Ask any novelist what readers most want to know at a book signing, and the answer never varies. Not “how do you structure a plot,” not “how do you find an agent,” and certainly not “would you mind signing this to my mum, her name’s Sandra.” No. The question, asked with the hopeful air of someone expecting a treasure map, is always the same: where do you get your ideas?
I understand the impulse. There’s a lovely assumption buried inside it, the notion that somewhere out there sits a secret well and authors alone hold the bucket. The truth proves far less romantic and, oddly, far more interesting. So let me pull back the curtain on the one thing every reader wants explained, and every writer struggles to answer without sounding like a pretentious fortune cookie.
The Honest Answer Nobody Quite Believes
Neil Gaiman wrote an entire essay on this, half driven round the bend by the asking. His flippant replies over the years included “from a little ideas shop in Bognor Regis” and “from a dusty old book full of ideas in my basement.” His real answer, the one he says leaves people looking faintly cheated, runs to six words: “I make them up. Out of my head.”
People hate this. They want a mechanism, a ritual, something they can replicate at home on a wet Sunday afternoon. Gaiman’s fuller explanation lands closer to the bone. “You get ideas from daydreaming,” he wrote. “You get ideas from being bored… The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.” Ideas, in other words, drift past everyone all day long. The writer simply owns a slightly better net.
Two Ideas Walk Into a Room
Stephen King put it more mechanically in his memoir On Writing. “Good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere,” he reckons, “sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun.” His follow-up matters more than the lovely image. “Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
This rings true for me. A story almost never arrives gift-wrapped. Far more often, two unremarkable scraps wander into the same corner of your skull and strike up a conversation. A half-heard remark in the barber’s chair bumps into a worry you’ve carried for a decade, and suddenly a character clears his throat and wants a word. Mine tend to turn up at around three in the morning, fully formed and deeply pleased with themselves, like a brass band that’s booked your bedroom for a rehearsal.
Trains, Washing-Up Bowls and a Thunderstorm in Switzerland
The famous origin stories all share this accidental quality. In 1990, a young J.K. Rowling sat on a delayed train crawling from Manchester to London, four hours late, no pen within reach. By the time the carriage finally rolled into King’s Cross, a bespectacled orphan wizard had walked fully formed into her head. She has always insisted the enforced boredom helped; with nothing to scribble on, she had no choice but to daydream the boy into being.
Agatha Christie, the best-selling novelist in history, plotted her murders over the kitchen sink. “The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes,” she said, and elsewhere confessed she untangled her cleverest solutions in the bath, lining the rim with apple cores as she thought. The woman who fooled millions of readers did her finest work elbow-deep in suds.
Then there’s poor Mary Shelley, holidaying near Geneva in the soggy summer of 1816, the famous “year without a summer,” when a distant volcano had smothered the sky and trapped a houseful of writers indoors. Lord Byron, bored stiff, proposed a ghost-story competition. A few nights later, after the men had talked late into the dark about galvanism and the reanimation of corpses, Shelley surfaced from a waking nightmare gripping the image of a “hideous phantasm” shuddering into life. She had just dreamed up Frankenstein, aged eighteen, while everyone else in the villa managed nothing grander than a headache.
So Where Do Mine Come From?
I’ll be honest with you. My first novel, The ’86 Fix, owes its entire existence to a New Year’s resolution made several pints into a Christmas gathering. I’d spent years telling anyone who’d listen that I had a book in me. Eventually someone called the bluff, and pride did the rest. The idea itself, a middle-aged man handed one precious weekend back in 1986 to repair the wreck of his life, came from nowhere grander than my own nagging suspicion that most of us carry a private list of moments we’d quietly love to revisit.
That’s the unglamorous secret. Ideas don’t descend from a cloud marked Inspiration. They accumulate, slowly, like limescale. A redundancy you watched a mate stumble through. A Facebook message, out of the blue, from a lad you sat beside in 1985 and hadn’t thought about once in the forty years since. The slow dawning that the bloke in the bathroom mirror looks nothing like the one you’d planned to become. Drop a quiet “what if” into that swamp and stand well back.
Which Rather Misses the Point
Here’s what I never say out loud, mostly because it sounds ungrateful. The idea is the easy bit. Ideas cost nothing and turn up uninvited at the least convenient hour. The hard part, the part nobody ever queues to ask about, is the many, many months spent alone in a quiet room, turning a bright shiny notion into ninety thousand words you can read back without wincing.
So the next time you corner an author by the signing table, by all means ask where the ideas come from. Just know that the truth is gloriously dull. We notice things, we worry about them, and now and then two of those worries shake hands and refuse to let go. Anyone can do it. Most people simply have the good sense not to.
If you fancy seeing where a few of those shaken-hands worries finally ended up, you could start with The ’86 Fix, the drunken New Year’s bet that grew into a man bargaining with his own past. Or In Lieu of You, which asks the dangerous “what if we’d never met” of a marriage worn thin, then chases the answer somewhere its hero never wanted to go. And for anyone with a soft spot for the road not taken, Tuned Out packs a frazzled millennial off to 1969 to discover whether his parents’ generation really had it easier. Three ideas that arrived uninvited, and stayed long enough to become books.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do authors really get their ideas?
Honestly, from everywhere and nowhere in particular. Most ideas form when two unrelated scraps of life collide: a stray memory, an overheard remark, a worry someone has carried for years. Writers aren’t issued a secret source. They simply pay attention when an idea drifts past, and bother to write it down.
Is it true J.K. Rowling thought of Harry Potter on a train?
Yes. Rowling has said the character of Harry Potter walked into her mind in 1990, during a four-hour delay on a train from Manchester to London. With no pen to hand, she spent the entire wait daydreaming the boy and his world into shape before she reached home.
How did Mary Shelley come up with Frankenstein?
During a wet summer near Geneva in 1816, Lord Byron challenged his houseguests to each invent a ghost story. After an evening spent discussing the reanimation of corpses, the eighteen-year-old Shelley experienced a vivid waking dream of a creature stirring into life. That nightmare became Frankenstein.
Do writers ever run out of ideas?
Rarely in the way people fear. The trouble is almost never a shortage of ideas; any working novelist has far more than one lifetime could ever use. The real challenge lies in choosing which idea deserves the best part of a year of solitary effort, and then doing the actual writing.
Are ideas the hardest part of writing a novel?
Most authors would say no. Ideas arrive cheaply and constantly. The difficult work, as Stephen King put it, lies not in finding ideas but in recognising the good ones, and after that in the long, unglamorous slog of turning a single one into a finished book.