“Where do you get your ideas?” It’s probably the most asked question
at author events. Some authors dislike it but I don’t mind. People genuinely want
to know. Why not discuss? We’re not giving anything away. What the questioner
makes of our responses will be his or her very own, and not a problem for us.
I believe it was Ray Bradbury who claimed there was a
factory in Schenectady that manufactured all the ideas and sold them for a modest fee
but the most common
answers are “Newspaper stories” and “Eavesdropping.” True for me. A tiny bit of
information, almost an urban legend, was the start of my first Brooklyn book,
and a series of news stories about a very odd crime- thefts of valuable stained
glass from neglected cemetery chapels – was the germ, remembered for years, of
the second.
A character in the third was inspired by a newspaper clipping in a
library file, so that was newspaper, once removed.
Here are some of my recent discoveries:
My local paper is the New York Times which has a big real estate
news section on Sunday. Real estate is big news in this always changing
city.
Through the section covers major
development and trends in depth, lately I find some of the best stories are in the
Q
& A column. People are desperate to know how to deal with the difficult – noisy, nosy, threatening,
rude, cat hating -or cat adoring! - neighbors.
After love in all its forms, what can make
people crazier than the spot where money and “my home, my castle” meet? And clash?
Recent gems were questions about the mice and insects coming
from the apartment of a hoarder, a renter who does not understand why owners in
the co-op building object to his free-roaming cat, and a belligerent neighbor
who has taken to dropping in on every open
house for possible home purchasers. You think that one might discourage a buyer?
How about people who illegally occupy a
cheap, rent-controlled apartment in this expensive city? How about the guy who
makes his living investigating such cases?
The possibilities are endless.
Eavesdropping? I recently
waited at a bus stop where an older man, friendly, cheerful and probably
somewhat substance impaired, was flirting with a similarly aged woman. Far from
being annoyed, she seemed thoroughly entertained. When he said, “But how can I
marry you if I don’t know you’re a good cook?” she promptly said she was from Trinidad
and starting telling him about the wonderful Caribbean delicacies she could
make him. There was a lot of laughter.
My most surprising source recently was my very own files. I
found some notes about a long ago crime wave in a small, farm-country town near
where I grew up, perpetrated by the illegitimate children of the police chief. I thought, “Wow. I’ve just been handed a
plot.”
I have absolutely no memory of
ever writing those notes, and no source at all for the information. Did I read
it in the hometown paper? Did someone just tell me a story? Was it accurate or
just gossip? And does it even matter?
I can just make it up. It is fiction, after all. In the end, it doesn’t matter where it came from. It’s all about what we do with it.
I can just make it up. It is fiction, after all. In the end, it doesn’t matter where it came from. It’s all about what we do with it.
