Where Ideas Come From

The world is an amazing place. It is filled with unlimited stimuli for our senses and our minds.

Something so simple as the wind moving the pine tree in an impromptu dance can bring forth images from other times, other places. Or that pine in the wind can be a soothing balm for our eyes and mind.

To my way of thinking, the thing that separates a writer from a non-writer is the ability to take the thoughts, patterns, and images we experience around us and see a story in them. The non-writer simply experiences the world. The writer not only experiences, but sees the stories that are there.

For 30 years I worked in county government and hated it. Yet, that job provided me with the seed idea for my first mystery, Festival of Death, gave me experiences and information and insights that I’ve used in many poems, short stories, and novels.

One morning a sentence popped into my head: Today I killed a man and a woman. A provocative sentence that! Must’ve had a bad day at work! That sentence, though, grew into my post-apocalyptic cozy catastrophe The Rocheport Saga.

The job isn’t the only source of ideas, however. Story ideas are everywhere.

The Pierce Mostyn series has a genesis that goes back decades. In the early 70s I became a member of a Minneapolis-based horror and pulp fiction fan group. I met Donald Wandrei, Carl Jacobi, Weird Tales artist Jon Arfstrom, and Jack Koblas, who went on to became a noted regional historian and biographer.

That fan group also introduced me to The X-Files, although many years passed before I actually watched the show.

Then sometime in 2017, after watching a few episodes of The X-Files, I got the idea for a mash-up between The X-Files and the Cthulhu Mythos. I liked the idea of an FBI agent hunting monsters and aliens. And what’s not to like about Cthulhu and his ilk?

After that idea took hold, it was a simple matter of a few broad brushstrokes to create the Mostyn world, and I was in business. But what stories would I tell about Pierce Mostyn and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena?

The first three Mostyn tales were heavily inspired by HP Lovecraft’s stories “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, “The Mound”, and “The Lurking Fear”.

The next Mostyn stories, however, drew inspiration from a variety of sources: Van Dyne’s Vampires from cryptozoology (the chupacabra and the Jersey Devil in particular); the seed idea for The Medusa Ritual came from the Heald/Lovecraft story “The Man of Stone” and the Medusa myth; Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City” and the movie The Mummy gave me the launch pad for Demons in the Dunes; and the forth coming Van Dyne’s Zuvembies makes use of Robert E Howard’s creation which appeared in his story “Pigeons from Hell”.

There is nothing new under the sun, the writer of Ecclesiastes declared. And he’s right. Everything plays off of everything else. Someone may come up with a unique and memorable way to express the thought, but most likely the thought itself is not unique. Someone said or wrote something like it before.

All one has to have are the eyes to see the stories, the many stories, that are all around us. If you have those eyes, you’re a writer. If you don’t, perhaps you can learn.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy creating!