Probably one of the things that anyone who even attempts to write for a love gets is the question: where do you get your ideas?  The truly successful writers often come up with clever answers.  Although I am far from a hugely successful writer, I do get asked the question in one form or another.  Of course, there really is no way to answer it.

They say that you are supposed to write what you know.  What I have found is that this is largely true, but that doesn't necessarily mean you just write about your family or what you do.  I have an interest in writing horror and thrillers and suspense novels.  Therefore, there is very little of what I do from day-to-day in my writing.  I have never been on a demon-possessed oil rig, for example.  Hell, I've never even been on an oil rig.  Yet, I wrote a novel about a demon-possessed oil rig where I wrote about what I knew.  How?  I used two people, two friends, that I worked with as characters in the book.

Where this often comes up for me is when you have to describe the character.  In my mind, I had my friends Jason and Karmen firmly in place.  Then I created the characters upon which they were based.  Yes, they were hyper-reality and fictionalized version of them, but they were based on them.

My very first novel was a collection of stories about friends I was with in high school.  Me and a bunch of people started hanging out in high school and we noticed that we were all wearing jean jackets.  My friend Tim dubbed us the Blue Denim Gang.  If you look closely you will see that my first novel was called the Ballad of the Blue Denim Gang.  I took each member of the "gang," fictionalized, and made them characters.

Sometimes ideas kick around for a long time.  BDG kicked around for years before it become a novel.  My novel Dust did the same thing.  At that point I was driving from St. Louis to Chicago and passed through a small town.  There was some construction going on near one of the houses I could see from the highway and I wondered what it would be like if that ditch-digger dug up a skull.  The problem was, I couldn't figure out what the skull would be and what it would represent for nearly ten years.  Then, I read a story about a skeleton being found near Rockford Illinois and, suddenly, I had the entire story in my head.

So, you never know where the stories will come from.  One thing I have found is that you cannot force it.  I once had a story come from an image in my head that popped in there when I was out walking my dog.  Some writers carry a notebook with them, especially when driving, because, for some reason, nothing sparks the imagination like being distracted by something mundane like driving, walking or even shaving.

I wonder, sometimes, if artists suddenly see the completed picture, painting or sculpture like I sometimes see the entire story, characters and plot in my head to a novel.  Perhaps they do.  So, if you are a writer, don't worry about coming up with that great novel idea.  Just go with the ideas you have.  Let them simmer and boil and kick around in your head.  Try not to force it.  Let it tumble in your head like a rock in a rock polisher.  It may take a while, but the end-result will be beautiful.