Where DO I Get My Ideas?
I had a friend who used to insist that she didn’t write her stories–they came to her from somewhere else, and she just wrote them down. She had to figure out the best way, of course, and sometimes she couldn’t catch what she was told (or worse, the stories maybe weren’t trying to get to her) but she didn’t believe she wrote her stories. I…could go both ways on that, pretty much at the same time. I write my books. I work hard at them. My characters, though–often they do seem to come from somewhere else. It’s always been that way, even when I’ve been scolded for being “fanciful” (and once lectured for not “taking responsibility” for the quality of my story!) Eighteen years ago I finished my first novel’s first draft. My character Ben was pretty much set from then on–but it’s only in the last few years, in my attempts to deepen the backgrounds of everyone, that I’ve realized Ben is Hindu. I’m researching that now, and it’s amazing how well this ancient religion explains the way Ben has always been. A friend told me I just knew subconsciously back then that he was Hindu and deliberately wrote him that way, but how could that be when I knew NOTHING of Hindu religion then?