Monday, January 2, 2012

Where do I get my ideas from?

People are always asking me how I come up with some of my ________ ideas.  Please pick from one of the following to fill in the blank:  good, bad, crazy, off the wall.  Honestly, I do have strange ideas, and they seep into almost every aspect of my live. 
I’m a published author, and my writing spans from Southern Women’s Humor about a female tow truck driver in a small town in Georgia to a dark fiction about an abused woman who kills her husband.  In the middle of that mix are a few mysteries and even a paranormal romance.
I’ve been known to throw theme parties from elegant dinner affairs to an author/agent reception for my local romance writers’ chapter.  Every room in my house was decorated to represent a different romance genre—a Medieval Faire, Murder on the Orient Express, Little House on the Prairie.
I’ve also been known to feed full-scale meals for anywhere from 25 to 50 people out of the small kitchen in our recreational vehicle.  Or, 225 people in our barn when I celebrated my twenty-ninth annual twenty-ninth birthday.  I’ll do the math for you.  I was turning 58.
Those are the kinds of ideas people always want to know where in my brain they come from.  I think it is an affliction caused by the paste I ate in the first grade.  That’s about the only thing I haven’t heard named as cause for our health decline in later years.  But I’m thinking I might be on to something.  You be the judge.
How do you come up with your ideas?   
Dolores J. Wilson
doloresjwilson.com

10 comments:

  1. Love it, Dolores! I'm often asked the same question. In fact, I've blogged about it a time or two.

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  2. Wonderful! I never ate paste, but a few times I did sniff the glue.

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  3. Great blog, Dolores! I don't recall eating paste, but I inhaled deeply every time they passed out mimeographed papers - I wonder if that accounts for the odd kick in my gait?

    Skyewriter

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  4. Marilee, Kathy, Skye, thanks for chiming in. Check back often.

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  5. Weren't we separated at birth? *LOL* I didn't eat paste or sniff glue, though. I used to eat my niece's teething biscuits, and were they hard! Not sure it affected my mind, but it certainly did my teeth!

    As for where I get ideas for my writing, I can honestly say everywhere. My good friend (the late Marv Jones) and I were training for a marathon. We were doing a twenty miler, running on Scott's Mill Road in Mandarin and it was dark. We entered Forest Circle and the headlights of a car suddenly blinded us. Who was that guy? Why was he speeding away so early on a Saturday morning? Maybe he killed someone. The what-ifs grew and we built on the story to pass the time while we ran. Ten years later it was my first draft for what would become RUNNING SCARED.

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  6. Heh. You had me at "I celebrated my twenty-ninth annual twenty-ninth birthday."

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  7. Tryng this again... I didn't eat paste or sniff glue or mimeograph sheets. I didn't need to. I have you to help me generate crazy ideas. Great blog, DJ

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  8. Thanks everyone. This may turn out to be fun. I told Kellie she may have created a monster, but now I'm thinking maybe a blog diva. :-))

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  9. Blog Diva for sure!

    I don't know where the ideas come from, but I will tell you this. When I get one, Providence moves! Case in point. My current WIP involves an old rehabbed factory building in Minneapolis (where I once lived--the city, not the building). Well, I'm in Chicagoland, so I can't just run over to see what one looks like. Then, on the TV news, one of the local reports had a story on someone who has rehabbed an old macaroni factory building here. And I have all the info I need. Plus, I never knew they made macaroni in a factory. An industrial kitchen, yes, factory, no.

    Go with the paste story. It works too.

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  10. DJ, Wow, what a great creative hostess and writer you are! You just go out there and "Do it!"

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