A friend and I were talking recently about generating ideas for our writing. The friend asked what method I use to come up with ideas, and asked if the characters I wrote about were actually me in disguise.
So, to answer the last question first: No, my characters are not about me, or based on me. They are not autobiographical.
But there is no doubt some of the characters I create reflect my thinking, my biases, my personality, my ideas, and other elements of myself. Sometimes, these are elements of myself that I didn’t even know existed in me, or thoughts or ideas I didn’t know I was capable of having. But I contain multitudes, as do we all.
As for the first question — Where do my ideas come from? — I usually rely on a two-step process:
- Real-life experience is one source of inspiration. Usually, these are not my own experiences, but observations about the world around me, including the experiences of others, filtered through my own perspective. We’ve all heard the advice to “write what you know,” and that’s a fine starting point. But we shouldn’t stop there. As Sigrid Nunez puts in in her novel The Friend, the narrator — a writer mourning another writer who committed suicide — says: “Rather than write about what you know, you told us, write about what you see.” That’s usually how I approach writing. I try to be observant of my surroundings, of snippets of dialog I hear, of whatever the world may throw my way that I think has the makings of a good story.
- Creating “What if …?” scenarios based on those real-life observations. Sometimes these can be far-fetched and fantastical, like the premise for “The Eclipse Is Running Late,” a short piece I wrote last April on the occasion of the latest solar eclipse to come across North America. For that story, the “What if…?” question I pursued, to its absurd conclusion, was, “What if the eclipse did not occur as scheduled?” Other times, the “What if…?” question arises from something more grounded in our current reality. A 75-word piece called “Lunch Break” came from an observation of a woman drinking soup in her car outside of a local convenience story. I imagined she was on her lunch break, and if I ever expand on this micro fiction, I might pick up on that idea and flesh out what happens after she slurps down her microwaved soup. Will she be late getting back to work? Will the boss be pissed off? Will she get into a car wreck on the way back? These are all possibilities for the story to expand, based on the question, “What if…?”
Pursuing the “What if …?” question in your writing is a type of speculative fiction, I suppose, but it doesn’t have to be sci fi or fantasy or even magical realism. It needs no label. And the best storytelling defies all labels anyway. For it contains multitudes, just like us.
AI-generated image.
Andy writes! 
I like these ideas for approaching the early stages of ideation. I don’t often use “what if” scenarios myself. I do a lot of observations of the world around me as well and that often influences my work. I also like to look to ancient history and folklore as I posted about on social media this morning.
One “what if” story I’ve been sitting on for years now that was to be the third and final installment of a trilogy of short stories about a business man named Linus Martin stemmed from “what if the sun went dark?” It’s a fascinating “what if” and I love the story and I do need to complete it someday so I can complete the character’s arc. The first story in the short series also stemmed from a “what if” which was “what if a man met every woman or girl he’d ever wronged as ghosts on a ship?” That idea came to me from The Crystal Ship song by The Doors which has the lyric “the crystal ship is being filled. A thousand girls, a thousand thrills.”
Speaking to autobiographical, I don’t write about myself but I do often trickle in little details from my own life into stories. For example, my main character from my book series has music tastes that mirror mine from high school. A lot of 70’s music, basically. She also has a small collection of old books (like me) such as a book on psychoanalysis and the dream state from the 1920s. I own this book. It’s a series of essays (Freud even has an essay in it as I recall). It’s a frightening look back to how abysmal mental healthcare used to be. My favorite one I own is a second edition of Wuthering Heights.