Tag: Where did you get the idea?

Where did you get the idea for the sequel…?

Where did I get the idea for The Changeling? In Fort Collins, Colorado. I was just about a half a block from the Colorado State campus, walking on Elizabeth Street between Shields and City Park Avenue. I believe that I was on the north side of the street heading west, but I couldn’t swear to that.

At this point, it probably feels like we’re in a variant of the joke where a guy is in a hot air balloon, asks a passer by on the ground where he is, and is informed that he’s in a balloon about twenty feet off the ground, the joke that ends with, “You must be a computer person. The answer that you gave was technically correct but completely useless.”* And while I’m guilty of being a computer type, I’m not trying to be difficult here. “Where did you get the idea…” is not asking for GPS coordinates, I know, but in this case, that’s the only answer I have. 

I got the idea for The Changeling  before Red Lights on Silver Mountain Road was even completely outlined, let alone written. I was working at Colorado State University at the time, and I had gone for walk while a particular complicated bit of code chewed through my data. At that point, many of the details of the world and the characters were still nebulous: the series was set somewhere in the Appalachians, and I had a vague idea of Emma as a law student at someplace like West Virginia or Appalachian State. As I said, I was walking along Elizabeth Street just west of campus, not thinking about anything in particular, when the idea of Emma trying to defend a changeling who wanted to keep a human life rather than returning to the fairy world downloaded itself into my head. I don’t know what put it there or why, but by the time I finished my walk, I was brimming with thoughts of Emma as a lawyer helping humans and fairies who had fallen afoul of the laws of the Fae. The series name of The Seelie Court occurred to me then, with the pun on it being a court of law fully intentional. (You may now groan and throw things at me through the computer).

Obviously, things changed. The setting moved to Colorado, and Emma turned out not to be suited for lawyering: she’s certainly smart enough, but she’s a woman of action who would have no patience with debates on how New York Times v. Sullivan would apply to Twitter feeds. Given that, I wondered if the idea of The Changeling would still work or if it should be abandoned in favor of some of the other ideas I had about the Seelie Court world. However, the idea stuck with me for multiple reasons: I liked the idea of Emma’s allies from the first book becoming enemies (at least temporarily), and I liked the idea of an untrustworthy and not all that likable victim who nonetheless could be considered sympathetic. It struck me as a good way to explore the uncertainty and treachery that’s inherent in being a mortal dealing with the Fae. I also liked the idea of a courtroom and a trial as the framework to let Emma explore the Fae Realm. Even though Emma was no longer a potential lawyer, she would still want to help, and indeed her lack of verbal debate experience was a plus in throwing her into the deep end of the Fairy Courts and letting her flounder.

So it was that about six months after finishing Red Lights on Silver Mountain Road, I put my fingers on the keyboard to write The Changeling and see if I could type this story out of my head…

*: I should mention that we techies have our own ending to that joke. After balloon guy’s rant, the guy on the ground says, “And you must be a buisness person. You don’t know where you are or where you need to go, but you expect me to be able to help. You’re no worse off than you were before, only now, for some reason, it’s my fault.”

So Where Did You Get the Idea for…?

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.