Too Many Good Ideas

Where can you find ideas for your novels?

Everywhere.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that unless I become a full time writer, there’s no way I’ll live long enough to finish all of my movies and novels.

Let’s say I’ve got another 45 years.

I’ve got over 30 movie scripts. And at least 15 novel ideas.

If I never get another idea ever again, I’ll have approximately enough ideas to last till my last day on this planet.

The problem is, I come up with ideas all the time!

And I try to give ideas away, too! I came up with an idea for a novel, but it involves magic, and I’ve got strong religious beliefs. I won’t write a book about spells and spell castings. But I grew up reading Wizard of Earthsea, and so one single line in the second book combined with a random setting in my head one day, and I could see the entire plot set up.

Will I write it? Absolutely not.

But I use this as an example for the millions of ideas I constantly get.

A bottle on a beach.

A diary in an antique store.

A closed and locked chest in a thrift store, contents unknown.

You bump into an angry looking man on the sidewalk.

World Hunger.

Secret governments.

Conspiracies.

A fully loaded pistol, lying in a gutter.

A dog named Fred.

You walk out of a building, and find a cell phone partially hidden under leaves.

That’s ideas for ten novels. It took me 60 seconds. I just sat and thought of mental pictures of various locations.

For over a year and a half, I tried to write a story about Squirrel Island in Maine. I kept bumping up against Storm of the Century, which essentially is a story about Squirrel Island, in Maine. Until one day, I wrote down: “Lights Go out.” And the next line I wrote was: “Nuclear war.”

Okay, I had the entire story right there. And I wrote the entire short story in an hour, and had it on-line right away.

Train yourself to look for ideas. They’re all around you. That folded piece of paper lying on the ground may be a telephone number of just somebody.

Or it could be the phone number to the most powerful assassin on earth. And if you call it, he may pursue you everywhere, shooting everyone around you.

It could be a love note from a wife to a husband, who unbeknown to her is an MK Ultra, and he’s just been activated. You find the note, and it’s on, racing to stop him before he makes it to Washington DC to shoot the envoy from Wester Island.

Or you could be the wife, who finds the activation note that triggers your husband to begin the trip to DC.

Ideas are everywhere. Walter Mitty could have had a long career as a novelist if he’d just written his daydreams down!

I remember reading a short story about a man who bought a used writing desk, and found a letter from a woman who lived a century before in the writing desk. So he writes a reply, and puts it in the desk.

Then the next day he looks behind the second drawer, and finds her response.

That was such a powerful story, and I’ll never forget it. The emotional impact of that story made me cry – and getting a 12 year old boy to cry reading a story isn’t easy. I think that story had a lot of impact on me as a writer. Because of it, I view everything as a potential writing desk, a potential wardrobe, a potential treasure map.

I found a kids’ menu stapled to cover a hole in a wall in my house, painted over. What if it had been a treasure map?

Buy a used cell phone off of Ebay? You’ve got SO MANY potential setups for a novel on that one, the hard part will be picking which one to do!