Where do writers get their ideas?

It’s unbelievable, the number of times I’ve been asked this question. But this is what a lot of people want to know.

Where do writers get their ideas?

Recently, at a children’s writing workshop, I asked this question and a little girl in the audience put up her hand and exclaimed – ChatGPT!

I shook my head. Nope. No thanks. I do not get my ideas from AI. It is unfortunate that this is the first assumption that people have. The answer to this question is that writers get their ideas everywhere. But how do you know that they’re ideas in the first place?

A young boy is walking down the road listlessly, while his mother talks to him firmly, holding his hand. He looked despondent and unwilling to listen to what she is saying but he has no choice. His mother can see that he is not listening to her, so she crouches down and meets him at eye-level and then she puts her hands on his shoulders and shakes them. He rolls his eyes.

I saw this unfold from a bus window, a few years ago and the scene stayed with me. Ideas are formed from scenes such as this, when I take it apart and look at what I can do with it and apply the universal ‘What if’ to it.

What if the boy is being berated by his mother because he was too lazy and he didn’t perform well in school?

Sure. Why not? But ‘what if’ can be a lot more exciting as well.

What if the boy’s mother is telling him that he has no recourse but to take revenge for his father’s death and to do that he has to infiltrate his uncle’s family and behave like he was grateful to his uncle?

Ooh. Melodrama. I love it.

That’s the beauty of ‘what if’. It allows you to take any situation and build something absolutely amazing out of it. It can be bonkers too. It all depends on what you want to write.

I look at every story idea as a seed, and unless we nurture a seed, it’s not going to grow into a plant, is it? But, it’s not possible to grow all the seeds, so the next best thing is to save them. I do this by jotting down the ideas in my phone so that I can always look through them whenever I need inspiration.

Ideas don’t just come to me through life observation. I’ve had ideas triggered by a movie or a TV show, a ‘what-if’ scenario that is completely the opposite of what is on screen. Ideas can come from news as well, because well, truth is stranger than fiction sometimes. Ideas have also come to me through dreams.

That’s beginning to sound a bit prophetic but it’s nothing as profound as that. Sometimes, a small part of a story begins to unfold in my dream, and if I’m lucky enough to remember it when I wake up, I try not to let it go.

I make sure it goes into my seed bank.