideas for stories are not scarce. But non-writers ask the question, including my own mom: where do you get your ideas for stories?

Well, as I mentioned in a previous post, the idea for Next Time popped into my head in the wee morning hours a couple of day after a two-week stay in Ireland. I can’t explain how that happened - the idea popping into my head, I mean. I know how the Ireland trip happened, thank you very much.

The germ for First rolled around in my head for quite a while. I imagined what it would be like to be the first person to travel to another star system and how it would feel to be utterly alone. The trigger that made me write it out was an article I read about space travel. I don’t remember it all and can’t find it now, but the gist was that maybe if we could control the time component we could easily manipulate the other variables involved in travel. Or at least that’s what I got from it.

Going back further, the idea for Sunset and the other two books in the series came more from a philosphical stray thought. It was the time of the anti-hero in culture (think The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc.). The idea of a person who performed acts that were morally wrong but remained sympathetic to the audience intrigued me. What could i have a character do that hadn’t been done before and keep the reader from throwing the book against a wall? Murder, cooking meth, stalking serial killers…those had been done.

So I went with kidnapping. We know it exists and there’s a hidden world we rarely glimpse where kidnappings take place but we choose to ignore the stories. What if my main character was a kidnapper? How would he get into such a line of work, if you want to call it that? And how would the reader be able to identify with him and actually want to read his story?

I think I found a good solution and one that drove the very first scene in the book.