Hello, friends! Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writers’ Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Beth Camp, Crystal Collier, and Cathrina Constantine. Are you a writer? Do you feel insecure? Well, then this is the support group for you! Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.
One of the most annoying questions you can ask a writer is “Where do your ideas come from?” Ideas just happen, and most of them aren’t any good. However, day after day, week after week, year after year, the average writer has so many ideas that it becomes a statistical impossibility for all of those ideas to be bad. But if somebody insists on asking me this question—if they insist on asking “Where do you get your ideas?”—I have an easy answer, cocked and loaded. I write science fiction. I get my ideas from science.
Does that seem self-evident? That should seem self-evident. The tradition of Sci-Fi writers getting story ideas from science dates back to Mary Shelley, the woman widely regarded as the very first science fiction author. In 1780, Italian biologist Luigi Galvani discovered that applying an electric current to a severed frog leg would cause that leg to twitch. It was almost as if electricity could imbue life into non-living organic matter. When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, she’d heard about Galvani’s work. She may not have known all the details, but she knew enough to jolt her creative brain into action.
Just recently, I learned that you can save computer files to birds. Step one: convert computer data into music. Step two: have a bird listen to the music until the bird memorizes the data-encoded music. You can now retrieve your data from the resulting birdsong. Does this give me a story idea? Of course! Is it a good idea? Eh… we’ll see. I also recently learned that Earth once had Saturn-like rings, that mosquitos can smell which viruses are in your blood, and that woolly mammoths still existed when the Pyramids of Giza were built. Oh, and then there’s the latest news from Mars. That’s obviously giving me ideas, too.
Having ideas is the easy part of writing. That’s why we writers get annoyed by the “Where do you get your ideas?” question. It’s like asking if we know how to chew our own food or tie our own shoes. Me? I get most of my ideas from reading and learning about science. Are they good ideas? No, they usually aren’t, but the more science facts I’m exposed to day after day, week after week, year after year, the more Sci-Fi ideas I’m going to have. Eventually, one of those ideas will be good. It’s a statistical inevitability.
WANT TO LEARN MORE?
I threw a bunch of science facts at you today. If any of those science facts gave you a story idea, check out the links below to learn more.
- Yes, you can store data on a bird—enthusiast converts PNG to bird-shaped waveform, teaches young starling to recall file at up to 2MB/s, from Tom’s Hardware.
- Earth had Saturn-like rings 466 million years ago, new study suggests, from Space.com.
- Mosquitos sniff out hosts infected with certain viruses, researchers find, from NBC News.
- Woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth when the Egyptian pyramids were being built, from History Facts.
- Rock discovery contains “clearest sign” yet of ancient life on Mars, NASA says, from CNN.
i-love-space.com 
Unrelated to writing or science fiction, but today I learned that the iconic Ground Theme BGM and Underground Theme BGM from the original “Super Mario Bros.” were heavily inspired by two different songs in the jazz-fusion genre, “Sister Marian” by T-Square (1984) and “Let’s Not Talk About It” by Friendship (1979), respectively. Koji Kondo is lauded for composing memorable video game soundtracks, but none of us live in a vacuum. We’re always taking in new information and that shapes us in many different ways, particularly in regards to creativity.Staying curious, taking in new experiences, and just learning in general are great ways to spark creativity. An idea might not flourish into something worthwhile, but taking the time to play around with a concept could spark other ideas.The trouble I have is getting those ideas down on paper. I may have an idea for a story, or be inspired by another work to create something quite different, but most of it gets lost after that initial brainstorm.
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I have that issue too, sometimes. I’m making an effort to write ideas down more often, even if I don’t think they’re good ideas. Brains just aren’t good at storing ideas long term.
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Where do we get our ideas? Everywhere. Only someone with no ideas would ask.
Sounds like you have enough ideas to keep you busy for a very long time…
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Maybe I do, but I’m going to keep looking for more!
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I agree with Alex that ideas are everywhere. It’s great that you can focus on science ideas because of your genre.
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Reading as much science as I do has definitely skewed my ideas toward Sci-Fi, which is exactly as intended!
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Most of my story ideas, basically eight or nine out of ten of them, were inspired by dreams I had. I’d wake up thinking it’d make a good story. And before I forget everything, note it own and save to tackle for later.
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Yeah, you have to get dreams down on paper fast. They don’t stick around for long.
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I’ve seen several experienced writers point out that ideas are cheap. Feel free to steal them from anywhere. Execution is where the real work is, and that’s much harder.
I hadn’t heard that about Earth once having had its own rings. My first question was whether it came from a lost moon, but sounds like it was from an asteroid captured and broken up by Earth’s gravity. (Which I guess technically was a moon, briefly.)
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The IAU doesn’t have an official definition for a moon, so they can’t stop you from calling it a moon, if you like.
And yeah, ideas are cheap, and even if someone steals an idea from me, they’ll still end up writing something completely different from what I would write. Give the idea for Ender’s Game to Asimov, Heinlein, or Scalzi, and you’d end up with a totally different book from what Card wrote.
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that’s so incredible that computer data can be stored in birds! I never knew that. It makes sense how it can be done though.
when people ask me where I get my stories from, I tell them life. Our ideas form in one sense or another from our everyday experiences.
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That’s very true, though for me I don’t seem to realize when my inspiration comes from life. A few times, close friends have pointed out how something in my stories echoes something that happened in my life, and I have to say, “Huh, yeah, didn’t mean to do that, but there it is.”
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Neither do I realise what experiences in my life a story idea comes from. I just know it does in some way or another. We all have our own stories, fiction or non-fiction , to tell. It’s just that that’s the answer that’s easiest for me to give when someone asks that question and the one that I feel has made the most sense.
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I appreciate your visit to my blog. I always learn cool stuff on your blog. I can’t wait to see what you do with your science facts. Oddly enough, I’ve been struggling to wrap up a series about Ravens and now have an idea about how to do it.
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Awesome! Glad you got something out of this!
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