Where Writers Ideas Come From

  People are always asking authors where they get their ideas. In my experience this varies with each writer and each piece of writing. With me, ideas seem to come from the oddest things, usually something a little peculiar or strange that I encounter. For example, in my humorous   fantasy White Queen, Black Knight, there is a scene where Dorian, the protagonist, enters a tunnel marked with the words "Dead Man's Tunnel" and a skull and crossbones. Well, I used to travel a road that went under a railroad bridge. Because it was also a curve and the road was narrowed to one lane, many head-on collisions occurred when a car entered it from each end at the same time. As a result, someone had placed graffiti in the tunnel in large bold letters, "Dead Man's Curve" with a skull and crossbones beneath it. That gave me an idea for a character who must travel through a tunnel marked in such a manner. I thought, Perhaps my hero is lost, maybe he was enchanted by a sorcerer to always head in the wrong direction. This thought gave me Dorian, a naive youth, who on his way to a tournament to win the hand of a princess is enchanted by evil sorcerer Mordrake to cause Dorian to always take the wrong path.

My Morgaine Series of eBooks started while listening to that old seventies hit, Dancing in the Moonlight. I pictured the scene, a moonlit clearing in the woods and odd people, Wiccans perhaps, dancing in the moonlight. I thought, what if an ordinary woman should come upon such a scene. I wanted to make it a supernatural romance, so I decided that the love interest would be an immortal sorcerer posing as a psychic, and the woman who falls in love with him would be an ordinary woman. Of course, there had to be a rival, which was a witch, Morgaine. Then I got to thinking, if the sorcerer was immortal, sooner or later he would have to disappear since he would not age. In another novel of the series, I had him go missing. His love, of course, hired a private investigator to find him. In another novel in the series, I got to wondering how Morgaine became a witch. I also saw a picture of little men attending a university of magic. I had Morgaine step into that picture to learn to be a sorceress. In another of the series, I got my inspiration from The Book of Revelations in the Bible. My protagonists had to stop an impending apocalypse.

Ideas can come from anywhere. All it takes is a little imagination to transfer something mundane or unusual into a scene, which in turn translates into characters (to be in the scene), background and an event. One thing leads to another, and soon you have story or a novel.