“where do you get your ideas from?” aka the creative process
The writing community, known for many things including rampant pretension, deep earnestness, and undeserved self-importance, also apparently hates being asked, “Where do you get your ideas?”. I feel like I’ve read multiple author’s notes, afterwards, forewards, interviews, etc, where a writer opines the plebs, once again, asking gormlessly, “but like, how’d ya think it up?”
When I told my parents I was writing a novel (terrible terrible idea, do not do this unless the ink on your publishing contract is already dry, extremely embarrassing otherwise), they both commented, multiple times, on their surprise that their daughter could produce a novel. Not because they thought I lacked the skill, but because neither of them are writers by trade, and in fact, both seem to view it as some sort of secret alien skill that is completely unknowable to them. My mom has declared, multiple times, “I wouldn’t even know how to start!”
Plebs 🙄
Anyway. I’m with my mom on this one. How do I start? How do I finish? How do I do that simultaneously boring but also vital stuff in the middle? How do I make it good? How do I make it worthwhile? How do I make it funny, or sad, or electric?
Maybe the writing community doesn’t like this question because the answer, so often, feels like, “dude, I wrote the damn thing and even i don’t know”.
Each writing element, on its own, is one thing. Prose, dialogue, character, themes, plot, structure, framing, atmosphere, the list goes on. But writing a story start to finish almost feels more like a completely separate skill than being good at any one element. It’s something that is more than the sum of its parts.
In the world of fanfiction, my creative process was thus: I wrote what I wanted to see. The characters and the world and the voice of the source material was taken care of for me— my only job on those fronts was to interpret as I saw fit. It was the plot and story that I had to come up with myself, and in fandom I was of the mindset that no one was going to give me exactly what I wanted except me, so… I just did it myself. Be the change you want to see.
This might have been noble if I wasn’t otherwise a snooty, picky bitch about the fic I actually did read. In both Supernatural and MDZS fandoms, at my most entrenched, I was barely reading fic by other authors because I was so easily annoyed by interpretations I deemed wrong (funny enough, much of this drama revolving around the fact that I think both Dean and Wei Wuxian are gay ((THERE ARE DOZENS OF US!!!)) whereas most of fandom thinks they’re bisexual). So I ended up taking on the onus, if you could call it such, of writing such hits as, “What if Dean was gay and didn’t realize it?” or, “what if Wei Wuxian was gay and didn’t realize it?”. At least in MDZS, this is literally a major plot point… though it could be argued it’s a big neon anvil-shaped character note hovering over Dean’s head for the entire series, threatening to drop at any second, crushing him like a bug. (Writing that last sentence gave me such a nostalgic rush of “hehe i love when bad things happen to characters I love.” Ah, the foibles and follies of ye olde fandom days…)
So, where my fanfiction ideas came from was the source material. Or, being generous to those with different opinions, my interpretation of the source material. Still, though, I would argue that a primary driving force for me, even in my fanfiction where I was writing in worlds and with characters I didn’t create myself, was to draw an arrow between the writing elements above directly from the source material to my story. For example, one of the themes in MDZS that really hit for me was Wei Wuxian finally finding a safe place to land with Lan Wangji after years of instability from both societal and familial external factors as well as internal factors like his own fevered brain (<3). This same theme manifests in pretty much all of my MDZS fic, and draws directly from the source material. Supernatural is similar (allowing room for difference as it’s a source material created by a bazillion people which will always invite wider interpretations as opposed to the single viewpoint of a single author like MXTX). Dean’s self-worth issues and projection as a masculine suave cool guy action hero ladies man when in reality he is a soft-hearted mommy’s boy with a heart of gold who just wants to be loved and domesticated is like, the central theme of pretty much every deancas fic I ever wrote, lol.
Maybe this seems obvious, but there is a large quantity of fanfiction out there that is almost completely divorced from the source material. And some of that fanfiction is also divorced from all other writing elements, but there’s no need to be mean, and fandom is and should be a place free for creative expression, so let’s leave that right where it is.
Fanfiction, to me, is like a frayed sweater. There are a lot of threads, knit by someone else. I have now come into possession of this sweater somehow (stolen, thrifted, gifted, dealer’s choice) and the question at hand is: which threads do I want to pull? And how do I weave this sweater back together in a way as to complement the original garment that is true and authentic but also leaves my mark on it? An egregious metaphor, but you get it.
My approach to original work is similar, except now I have to knit the sweater myself, which is like, a lot harder. Any threads I choose to pull were already left there by me. It’s mes all the way down.
I’ve never found getting ideas to be the hard part about writing. Ideas come in a million ways, from a million different directions, and in a million gradations of detail. Some ideas I’ve spent weeks daydreaming about, only to never put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard) and actually write anything out. Some ideas are like newly birthed babies in my palm, and end up getting raised, clothed, fed, and put through college by me. And the thing is, the difference between these approaches isn’t the quality of the idea, but simply the ideas I saw through to the end. Which sounds inane, but inane things can be true.
When I knew I wanted to write a novel, it wasn’t a matter of “Gee, what am I going to write about?” It was “Gee, I actually have to commit to one of these thousands of ideas I have and write about it for an entire book.” So, Don’t Worry About It, as much as I love it and cherish it and think it’s a worthwhile and good story, was mostly born of me closing my eyes and blindly deciding, “Okay, I’m sticking to that one.”
And I did. And it was hard. I have commitment issues.
Once that part was over, the hardest part of writing began: the actual writing (whatever step of writing you are currently on is the hardest, btw). Don’t Worry, in its very earliest stages, leaned way harder into the romcom aspect of fake dating (and may have originally started as a fanfiction idea but i’m taking that to my grave). And then, as many of my fics that started as romps did before it, it became a lot more serious, and, frankly, interesting.
I write all of my work almost entirely in chronological order. There are scenes here and there that I start chewing on in advance, which tend to get written out in either my phone’s notes app, or an email to myself, or at the end of the story document, etc. Somewhere within easy reach. These then serve as benchmarks I can write to, though there are also a lot that never make the final cut because I never run into a place to naturally slide them in— it ends up being a give and take, though I like to imagine I err on the side of “what’s right for the story” as opposed to “I wrote it, so it should be included”. Fine line to walk, because “what’s right for the story” is an incredibly amorphous statement.
To the Supernatural crowd, remember the days of “we go where the story takes us”? For those not in the know, anytime something shitty happened on Supernatural, TPTB would default to, “we go where the story takes us” to justify their shitty decisions. Obviously, this drove me nuts, because, like, stories don’t exist independently in the world. You guys wrote it, you take ownership of it. Acting like a story is an overexcited dog that slipped its leash and is off pooping in all the neighbors’ yards and causing general chaos and acting like you have no responsibility over it is stupid, right? “Well, the dog did it, not me.” Ok, dummy, sure, except for the fact that it’s your dog.
AND YET.
It would be disingenuous of me to pretend like there isn’t a deeply intangible part of my writing process that is similar to “going where the story takes [me]”. Sometimes, it really does feel like the story is happening without me and I’m scrambling to type fast enough to keep up. Yes, it all comes from me, but it’s almost like the story comes from somewhere in my body other than my brain, bypassing conscious thought altogether, and exiting out through my fingers.
The funny thing is, this intangible part of my writing process is probably the most important. Sometimes I’ll include a turn of phrase or line of prose or character note that feels important, only to realize upon editing it felt so important because I had already included it earlier on (likely weeks/months ago, so like, I’ve forgotten, but also not??). This internal, unconscious dialogue that always seems to be happening inside me when I’m writing a story is very strange, and feels even stranger to try to put into words. Sometimes I refer to it as “lateral thinking”, where concepts and themes and dialogue and so on all smash together in my head and somehow sort themselves into something legible and meaningful. Like when you put a bunch of garlic in a plastic container and shake it up and the cloves come loose from the skin.
So… it just happens. But also, it doesn’t just happen…s.
To make matters more complicated, I know that I have a natural knack for writing. I’ve worked hard and honed my skills, to be sure, and will always be learning, but even when I was a kid, I had the ability to put words to page in a way most of my peers either couldn’t or weren’t interested in. So here I am, saying I have a mystical "lateral thinking” creative process, plus at least some innate talent, which again, not much of this is actually explaining how I write. I’m bragging about my writing prowess, but can’t even put how I do it into words. Typical pretentious writer bullshit.
In the past, I’ve described my layered approach of storytelling as leapfrogging. It sounds deeply unromantic to say it out loud, but essentially what that looks like is:
THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 1
THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 2
THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 3
THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 1
THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 2
THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 2
THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 1
THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 3
THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 1
So, really, it’s just structure. It’s just balance. There have been times during the editing phase where I will just copy and paste chunks to different parts of the story because it helps even the scales. Or times I have deliberately added transitional scenes solely to break up a THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT that’s gone on for too long. It’s not elegant in the slightest, but I always try to remember that the only person who knows how many times I’ve changed the order of something, cut things here and added things there… is me. I’m looking at the story from behind, with all the tape and glue and popsicle sticks and gum. Readers are, hopefully, only seeing the story from the front, where as far as they’re concerned, that’s the only version of it that’s ever existed. Don’t Worry is actually a great example of this, because in an earlier draft, there was a whole subplot with Wren and her personal trainer meant to supplement the theme of Wren’s desire for control, and what happens when she meets someone who pushes back against that. She was also meant to be one of the few supports Wren has in her life, so when it inevitably goes sour, it’s part of the overarching story of Wren’s emotional tethers, tenuous as they are, finally being cut one by one (and of course, Wren’s the one doing the cutting— working title of the novel should’ve been Wren Scissorhands).
Imagine my surprise, when, desperate to cut down the final word count (debut literary novels should not be almost 120,000 words), this subplot got cut and it was only about 4000, or 3%. That’s not a lot. There’s no hard and fast rule, but I’d say having a subplot that only takes up 3% of your total word count is not really earning its place in the final product. It’s off balance. However, at the same time, I was afraid that cutting that subplot would throw the balance way off in the opposite direction— that is, not enough was happening in the remainder of the story to justify… well… the story. Like it was too much THEME AND/OR PLOT POINT 1 with no 2 or 3 in between as a buffer. EVEN THOUGH 1 is the main plot and is by far the most important. But also buffers aren’t just filler. They fill out your story, but they shouldn’t be just filler. But also, by definition, they are not as important as the main plot. So why include them at all? Well, because you need a buffer to help keep your story balanced aaaaaand we’re right back at the beginning. The leapfrogging is not perfect. The leapfrogging is not all knowing. Stories can be told in an infinite number of ways, but the stories I tell cannot. I subscribe to the frog.
This is somewhat of a sidebar, but all of this is compounded by my fear that my stories are boring. I know objectively they’re not— I have more than enough feedback to confirm this— but if insecurities were that easy to dispel, there would be a lot less makeup brands in the world. Like so many things, the more confident you are in your writing, the more likely other people are to respond in kind. Being transparently insecure, fishing, or “playfully” undermining your skill only invites scrutiny, which only leads to an unhelpful and unproductive feedback loop.
Obviously, I am an overthinker. And a circular thinker. And, dare I say, a “lateral” thinker. One of the ways I am attempting to combat the worst of all of these is to invest generously in my self-esteem. The ultimate enemy of overthinking is the confidence that you’re a competent human being who can do things well. It is simultaneously humbling and horrifying to consider the ways in which I’ve held myself back, both in my personal life and my writing, because I struggled for so long to take myself and what I have to offer seriously. It’s alarming to draw such a definitive line between between my ability to create and something as mawkish and nebulous and societally manufactured as the concept of self-esteem. I wish I was above it. But I’m not.
The good news is that with the sticky concept of self-esteem comes humility, humour, and a healthy amount of self doubt. Because the goal of creating isn’t to get it right the first time every time and accept no criticism ever (unless you’re one of those people who said you didn’t like dean winchester beat sheet because of dean’s fashion choices, your critiques mean nothing to me!!!). Actually, maybe it’s not confidence that’s the ultimate enemy of overthinking, but creating. Is there anything that says “screw you” to self-doubt and overthinking more than actually having pushed through the muck of both of those and come out the other side with something you made—and finished— with love and persistence and determination?
I can only speak for myself, but I suspect there are authors out there who are much more efficient and much less woo woo about their work than I am. In fact, a lot of the advice I’ve seen about taking your writing seriously is to treat it like a job, where you write no matter how “creative” you are feeling that day. At my most expeditious, I have done exactly that and seen the benefits of it. Sometimes, you really do just need to put some damn words on the page to shake the cobwebs loose. However, I don’t expect to become Stephen King levels of prolific anytime soon. I don’t think I have it in me, nor do I think I need to have it in me to feel like I’m a worthy writer.
All of these words to say exactly what I said at the beginning: “dude, I wrote the damn thing and even i don’t know”. I don’t have all of the answers, or even most of them, or even some of them… but I can say that creativity is an experience unique to everyone, and there is no clear road map to a “successful” creative session no matter what anyone says. That being said, willingness to make mistakes and be imperfect and embracing a reasonable amount of self doubt while at the same time feeling secure in your abilities goes a long way.
With that oxymoronic advice out of the way, I have one final word on the matter:
ribbit