Back in the sixth grade, my reading class had to do projects on their favorite authors. As we were starting these projects, the teacher asked us each to come up with a question that we wanted to answer about . There were a few exceptions scattered in there, but ninety percent of the class—the teacher included—had the same question: “Where does Author X get his ideas?”
It took about twenty-five years before I realized that was the wrong question. As an amateur, I—along with many other people, I believe—assumed that being a writer was primarily a matter of getting brilliant ideas. You get the idea of a boy who goes to Wizarding School, a beautiful vampire who falls in love with a human girl, or a teenage girl who must join in a game that’s a fight to the death. Once that spark of inspiration struck, it was a simple matter of writing things up, then collecting the money and accolades.
The truth is that ideas are everywhere. I didn’t realize just how many of them there were until I started keeping track of them in a file. Currently, my idea file contains enough that, at my current pace of writing, I’ll be busy until sometime in 2029. And it grows every time I take my daughter to the playground these days; that playground seems determined to write the seventh Seelie Court novel without much if any input from me.
However, whether it’s the “right” question or not, I know that people do wonder about where writers get their ideas. And because I can answer that question in the case of Red Lights on Silver Mountain Road, I feel I should satisfy that curiosity.
I remember exactly what gave me the idea that eventually turned into Red Lights on Silver Mountain Road. It was February 12, 2016, and I was reading Sarah Hoyt’s blog and her anecdote about driving from Colorado Springs to Denver on a foggy night. She described following the taillights of the car in front of her, turning where they turned, and hoping that the path that got that car safely along the highway would do the same for her.
Immediately on reading this, I thought of the legends of the will-o’-wisp. The original legend might have referred to lanterns in bogs, but the idea here was much the same: navigating via light. What if that light proved untrustworthy? And further, what if you knew that light might be untrustworthy—might you follow it all the same? What are your other options? I thought about Mrs. Hoyt and her drive along that mountain road. If she knew that those lights in front of her could be maliciously leading her to her doom, would she continue to follow them? Or would she try to navigate blindly, only able to see a few feet in front of her?
I thought about that idea for a while, and thought about writing it, but eventually I had to put it aside. All I had was an idea, and an idea is not a story.