Where ideas come from
An idea: a man believes he has to weed a field every day or the world will come to an end.
This idea by itself isn’t much, it certainly isn’t a plot for a story or novel, but if you start playing what-if games with it, it can lead you down some interesting paths such as what if this man believes that these weeds will grow into monsters if the field isn’t weeded. And what if this man’s family has had a contract with the town for several hundred years to weed this field, and while he, the current caretaker of the field, believes he’s saving the world each day, the rest of town has grown tired of this quaint tradition and want to end it. If you keep playing these what-if games, eventually you could end up with a plot for a novel, as I did for The Caretaker of Lorne Field.
So how did I come up with the initial idea? We had a black locust tree on the side of house and the root system had spread all over our front yard, and little weed-like saplings were constantly popping up over the yard. If I didn’t pull these out, they’d grow pretty quickly, first developing thorns, and then bark would grow over it, and before too long we’d have a forest of little black locust trees. Every day I’d be out there pulling out these saplings, and one day while I was doing this, I joked with my wife that I should write a book about this. She scoffed at that, and so challenged, I had to come up with an idea that I could write a book about.
When I first started writing seriously (seriously as in thinking I could be published), ideas frequently came from news stories. I’d read a newspaper story about a corrupt Denver sheriff’s office in the 60s and how they’d rob the stores they were supposed to be protecting—in one case when they were unable to break into a safe, they loaded it onto the back of a pickup only to have the safe fall off into the street, and I started playing what-if games with this combining it with another news story, and ended up with the plot for Small Crimes. Another time I was listening to a PI on a talk radio station tell a story of how he was hired by a young woman who’d been adopted to find her birth parents and how badly it went when he did find them, and after (many) more what-if games, I eventually ended up with the plot for Fast Lane. The idea for Pariah came from a combination of seeing a rash of tell-all books from South Boston mobsters being published and a plagiarism story that enraged me. The idea for Killer was born out of necessity. Serpent’s Tail had just told me they wanted to buy Pariah. Both Small Crimes and Pariah start similarly—a man is let out of prison and goes on a journey of sorts. I wanted to a two-book from Serpent’s Tail, so I pitched them the idea of a trilogy, with the third book (Killer) being about a hitman making a deal to give up the big mob boss and getting immunity for all of his past crimes (without the authorities knowing about his murders) and what happens when he gets out of prison. The idea loosely came from a new story about Johnny Martorano killing 20 people and being given only 12 years after making a deal to provide evidence against Whitey Bulger.
The idea for the first story I ever wrote was an emotionally damaged man is used to be the fall guy for a robbery but turns the tables on the gang that tried to take advantage of him. While I only realized this after it was published, this was the same idea behind Jim Thompson’s After Dark, My Sweet. The plots are very different, but when you boil down my story and Thompson’s novel to their pure essence, the ideas behind both are the same. It happens. Every writer is inspired to some degree by the writers that came before them. As South Park once proclaimed in an episode of the same title The Simpsons Already Did It.
Early on, ideas needed to be inspired by something. News stories, a song, an interview on a talk radio show, a jest, an observation. The more I wrote, the easier it came to manufacture ideas. While walking through a bookstore, I decided I wanted to write a Frankenstein retelling. That idea triggered the idea of what if all the events in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein actually happened, but for different reasons than what Victor Frankenstein relayed to Captain Walton? And then what if Victor and Marquis de Sade were in league of sorts? And then what if I worked in 120 Days of Sodom into this Frankenstein retelling and the theme of the book becomes the corrosive nature of revenge (the idea behind Monster). Another idea that came to me for a mystery story: What if a brilliant eccentric detective had an assistant named Archie, but instead of being human, the assistant is complex piece of technology worn as a tie pin, and with his neural network that was 20 years more advanced than anything thought possible was not only sentient, but had the heart and soul of a hard-boiled PI? What triggered that idea was wanting to write a Nero Wolfe pastiche for the Black Orchid contest, and after several minutes of what-if games followed by day or so of plotting and a few weeks of writing, Julius Katz was born.
I’ll end this by saying the more you write, the easier it gets to come up with ideas. The hard part is always turning those ideas into a plot.