Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?

It’s the question writers get asked the most. Well, here’s the answer…The Ideas Shop, of course.

This is it, The Ideas Shop, where writers get their ideas from. Of course, it’s not called The Ideas Shop, that would be too obvious. If it was, everyone would know about it and then everyone would be having great ideas and putting them down on paper. And writers don’t want that. They want to be seen as special. They want people to believe their ideas are plucked out of the ether or sent to them in a vision from their muse.

Have you noticed how they never really know how to answer the simple question “Where do you get your ideas from?”. They bluster and mumble and then say something like “It just came to me”. Rubbish. They buy their ideas in a shop. Just as ordinary people buy groceries, they buy ideas.

You’ll find an Ideas Shop in most towns. All pretend to be selling something else. This one from my local town purports to be a seller of curtains and blinds, but as the name not so subtly suggests in the word ‘mainly’, it sells something else. Something darker. The shop does sell curtains and blinds, but the most important curtain is the one at the back of the shop that hides a door. The door that leads down a long dark corridor to the ideas room. This is where the writers go to get their ideas. When you see them hanging around in coffee shops they’re not writing, they’re keeping their eye on the Ideas Shop and when the coast is clear, they’ll scurry over and fill their boots.

So don’t ask writers where they get their ideas from but if you do and they come up with some feeble story that the whole plot of their new novel just popped into their head when they were having a shower, call them out.

“No, you didn’t! I know where you get your ideas from. You buy them…from The Ideas Shop!