“Where do you get your ideas?” Every writer has probably heard this question. Often, it’s followed up by someone suggesting their own idea for a story. In some particularly obnoxious cases, the person then suggests some sort of business partnership with you, the poor ink-stained wordsmith, doing the grunt work of writing, while they, the free-thinking creative, feeds you ideas. They may even offer money – paid upon the contingency of publication, of course. Back away slowly. These people are deluded.

The idea is the easy part. Most writers have more ideas than they have time. Ideas are not even half the battle. Yet, it remains a strange and enduring truth that people find ideas to be most mysterious and difficult part of writing. In fact, ideas are simple. And you don’t have any? There’s a straightforward solution: Don’t write. Why waste everyone’s time in such an unpleasant pursuit without even having an idea?

Yet, most people have ideas. True, most of these ideas are terrible. (That’s true for writers too.) Others are simply impracticable. (Also true for writers.) And some are simply beyond one’s talent. (This is also true for writers, but this truth usually only becomes apparent after a great deal of time, sweat, and tears. This terrible truth only shows up after the story is done.)

The trick is not so much finding ideas as it is telling the difference between a good idea and a bad idea. This solution is also straightforward: You must read. You must always be reading. You should read whenever you get a chance. You must read widely and you must read deeply. All writing begins with reading and ends with reading. Read! And a little louder for those in the back: READ!!!

Reading will tell you when an idea has become a cliché. It will show you the different tricks and twists that have been worked on that idea’s theme. It will bruise your brain with humility and curiosity and those bruises will swell into wonderful imaginings. With some luck, reading a few time travel stories will stop you from approaching your local science fiction writer and pitching something like “a person goes back in time and kills someone, but that person turns out to be—” Yes, we’ve already guessed.

We’ve read it before.

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Now, having said all that, I do have diligent students who are completely convinced that generating ideas is either very hard or that they totally lack creativity. (I once had a student, a bright and charming young lady, say that she had taken an intelligence test that told her she totally lacked imagination. She scored 0% on that portion. She used this as evidence that she could not come up with ideas. But she was willing to try!) I do not blame my students for this situation. I blame the light-bulb.

Creativity is often portrayed as a bolt from the blue. It’s a stroke of inspiration. Athena leaping fully formed from Zeus’s head. Or, in the modern cartoon, a light-bulb appearing above a head. DING!

If this is how you think creative ideas appear, then you can be forgiven for thinking you don’t have any. The problem with children is, they tend to believe what adults tell them. That, by itself, is fine and a well-honed survival strategy, but it becomes a problem because so many adults tell lies. Adults lie for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they just want to save time. Other times, they don’t know the answers and don’t want to admit that. And often it’s just because an adult has to simplify matters for a child. The intentions are fine, but the resulting belief can be a problem. We lie about the difficulty of generating ideas, their relative importance to creativity, and how it feels to get them. We promote inspiration.

Is it any wonder that children think they don’t have ideas? It’s a bit like children wondering why they’ve never actually seen Santa Claus. The sort of ideas that they’ve been told about don’t exist.

I won’t completely rule out inspiration. I can remember when and where the idea for my novel, Technicolor Ultra Mall, occurred to me. I was on a bus passing through Oshawa. I looked out the window at The Oshawa Center, a fairly big mall in a mid-sized Canadian city. A question suddenly occurred: Where does that mall end? At the exits? Then what about the parking lot? What about the roads that lead to it?

This was a bit like inspiration. At least, it’s what passes for it around here. But notice it was not a fully formed idea. It was only a question. A question that I found interesting enough to pursue. We all have these questions. To get started, one just has to notice them and try to answer them.

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David Lynch has written and spoken about ideas. He says that, to him, it feels like there’s a fully formed puzzle on the other side of a door. Someone passes you a piece under the door. As you start putting it together, more pieces get passed to you. The first feeling isn’t “AHA!” with a light-bulb. It’s more like “what the heck is this thing?” And the more you work with it, the more of the idea comes. Finally, you have the puzzle.

The Lynch analogy works. However, I’ve always tended to describe ideas as digging. Either archaeology or mining. You notice something, you decide to dig. You develop a method for digging and an instinct for the ideas that are worth pursuing. When I had that thought about the Oshawa Center, I knew – ‘there’s gold in them thar hills.’ I just had to build my grid, get my shovel, and start digging. Hard graft? Yes. Worth it? Maybe.

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Even if you don’t think you have ideas, you can still generate them. You don’t always need to find them. You don’t always need to wait for someone to pass you a piece of a puzzle. There are simple techniques to create ideas. I’ve used these techniques myself and have taught my students to use them. They work. They even worked for the student with the 0% imagination score.

Let’s get to it!

IMITATING & ADAPTING: Everyone wants to be an original. But most writers start by imitating. Some have built entire careers out of it. Now, this doesn’t mean copying. (Although, realistically, that’s how most writers start.) It means taking an idea you like and trying to do it yourself. Adapting it. Take Moby Dick and put it in space. Take a Shakespeare story (most writers have) and put it into a new context. Macbeth as a modern politician? You get House of Cards. King Lear as media mogul? Succession. So many books, stories, and movies have been based on real events or people. When you see a great idea, try to steal it, and make it your own. It takes creativity to not get caught!

ARGUMENT: You ever read a story and wish something else had happened? Guess what! That’s an idea. Rewrite the story to make it into the story you wish you had read. Think clearly about what didn’t work and make it work. Maybe you hate the theme. Disagreement can be inspirational. Maybe, as you were reading, you found yourself thinking “yeah, but . . .” Start your writing there. Follow that thought and write the story you wish it was or think it should be. In some ways, you can learn more from reading terrible writing than you can from reading great writing.

PERSPECTIVE: Think about telling a story from a different perspective. Imagine a Jane Goodall biography. But instead of telling it from Jane’s point of view, you tell the story from one of the chimpanzee’s perspectives. Maybe Jane’s friend, David Graybeard. Maybe Jane’s nemesis, Frodo. There’s at least two sides to every story. You pick a different side, you’ve come up with a new story.

CUT UP & COLLAGE: At first glance, avant garde literary techniques would seem like a strange place for young writers to get ideas. Yet, in the classroom, I’ve had great results with modified versions of these advanced techniques. The basic idea behind this approach is that creativity is not about having a fully formed idea. Rather, it is about finding connections between juxtaposed elements. I look around my office and I see a model skeleton, a picture of an FBI Agent, and a chessboard. From that, a story about an FBI agent playing chess with death. What are the details? What are the stakes? Those are the problems that creativity can solve. The idea is taken care of. All that remains are difficult, but manageable problems. Find three random elements and connect them. They won’t all work. But some will.

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Some ideas won’t work, but some will. Perhaps, most won’t. But some will. Maybe. We live in hope.

But, however it goes, when you pursue an idea, when you dig for an idea or fish for an idea, other ideas will come. You will also learn something important about ideas. Ideas are vital, but they're easy. You must learn to be true to the idea and treat it with respect. You must try to execute the idea. And that is where the hard work of writing really begins.

Anyone can tell a writer their idea and be ignored. Anyone can write a prompt into an AI and generate mediocre slop. Anyone can come up with an idea and forget it. The skill is honoring your idea in prose. And that takes practice, hard work, and, often, a little help from your friends. It's not easy, but it may be worth the effort.