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 