In this week’s guest post, New Jersey-based author Stuart Clark examines where speculative fiction authors get their crazy ideas.

Running With The Idea
By Stuart Clark

A question that authors often get asked is “Where do you get your ideas?”  It’s a topic that many speculative fiction authors have blogged about recently.  The general consensus seems to be that ideas are everywhere and they come from observing the world around us.  But simply having an idea is like having salad dressing without the salad – It may be good, but it’s almost unpalatable on its own.

So what’s after the “What if?”  How do you take that initial idea and turn it into a full-blown story?  Whether you’re writing shorts or novels, there are a number of techniques you might want to consider.

Combination

It’s often been said that every idea has already been done, so how do you come up with something new?  If you’re a creative type, you’ve probably got more than one idea bouncing around in your head.  Why not mash two of them together and see what you come up with?  You can’t bake a cake without mixing some ingredients – why can’t the same approach be taken to writing?  You might come up with a new, fresh, perspective on an old story.  Heck, you might even create a new genre.

Inversion

Take your idea and flip it on its head.  That’s right.  You heard me.  Give it the full 180 treatment.  There’s a million-and-one stories of supreme alien beings invading Earth but what if it was us that was doing the invading? Us doing the wiping out?  What are our motivations for such behavior?  Are we at war or do we just obliterate everything in our path as we colonize the stars? Already your “What if?” question has blossomed into three or four more questions and additional threads of thought that you can pursue and explore.

Perspective

Tell the story from another viewpoint.  If aliens visited Earth today what would they think?  Imagine if they gate crashed a WWE Smackdown or a Dutch clog dancing festival.  What would they think?

I think of this every time I see someone out walking their dog.  Who’s the one in charge?  Is the human walking the dog or is the dog dragging along a human slave, tethered to them by the wrist?  In our frame of context we know the answer, but imagine someone or something that has never seen that before.  They have no point of reference whatsoever.  Then the dog leaves its little calling card on the street and…the human stoops to clean it up.  Really, who’s in charge here?  The world is ruled by Chihuahuas.

Tapping into your Memories

A long time ago a friend of mine asked me “If I make something easier am I being more efficient or lazy?” I didn’t have an answer for him back then and I still think about that question to this day.  On a recent visit to the grocery store I discovered that they sold peeled, hard-boiled eggs.  At first I was somewhat outraged.  Really?  Has it really come to this?  What is it that we do that we’re so busy we can’t boil and peel an egg.  Then my “What if?” question came.  What if we got to a point where everything was done for us? – and that’s when I remembered my friend’s question.  Are we being lazy, in which case do we become a society comprised of people trapped in bodies unable to move? Or are we being hyper-efficient, requiring these things to be done for us because there just aren’t enough hours in the day for the 24/7 society we’ve created? I thought both of these eventualities were interesting.  Maybe the two subcultures would exist side-by-side, despising each other in a future, dystopian world. The ideas kept coming, the catalyst for all of them a question a friend had asked me years ago.  Maybe there’s something deep in your memory banks that you can use to give fuel to an idea.

Extrapolation

One of the things I like about writing science fiction is that you have a great deal of latitude in where you can take your ideas. Extrapolation is all about taking your idea to extremes.  The only limits are your own imagination.

For example, we all know that the internet is a huge information resource, but it also comprises a lot of garbage and a lot of mis-information.  What if (there it is again) it became a tool of the government to control the population?  What if your access to the information was controlled based on your IQ level?  What if a small, underground faction began disseminating mis-information so they could become an intellectual elite?  So many “What if?” questions.  Many possible stories.

The one caveat with extrapolation is that you have to stay true to your story.  You could create the wildest, most outlandish universe ever put on the printed page but that universe is still governed by rules and laws that you, as its creator, define.  You cannot then step outside of those rules to tie up loose ends.  All that will do is leave your readers feeling cheated and, as an author, that’s the last thing you want to do.

Finally, there’s no reason why you can’t use any of these tools in combination with any of the others.  Throw two of your ideas together, take the result of that and flip it on its head.  Write that story from an atypical perspective and see where it takes you.

Good luck!

Stuart Clark is the author of the Project U.L.F. series of sci-fi adventure books. You can find him online at www.stuartclark.net

Be Sociable, Share!

•