What are the sources of ideas?

From Revising Fiction by David Madden:

"'Where do your ideas for fiction come from?' writers are often asked. Here are a few typical answers:

1. My own direct experience — what I have done or what has happened to me. (At work here is the autobiographical impulse, which sometimes becomes a compulsion.)
2. Experiences of strangers or friends that I have only observed, or have been told about as stories.
   
3. Actual events reported in newspapers and sometimes on television.
4. Notions or concepts or images for stories that my reading in fiction and poetry, or my viewing of movies and plays, stimulates.
   
5. Experiences that well up suddenly out of my subconscious.
6. Experiences that I willfully and deliberately conjure up out of my imagination — experiences that I see and feel only in my imagination. (Beginning writers have great trouble imagining stories.)
7. Publisher's ideas — a novel about white collar crime, for example.
   
8. Ideas from my friends and relatives.
9. Ideas suggested by dreams.
10. Possibilities posed by a new or different technique. (One then imagines uses of that technique.)

Once a writer has a story, he may make a short note, file it away, turn it over to his creative subconscious, and wait for the day — perhaps five years later — when the compulsion to tell that story takes possession of him."

Assignment: (From Fiction Writer's Workshop by Josip Novakovich) "One page . . . Write a scene of a story from a glimpse you have had of a group of people — in a cafe, zoo, train or anywhere. Sketch the characters in their setting and let interact. Do you find that you know too little? Can you make up enough — or import from other experiences — to fill the empty canvas?

Objective: To find out if you can make much out of little. If you can, great, If you can't now, don't worry, you might later, or you'll have to get your stories from other materials.

Check: Can you visualize these people further? Can you begin to hear at least one person speak? If not, go back and find a way of talking that might fit one of the people in this group, and carry on from there."

The "So-What" Factor

Assignment: When you finish reading a scene, ask yourself, "So what? Is this scene necessary?" Read the scenes before and after the one in question and ask yourself if it really matters. Does whatever happens deserve its own scene? Could the information be placed in one of the neighboring scenes?

From Novelist's Essential Guide to Crafting Scenes by Raymond Obstfeld

Copying to improve style

This is an exercise I have come across in several different books. The writer is asked to copy a selected segment — a few paragraphs, a scene, or a chapter — from a favorite author's novel, preferably a best seller. By copying, I mean to handwrite out these selections. Of course, this is not for using in the writer's own manuscript, but for study.

How does copying text from a favorite novel help the writer? In his book You Can Write a Novel, James V. Smith, Jr. says this teaches several lessons. First, it helps the writer to master simple mechanics such as punctuation. Secondly, it helps the writer learn publishing conventions of the genre from which the writer is using. For example, it gives the writer a perspective on chapter length and scene to scene transitions. Next, it helps the writer create images with either much detail or a few specific word pictures. Also, it helps the writer study dialogue. Lastly, it helps the writer build scenes by building conflict, suspense and character motivation.

The idea behind copying writing is to develop prose style. The writer might benefit by performing this exercise a few times before writing a draft of a short story or novel. It can also be repeated on those occasions when writer's block seems to be tightening the writer's hand and throat. "As a method of studying writing," says Smith, "I have found none better. It works. It will teach more about professional, salable writing than any three college courses or any five writing handbooks."

Assignment: The following exercise is from Finding Your Voice by Les Edgerton. "Choose a book, a short story or an article from your favorite writer, one whose work is at least fifty years old. Select a favorite passage and type it out. Try to analyze how the sentences work. Compare it with a piece of your own that uses similar material, paying particular attention to how you both handle the elements listed below.

1. Scenery descriptions (active or passive?)
2. Dialogue
3. Flashbacks or backstory
4. Dialogue tags or attibutions
5. Use of adverbs and adjectives
6. Use of punctuation and grammar
7. Elaborate transitions
8. Andy idiosyncrasy that seems archaic or 'odd' to you"
   

That emotional connection

In The Writer's Digest Writing Clinic, the fiction writer is encouraged to make sure he or she has made an "emotional connection" with the reader. One way to do this is for the writer to create an emotional bond between the reader and the protagonist of your story. How can the writer test this?

Assignment: "Ask a friend or a critique group member to read the opening pages of your novel and to place a star next to the point where he begins to feel an emotional bond with your central character. Does this point match up with what you intended? If it doesn't, rework the way the hook is presented. Are the supporting sentences too thick? Is the focus off?"

From The Writer's Digest Writing Clinic

Eavesdropping

In his book 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, Gary Provost says eavesdropping is one way to improve your writing when you're not writing:

"Be nosy. Listen to conversations on the bus, in the elevator. Screen out the words sometimes and listen only to the music. Tune in to teenagers' conversations and you'll pick up the latest slang. Pretend to be reading on the park bench, and you'll hear how words are used to convey more than they mean. Find out what people are talking about, what they care about. All of this will help you to communicate more effectively through your writing."

Lou Willett Stanek, in her book So You Want to Write a Novel, encourages the writer to go all out when it comes to eavesdropping:

"You need a cop in your story and you know he doesn't talk like your banker husband? If you live in New York, there is almost always a parade somewhere with a gaggle of cops lining the street talking to one another. Hang around and listen . . . if you live somewhere else, discover where the cops hang out, take a walk, and eavesdrop. It's okay. You're working."

Any place where a group of people are gathered — weddings, restaurants, the mall — is a treasure trove of conversation which can be used in your writing.

Assignment: Collect five snatches of conversation throughout your workday. Write as much about the conversations in your writer's notebook.

The Sound of Your Writing

The following is based upon an exercise from Ursula K. Le Guin's Steering the Craft:

Le Guin claims that children have an appreciation for the "repetition and luscious word-sounds and the crunch and slither of onomatopoeia" that we outgrow as adults. She advises that "an awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer" and that the writer should feel free to "play with rhythms and sounds of the sentences" he or she writes.

Le Guin offers the following as examples of writers who play with rhythms and sounds in their writing:

• Susie Asado by Gertrude Stein
• How the Whale Got His Throat by Rudyard Kipling
• The seventh paragraph of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain

Assignment: "Write a paragraph to a page (150-300 words) of a narrative that's meant to be read aloud. Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect — any kind of sounds-effect you like — but NOT rhyme or meter."

Three details a day

Assignment: Every day in your writer's notebook, write three details from life. Get into the habit of consciously observing what is going on around you by using the five senses. You will probably never use all the details you record, but sometime you may pull one out for your writing and it will pack the punch you need.

Example:

• frozen waterfalls hug the carved-out cliffs along the highway
• faint voices of Christmas carolers down the street
• musty odor hanging in the air of a used-book store in an old building

Remember to get a mixture of the five senses; also, remember to include details about unattractive things as well as pleasant things.