Chapter 3 -- Getting the idea? (Or, "Where do ideas come from?") Inside each of us is at least one story -- make that multitudes of stories -- whether or not we get them down in a form in which anyone else can ever read it. The trick is to recognize them as such. People who are not interested in writing will let these stories pass them by, and that's just fine. People who think they are interested in writing but who really are not will also let these stories pass them by. These are the people who marvel at J.K. Rowling's series and wonder why they never thought of that. See, true writers never let anything pass them by. A line one night on the Prairie Home Companion radio show sums it up best. This is a paraphrase: Nothing bad ever happens to a writer. Everything is material. This is true. In fact, this is often the insult flung at people who write for newspapers: "You just want a headline!" Duh. One universal truth about writers is that they write to be read. They WANT people to read their stories, their essays, their poetry. This is why they need interesting material. And of course, interesting material is the stuff of life. Are you getting it? No? Well, simply put, ideas come from life itself. We can see you over there in the corner, shaking your head. You're thinking that the Harry Potter books aren't the stuff of life. He's a wizard! No wizards live on MY block. We have to agree that we know very few if any real-life wizards. But wait. We don't know any house elves, either. But we know people just like Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia and Dudley. Don't you? OK, now that you're seeing a little bit of what we mean, you are probably thinking that the characters of Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia are exaggerated in the Potter books. We agree with that (although we think that some people with more interesting families would disagree!). A writing coach instructs her students to take their ideas and turn them on their heads. She told author Barbara Elmore to do that in her first published book, Breathing Room. The coach said the author should write about a subject she knows well, then start asking "what if" questions. Barbara's subject was an adolescent girl learning to cope with asthma. Since she suffered serious asthma attacks, this was a subject she could handle with authority. But Barbara didn't want her book to be a list of methods for coping with asthma. (Snore.) So she threw in a problem...her heroine's mother didn't know how to handle a child with asthma. This made for some interesting situations. Her "what if" questions included these: What if the main character's mother was overprotective (many parents of asthmatics are)? What if the main character, Alberta, didn't want anyone to know she had asthma? What if she wanted to run track? What if, what if, what if. Having an idea and asking "what if" questions gives the writer a tangible way to create scenes. The scenes make up the story. Now we can hear you saying you've never had asthma...just like you were saying a little while ago that there weren't really wizards in the world.If you are thinking that, we diagnose you with an underworked imagination. Stories, or pieces of them, are everywhere you look. Our story doesn't have to be your story. And your story doesn't have to be about some illness you have fought and conquered, although that's never a bad idea. In Crookwood, Barbara's second book, the main idea came from a true story about a family that moved from the city to the middle of nowhere. The working title was "Nowhere," until an agent vetoed it. Characters in Crookwood came from all over -- family members, people Barbara knew and still knows. They were made up, yes, but each had the traits of a real person. You should always keep a real person in mind when defining characters. You can do this by asking if your character -- let's name him Solomon -- would really take a hot-air balloon to his family reunion. If you can imagine a real person doing it -- or better yet, if you know a real person who did it, then you're OK if it fits within the setting of what you are writing. By now you are getting tired of the message that reading is essential, but we have to say it one more time...you want good ideas for stories? Then READ. Many ideas for stories come from the newspaper. An author we know who has published two books of fictional short stories gets his ideas from characters he has known. Another colleague decided to write about good things in the world, so her story is about angels. Another took an event in history which she felt was under-reported (many are!) and retold the story in an interesting way that appealed to young readers. Ideas are as near as the house down the street where the eccentric man lives or as far away as a family in Afghanistan trying to rebuild its life after the Taliban, after Sept. 11, after the war. When you get an idea, write it down, nurture it, ask "what if" questions about it. Maybe it will be only a scene in your book, but maybe it will spin off ideas for other scenes. And maybe, just maybe, it will be your Harry Potter. NEXT CHAPTER: I HATE THIS! (Or, "Why should I bother? I am not going to be a writer.")