Journal Interrobang's Journal: "Where do you get your ideas?" 5

Or, Notes on Process

"Tradition and the Individual Talent" this is not. What follows is one writer's account of where the ideas come from, which doesn't necessarily apply to any of you.

I'm writing a story, as you may know from my previous entries mentioning it. Here's how I got the idea to write it. As I explain it, you might begin to realize that story ideas aren't necessarily just things that come from straight imagination, they're a little bit more synthetic than that, or maybe a lot.

Well, I've been having nightmares about this one subject since I was about two feet tall, as near as I can remember, and it's driven me to do a lot of research on the subject (this has two purposes - it gets rid of the "oh, good, I thought that would be a twenty foot tall giant spider; a ten foot tall giant spider I can handle" aspect, but at the same time it tends to sharpen the details of the remaining nightmares). One way I've found of dealing with things that haunt me is to exorcise them, as it were, by writing about them. I've managed to deal with a bad rejection (that one resulted in "The Trouble With Polyamory"), a bad breakup ("Avie"), a chaotic personal life ("Pinball, That's All," and "The Most Improved District"), and other things, using fiction-writing as good old time-tested catharsis. (That's not to suggest that the stories are autobiographical accounts of these events; they're not. I'm much more a Harlan Ellison-type confessional writer than I am a straight fictionalizer. Anybody who's read those stories knows they're not just me writing about my life in one-to-one terms. Check out "The Most Improved District" if you don't believe me - the hyperlink is somewhere in Entry 200.) Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea if I finally wrote a story about it, even if it puts me at risk of re-writing Fragments, or something.

But wait! It's not that simple. (Is it ever?)

I was also having a series of conversations with Yet Another Unnamed Friend about reincarnation, something in which I personally don't believe, yet find intrinsically fascinating, partially because weird shit like that is made to go in magic-realist stories like the ones I write. (Had you figured that out yet, YAUF?)

So I got thinking, just for shits and giggles, about some ways reincarnation could affect a person, and what it might be like, and things like that. Somewhere along the line, the whole combination of things, plus a hefty dose of music in the form of "Bei Mir Bistu Shayn" and "Sin" by Nine Inch Nails (a song I associate with Skippy, but that's another story)*, Hebrew studies, some Yiddish grammar as code-key, some dreams I've had where I've been somebody else, and some of the art I've mentioned here previously, sunk into my subconscious...

...and an image came out. The image was of someone waking in the dark from a horrible dream, only to discover they've somehow been transported somewhere even worse, in the most dramatic way possible.

Of course, that's sort of like describing Moby Dick as "this really long book about a crazy guy who's obsessed with a white sea mammal," but you get the idea.

As a brief note on the importance of music to my writing, I've written almost the whole story, as far as I've gotten, listening to NIN's "Sin" on infinite repeat, for what it's worth, too. That's something I often do while writing, much to the consternation of those sharing my surroundings at the time.

Well, now you know how I do it.

This has been a Writing Porn Production. I'm your host, Interrobang. Please wash your hands on the way out.