shewhomust | Where do you get your ideas from? (Reply)

mabfan asks the traditional question "Where do writers get their ideas from?", and offers some of the traditional answers: the store on the corner of Lexington and Twenty-Third, the weekly magazine, The Idea Book...

I love this question. Jokey answers, like these, make me laugh. And although writers claim to dislike being asked it, sometimes, for specific stories, they have a really interesting answer. So:

Chaz Brenchley's Books of Outremer started with a mailing from the Folio Society advertising Sir Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades, and led to a discovery in a bookshop. His crime novel, The Samaritan, came from a poster for the Samaritans. (D'uh).

This is what Alan Moore has to say about the origins of V for Vendetta:

There's one at every convention or comic mart or work-in or signing, always one nervous and naive young novice who, during a lull in the questions-and-answers session will raise one fluttering hand aloft and enquire, tremulously, "Where do you get your ideas from?"

And do you know what we do? We sneer. We lampoon and ridicule the snivelling little oaf before his peers, we degrade and humiliate him utterly and rend him into bloodied slivers with our implacable and caustic wit. We imply that even to have voiced such a question places him irretrievably in the same intellectual category as the common pencil-sharpener.

Then, when we've wrung every last sadistic laugh out of this pitiful little blot, we have the bailiffs take him outside and work him over. No, I know it isn't nice. But all the same, it's something that we have to do.

The reason why we have to do it is pretty straight forward. Firstly, in the dismal and confused sludge of opinion and half-truth that make up all artistic theory and criticism, it is the only question worth asking.

Secondly, we don't know the answer and we're scared that somebody will find out.

It's only a day or so since

mevennen and I were agreeing that Iain Banks' Raw Spirit is a scam, a holiday for the author at the public's expense. It's also a very entertaining book, and it contains the best answer to the question "Where do you get your ideas from?" I have ever seen:

Leaving aside the obvious, "Class A drugs, actually," or, "A wee man in Auchtermuchty," I've sometimes wondered what sort of answer people really expect to this. What class of possible reply are people anticipating, or are they completely in the dark regarding the creative process?

The answer, by the way, is startlingly simple; writers get their ideas from the same place as everybody else. When asked The Question by an individual, it's perfectly okay to look them in the eye and say, "Well, the same place as you do." This usually leads to people saying they don't have ideas.

But everyone does. Everybody has ideas. If you've ever had a sexual fantasy that wasn't a perfect copy of somebody else's - you've had an idea. If you've ever thought about what you'd do if you won the Lottery - you've had an idea. If you've ever passed some time pondering the exact form of words you would use - having just heard from your bank that the Lottery cheque has cleared - to tell your boss or colleagues how much you have enjoyed working with them over the years - you've had an idea. If you've ever read a book or watched a film and thought, But what if this had happened instead of that - you've had an idea. If you've ever been walking down the road with lurid red kebab sauce dripping onto your good shoes when you suddenly think of the stingingly witty reply you should have come out with half an hour earlier in the pub, when somebody insulted you or said something you wanted to take issue with but couldn't quite work out what it was you wanted to say at the time - then you've had an idea.