The Lightbulb Moment
One of the questions I am asked most often is “where do you get your ideas from?”
Sometimes I wonder myself… This isn’t a bad thing though. I have a tiny fear that if I ask too many questions my Muse will rebel and leave in a great hurry.
But when forced to answer such questions my best bet is honesty: I know when I get these ideas. But seldom do I know how.
Movies. Music. Books. Yeah. Not rocket science I know but it works. It is useful to read widely and have a well rounded general knowledge.
When does the lightbulb flick on? Mostly when I’m falling asleep or the very second I open my grit filled eyes after a night of barely no sleep. It’s not fun when an idea strikes at 1.28am, when you’re finally in that falling feeling stage when you just might fall asleep this time, and you just know that if you don’t write down this brilliant idea it will disappear like wisps of fog in the morning sunshine. So you dig around on the night-stand for your i-Pod and find it’s dead, scrabble around for a pen, find nothing, drag yourself out of the bed turning the idea over and over in your head, gripped by a desperate fear that by the time you find the darned pen the idea would be lost to the ether. You stub your toe on a stray doorjamb (who put that there?), head downstairs and by that time you’re wide awake and might as well write it straight into a Word Doc.
Of course it’s easier when the iPod is charged and you jot the idea down and it develops into 500 words before you know it, all the while hoping DH wouldn’t notice the light.
I admit to having shower moments where ideas smack me upside the head while beneath the falling waterdrops, where technically most thoughts should not be allowed. What’s more pleasurable than an uninterrupted shower?
See the pattern. It’s the times when I’m not writing or researching, times when I should be relaxing. When I’m cooking? Taking a walk? Then too.
Ideas follow me, stalk me, waiting for the moment when begin to chill, striking when I relax. No fair!
And as tempted as I sometimes am to be left in peace I dare not make that request, for what is a writer without that little bottomless bag of ideas?
Share with me … Where do you get your ideas from?