WHERE Do You Get these Ideas?

Where Do You Get these Ideas?

This month I'm participating in a Blog Chain with many of my fellow Christian Writers from www.ChristianWriters.com If you check the sidebar, I have a panel that will let you check out many of the other wonderful posts on this chain. The subject for the blog chain this month is 'Where do you get your ideas?'

I get this question quite a bit. The answer is pretty obvious - the ideas for my novels come from the world around me. True, the fantastic adventures I write about don't happen every day (or perhaps ANY day) but the characters, locations, interactions, and even some of the situations come from the real life I experience every day.

Just as an example, one evening last September while driving my family somewhere, we passed a house in a neighborhood nearby that had a brilliant blue door on the front. The trim wasn't blue, or the shutters, just the door. Everything else was white. The late afternoon sunlight shining on the high-gloss paint of that brilliant blue door made it seem like the door was glowing.


Not a half-block further, we passed several huge crows sitting on a lawn and muttering to one another in a gutteral tongue only they could understand. They looked like they were having a meeting.


And suddenly, the plot to my next NaNoWriMo novel was plopped into my brain. Oh, certainly, there was a lot more to it - some of the characters in the story I saw while at Six Flags several years previously. And no, it wasn't Bugs Bunny and Marvin the Martian. Or even Yosemite Sam. it was a brilliant-looking older man with a grandson and granddaughter near the fountain by the entrance. He looked a bit like an older Milo from Atlantis. Unkempt silver hair, spectacles, and intense blue eyes that twinkled as he explained something about the way the water danced in the fountain to his family.


The world around us is full of stories to tell. Mix and match what you experience and observe. Keep a notebook with you to write down ideas. Take photographs - carry a camera and take pictures of interesting things - things that give you ideas.

While mulling over what to write about in this post, I was driving to work and saw this monster stuck under my windshield wiper. The poor fellow had simply landed on the front of the van, and the wind as I accelerated swept him up under the windshield wiper.

Don't try this at home, kids, but I took this photo while driving. Yes, I keep a camera with me all the time. Once I got to work, the fellow flipped off and flew away, perfectly fine, although miles and miles from his old home. And this big guy gave me the idea for a story - a story I'll share with you in four installments this month. Hope you enjoy it!

NaNoWriMo Has begun

So, it's the start of NaNoWriMo again.

Time for frantically slamming fingers to keyboard in the attempt to get 50,000 words written within a short month.

I've had to put my fourth (and final) novel in my first series aside so I could prepare for Book 1 of my new series.

Many people suggested that Nanowrimo is supposed to be just 'writing without limits'. No real plot or direction to speak of.

But I decided that I needed to start with a plot, an outline, character sketches, even down to what actions will be taken by who in each chapter.

By the outline, I have about 30 chapters to write, with I expect 100,000 words in the book.

So. I'm going to measure myself against 100,000 and see how it goes. Maybe I'll make it to the end of the book, maybe not.



But one thing's clear - I'll be posting very infrequently here for the next month, because most of my literary words will be typed into a Word document about a Blue Metal Door, and the world through it...
:-)

And, for all of you doing NaNoWriMo, Good luck with your new masterpieces!

Choosing your words carefully

As a writer I find often that words flow out of me like a stream of water, rapid and refreshing. When I read back over the prose I pen, however, and consider the readers who will be enjoying my novels, I wonder how many of the words in my vocabulary as a 46 year-old engineer will be grasped by the 12-25 year-olds who will be reading them.

I'm encouraged by many writing blogs, books, and literary sources, to consider the vocabulary of the reader, and filter my words to reach their level (or below).

Counterwighting this is the knowledge that as we 'dumb down' our vocabulary for the reader, we inadvertently do them a disservice. Because we don't consider that these novels we write are the very sources many young people will use to expand their vocabularies.

Allow me to explain.

As a young boy, at the tender age of ten, I was devouring books by authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Andre Norton, Piers Anthony, Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein.

I was not studying books like The Dictionary. Or the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Call me an escapist, or a Walter Mitty.

But reading a big book of words in order to expand my stockpile of terms was just a waste of precious time, when I could be hidden in an apple barrel listening to Long John Silver planning to take over the ship. Or racing across the ochre moss of Mars with John Carter to save his precious Dejah Thoris. Or discovering new worlds with the half ship's cat, half ??? named Eet, in search of the Zero Stone.

No, my vocabulary came vicariously, through my exposure to these books i enjoyed so much.

Often, a term would roll out I didn't know, and I would consider the context, and learn a new word in the process. Did I look up the word in the Dictionary? Infrequently, but yes. More often, I reasoned out the word on my own. I was usually right, but not always. I didn't let these short hiccups stop me from enjoying a good read. I used it to expand my horizons.

I believe we must balance this desire to expand the reader's vocabulary with a healthy dose of realism - the average reader will quit if they have to check much more than a few words in the dictionary. I know I would have. But, we shouldn't expect the reader to simply check their brains at the door, either.

How do YOU find this balance as a writer? Do you write your novel in your own words, then do a Word check for reading level, and adjust as needed? Do you adjust it for the average reader at all, or risk alienating them?