What was it, that helped innovate your best novel ideas?

I explore the what-if scenarios and dig deeper into them to see what was possible at that time or could be possible in the near future along those lines. When I discover the results, things start lining up and shaping the background, or worlds build before my eyes, and the story within that takes shape. Think about every Star Trek of any generation. It's just a soap opera in space. The setting makes things a bit more interesting. I didn't know electrical capacitors existed before WW1, and ersearch in magnetic propulsion was already underway at the same time. Add in a new discovery to make one of those failed research projects work and I now have a background to place my character into. Thats just one of the ideas but I seem to use the same process when thinking up others. I use plausibility to build everything, even if it's science-fiction.

 

I have to work really hard on ideas because they don't come naturally. I have to sit and think about it logically: what would keep two people in love from being together? Why would they be attracted to each other despite the barriers? How do they overcome it, with enough hardship for it to be interesting but not so much that it's unrealistic?

Once I have the plot, the characters and certain things that happen to them might be inspired by people I've known, things I've read, things I've seen. But the actual idea only comes with effort.

 

Read/watch/play what captures your imagination. Abandon reality, because reality is not that interesting. Be unpredictable, the MCs are not above getting affected by their emotions/environments (also not invincible, bullets have impact and in space no one can hear you scream ). Imagination is the best tool in your bag of tricks (also the ability to interpret it into a comprehensible way ). The journey is the most important part of the experience (research is fun when you don't have to worry about deadlines. Also you learn a lot of interesting facts that serve no real world application.) Have fun, if you are not enjoying writing it chances are not many will enjoy reading it.

Just a few things I have learned in the time it has taken me to work on my sequel. Also proofreading and editing suck!

 

My stories/novels come from various places. Most of the time it's daydreaming. I find myself lost in my thoughts a lot. Random things would pop in my head and form a story I think is worthy enough to write down. Others, is dreams or thoughts I have before falling asleep or thoughts I have in the shower. Rarely, but occasionally, I will get an idea just from talking to someone. If someone tells a story about their past or what happened to them the other day I will form a fictional story based off it. I work with many different genres, types of writing, first person, second person, third person, I go everywhere with my writing. So anything can easily give me a story idea.

 

Well, I've already posted an incredibly long treatise to this site about the fiction that most directly inspired my own, but if I could take almost as much time to talk about some general concepts that inspired me in addition to the specific examples:

After the article about Orson Scott Card (see link above) forced me to take a second look at how I was portraying religion in my Doctor Who fan-fiction, I decided to research stereotypes about LGBT+ to make sure that there wouldn't be any problems with the woman who was at the time my lead protagonist (despite somehow becoming my tertiary by the time the story ended ).

Spoiler: Very Very Long

And holy **** was there a problem. Apparently a lot of authors have tried to make LGBT seem less "natural" than "normal" people by either 1) using promiscuous LGBT characters to make LGBT seem "fundamentally" promiscuous and disgusting and/or 2) using villainous LGBT characters to make LGBT seem "fundamentally" villainous and disgusting.

My lead protagonist being a promiscuous bisexual serial killer? Not going to leave a good taste in a lot of people's mouths, and I don't particularly care about the people who wouldn't have a bad taste from that.

Sure, technically I had "good-ish" reasons for both: in official Doctor Who canon, there are two rather important characters that the writers tried to make as superficially similar as possible so that the fundamental differences would stand out more strongly: promiscuous bisexual former Time Agent going by the alias of "Captain Jack Harkness" and his psychotic ex-husband, promiscuous bisexual former Time Agent going by the alias of "Captain John Hart."

I'd originally thought it would be interesting to continue the pattern, so I came up with promiscuous bisexual former Time Agent going by the alias of "Captain June Harper," but when I read that the "promiscuous bisexual" had already been done to death, suddenly continuing the theme of my favorite series didn't matter as much if the original theme had been a problem from the beginning.

And of course deciding about 3 chapters in that June Harper was a sadistic sociopath on the run from charges of vigilante murder didn't make any of this any better, now matter how much the "3 hero protagonists serving a villain protagonist" dynamic seemed more interesting in a vacuum than the basic "4 hero protagonists" that I'd originally come up with.

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to create a counter-stereotype "bisexuals can never be promiscuous and/or evil" to counter the original stereotypes, the entire point of stereotypes being a problem in the first place is that the breadth of the human experience should not be destroyed for the sake of dogma. Since I couldn't find a way to remove the stereotypical combination of traits (promiscuous bisexual sadist) from June Harper without destroying the character (and believe me, I tried), I then decided that I simply had to keep the combination of traits without feeding into the stereotype that they have to be combined.

Which is stupidly simple, really: examples are not stereotypes, patterns are stereotypes. One movie failing the Bechdel test does not mean that there's a problem with the movie, 90% of movies failing the (stupidly easy) Bechdel test means that there's a problem with the industry that made the movies (even if there's nothing wrong with the individual movies themselves).

Likewise, one of my bisexual characters being a promiscuous serial killer was not the problem with my story at that point in my writing, 100% of my bisexual cast being a promiscuous serial killer was the problem. Therefor, all I needed was to: write a bisexual character who is not a promiscuous villain, write a promiscuous character who is not a bisexual villain, and write a villain who is not a promiscuous bisexual.

I already had the villain, and after going through my cast of characters I was able to figure out which two would work best as a gay couple (one of whom would be mentioned as going both ways). And here's the thing: I hadn't seriously played around with the idea of any romantic subplots in my story, but the budding romance between these two guys (one "Damien" was in my original group of protagonists, the other "The Agent" was introduced later on) made the character arc for The Agent so much better than when I thought that he and Damien would both be single.

And almost as good, Damien had already complained in Chapter 2 about June Harper being promiscuous (in a scene that I actually wrote before I came up with June being a serial killer), but my original portrayal of Damien as being asexual like me only added to the "complaining about bisexuals being fundamentally promiscuous" image that I was now trying to clean up.

Now that I saw how much better Damien worked as a bisexual character than as an asexual in terms of The Agent's arc, Damien's own characterization became so much better because one bisexual complaining about another being promiscuous makes it clear that the direction of June's sex drive is not the problem in Damien's mind, only the magnitude

And now for the promiscuous straight character (that my monogamous bi-guy Damien will be just as annoyed by as he was by June). I could not find a way for any of my 7 characters to be made aggressively straight without destroying their characters either, so I decided to see how easily I could add an 8th character to be the promiscuous straight guy (and it would be a guy: I don't have a problem with one of my promiscuous characters being a woman, but I'd have a problem with 100% of my promiscuous characters being women).

Oddly enough, I was also starting to think more deeply about getting non-human characters into my story for basically the same reasons. I had an artificially sentient ship character, but I also had 4 humans and 2 aliens that looked exactly like humans, so I didn't see the point of forcing yet another character to look exactly like a human when there was an entire universe of what my sci-fi character could look like. I spent weeks scouring the internet for lists of Doctor Who species to see if I could come up with a character around any or if I would have to invent my own from scratch.

I originally didn't want to use the Malmooth - a species with a basically humanoid body and some insectoid features didn't seem to fit the bill for a distinctly non-human species - but then I came up with the most perfect explanation for why the only two things we know about the species (their biology and their culture) work so well together despite my being certain that the writers did not originally intend this connection (item 6 on this list) and I realized that I had no choice but to invent a Malmooth character to share this "discovery" with the world

I had also just discovered the idea to re-arrange Maslow's Hierarchy to create a non-human psychology and wanted to use it in my own work, so I decided to try coming up with a Hierarchy based on what I had come up with for the Malmooth. It didn't take long for me to settle on Relationships as being the most basic Need, followed by Esteem, Physiological, Self-Actualization, and finally Security Needs after everything else is taken care of (or, after finding a second article on the same subject and deciding that this other guy's terminology was far better: Relationships-Contribution-Food-Specialness-Security).

Now I had a psychology for the species, now I just needed to decide what would be special about this one particular Malmooth character. Professionally, I decided that he would be a physician. Personally, I decided that he would be rather cold and insensitive (making him even more of an outlier in his species than someone like that would be in ours). Storily (yes, that is now a word) I decided that he would start out being held captive by the same mad science facility as my other two alien characters and one of my Humans (albeit not as a test subject the way they were).

And the best part? I had already spent months wracking my brain to find something that would catalyze the arc I had planned for one of my other characters to go from being extremely sensitive to being extremely cold, and her admiration of the Malmooth character became the most perfect solution completely by accident (which actually hasn't happened yet as of Gemini but I have a number of very specific plans for my eventual future installments "Libra," "Scorpio," and "Cancer," and this is definitely one of my favorites)

And that's what I say to the people who insist "You shouldn't have been forced to write about anybody else, you should've been allowed to write a straight/white/Christian/Human/male-centric book if that was the first thing that you came up with. Stop destroying your story for 'Political Correctness'!"

No. If I re-wrote my story to accommodate the version that somebody like this were telling me to write, then absolutely none of my characters' arcs would feel anywhere near as powerful to me as they do right now. My story became thousands of times more powerful after I excised a bunch of stereotypes that I hadn't initially noticed, and I will never apologize for doing this.

Sometimes an author isn't being forced to respect the real world and the real people in it, sometimes the author wants to respect the real world.

EDIT: OK, I just realized how very 1-in-the-morning it is right now. How exactly did that just happen?

 

The novel I'm currently pitching had its genesis in the Elian Gonzalez controversy in 2000. Elian's parents were divorced and his mother died, leaving him in the custody of his maternal grandparents. His father wanted custody. Simple issue, you say? Un-newsworthy, you say? It would have been, had Elian's dad lived anywhere but where he did - Cuba. Little Elian became the center of a national scream fest, with all sorts of horrific consequences predicted for Elian were he to be allowed to return to his father, by people with no connection with either the family or with Cuba. It was so over the top that it defied reason. And then I realized that most of what I knew about Cuba I had learned at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis - when I was 9. So, I decided to read up on Cuban history - first a short survey work, then a more in-depth general history by a British historian (where I discovered that 90% of what I had learned about what we call the Spanish-American War was BS, but that's a rant for another time), and then much more period-specific and topic-specific material. By that time, the thought had occurred to me that this would be fertile ground for a historical novel, so my reading took on a different slant, as I looked for answers to specific questions. I also read some fiction, some poetry and writings by Jose Marti and Fr. Felix Varela.

And then, one day, two thirteen-year-old kids popped into my head - an Irish-American boy and a Cuban girl, and I realized how I was going to pull it all together. And so Rosa's Secret was born.

 

Of the 4 WIP's that I have, three have been in my head for most of my adult life. The fourth one came about by a chance encounter. I can't describe it. I'm a consulting engineer, and after I was finished with my field work and the interview with the estate's caretaker, the whole story gelled in my head on the drive home. That has never happened to me before.

 

For me it was frustration at the uk governments proposed plan for citizens to carry ID cards around with them, it felt like Nazi Germany "show me your papers", thankfully it was shelved once Tony Blair was out of power. But this infringement on personal freedom spawned the first idea for my novel.