The Spark

Late stages of a work in progress are usually when I start putting the pieces together for the next thing I'm going to work on. Having something new to work on helps keep the panic at bay when I'm waiting to hear back about a piece that's with a reader or being queried.

One of people's favorite questions to ask writers is a question that I hate answering. If I mention starting something new or if someone finds out that I write, they always ask the same thing: where do your ideas come from?

My first issue with this question is the suggestion that the ideas exist fully-formed somewhere outside the writer, and we stroll in with a shopping bag and toss in the ones we want to keep. As though ideas pop into our heads instant and fully-formed like some kind of reverse Athena. Those instant moments of total inspiration are not impossible, but they're more part of the fictionalized image of writers than a typical fact of the work.

The second problem with this question is that there's not one answer. And I don't mean that there's not one answer for every writer (thought there isn't). I mean that I don't have one answer for me.

Every project is different. Evin started with staring at a poster of a panther for a few minutes too long. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" was the result of a marathon of noir movies and a personal challenge. With "Red Snow, PI," I had a prompt to start with.

As I wind down CANUS (Project 2016--or the first third of it, anyway), I've been on the lookout for new ideas. I've got a couple of loose novel outlines in the trunk, and while I really like both, neither has me fired up the way I want and I've got two short pieces I need to work on that I'm not sure where start with.

Looking for ideas is a little like waiting for water to boil. If you keep your eyes on the pot, it may not take longer to get going, but it'll definitely feel a lot longer. I've been trying to let things come in their own time, but the waiting makes me nervous.

I went into my last writing group meeting with nothing. I'm not at a place with CANUS where getting a couple thousand words critiqued by the group is going to help the project. I haven't started anything new since the secret project back in November, and I don't have more than a character name and a vague setting for the LIBRARIUM story. I figured the best that I could hope for was that I'd have something helpful to give the group members who had actually produced something.

Critique didn't take up as much of the meeting as it typically does, so we ended by doing a writing exercise.

The exercise was simple enough--you got a photo and twenty minutes to write something about it. I've done these kinds of exercises before. Usually, I get a few paragraphs of something not so great. And I didn't churn out great prose this time, either.

But I did find a spark. The photo I got, the couple of pages I wrote, stuck in my brain. The "what ifs" started spinning in my brain--a slow burn of a story taking shape. Nothing sudden. Nothing spiraling like the start of Evin. No specific character sketches like with Project 2016. But the spark. The first part of a fire like I haven't felt since starting Project 2016.

I made a few notes when I got home-- a high-concept pitch and a vague summary.

It doesn't help with the short projects, but it is exciting to know what comes next after CANUS.

By the end of 2018, I hope to have an alpha draft of my next project: BRUSHSTROKES.

I don't know how to explain where the ideas come from, how something goes from a nebulous question in the back of the brain to something you have to put on the page. I guess in the end it doesn't really matter, as the spark finds you and you don't let it go.