A Pearl of an Idea

Where do ideas come from? How does a writer fill a pile of blank pages into a story or a book? These are questions most aspiring writers ask but the answers they receive will be many and varied.

"There's nothing new under the sun," the old saying goes; ideas are not the be all and end all of writing. You - the writer - need to present story and book ideas in a fresh and new way to your readers. Just as perfect grammar and a pristine manuscript will not ensure publication, neither will a good idea if it is not giving the reader a new look at something they usually know quite well.

Ideas are the fuels that feed our writing. How do you find them? Once you begin to look for ideas, you will see them everywhere. At the beginning of your writing career, you might keep an ideas notebook. Look at newspaper headlines for germs of ideas. Brainstorm on paper, letting the thoughts flow, writing until the flood dries up. When one thing doesn't work, try another. Change your location, and/or your method. If you write sitting down, try standing or walking as you scribble. You could even lie on your back and study the ceiling, or the clouds. Change the times that you try reaching for ideas. Do you need to be in a busy place, or do you prefer to be alone? Keep experimenting until you find what works for you.

Most of my ideas come from my own life experiences. Often, I use one moment of an event and build a fictitious story around that. At other times, I turn an actual event around and say: "What if I, or he, or she had done this, instead of that? What might have happened?"

Sometimes I feel that my idea is not worthy, that nothing will come of it. That's when I remember the oyster. A pearl begins life as a little piece of grit that worries the oyster so much that it covers it with layers and layers of its essence. An idea that grows into a story is like that little piece of grit -it's when it is finished that it is a thing of beauty so don't worry your ideas into extinction before you see what they might become.

Find your little piece of grit and cover it with enough words to change its shape so that it becomes more than it was. Like the oyster, you just might end up with a thing of beauty.