Where Do the Ideas Come From?

Where Do the Ideas Come From?

It's different for everyone. As I've worked through my own writing journey, I've started asking other writers how they plan their books.

Some are precise — a full synopsis, then character sketches. I think of it like designing a home (see The Dream House Book): you lay out the floor plan first, then decide on finish and decor. Others work from a rough outline. Some pin index cards to a wall.

I start with a sentence, and maybe a name — something that simply intrigues me. Then it's off to the races, building my own little Lego tower. I'm usually about halfway in before I get any real inkling of how it ends. It's the ultimate leap of faith.

Years ago I discovered the power of the long, active walk — four to six miles, sometimes up to two hours. I've added long bike rides since. Both give me thinking time. I conceptually write in my head out there and come back to hit the keyboard with something already half-formed.

Morning headlines, podcasts, places I visit, people I notice — they're all scraps I cut out in my mind before I knit them into a linguistic quilt.

That accounts for the small ideas. What about the big ones?

Early on, I was eager to explain the set design. I'd lived twenty years in the Vail Valley, with a lot of firsthand experience inside mega-mansions, and I described them well — too well. One early reader put it bluntly: it sounded like real estate porn.

So I backed off. I started treating subtext as background texture instead — politics, technology, water rights, RVs, real estate development (okay, there's still a little real estate moment in Fiery). I reprioritized character over setting once I realized something simple: when we remember stories, we remember them through character, not backdrop.

The best comparison is shallow focus in film. The actors are sharp. The scene behind them is slightly blurred.

Okay, one last swerve into the real estate lane. I was exact in the design of our mountain house — over forty iterations before I landed on a final plan. But years earlier, when Terry and I were contemplating a major remodel of our home's center section, we moved all the furniture out and cracked the faux rock off the fireplace. We stripped the room down to nothing.

We'd spent a year clipping photos and articles, building a file folder of ideas. But it was standing in front of the bare walls that helped us actually coalesce around a design. And as the project went on, I learned something else: if you get the details right, people may not be able to name what's working, but they'll know the room feels right.

That lesson carried straight into the books. Tighten the plot lines. Make sure the logic holds. No loose threads. Get the architecture right — in plot, setting, and character.

For me, the ideas are the easy part. Assembling them into something that makes sense and holds your interest — that's craft and instinct in equal measure. And as much as I'd like to understand the logic of it, I don't have a clue.