The idea of the idea

I am fascinated by ideas and where they come from. In short, they come from all sorts of sources, what we see, what we hear, what we observe, often what we believe.

It is worth examining how writers go about it:

* Writing about something you know can work. My crime novels are set in a world I know well because I was a crime reporter for newspapers and still am for magazines, and know plenty of detectives and have covered plenty of crimes. That experience makes for a deep pool of inspiration.

* It could be something in your own life. My mum’s grandfather was a widower and lived with two animals, a budgie and a cat. The man loved the budgie and the cat but the cat hated the budgie and saw it as lunch. For years, the cat waited its chance then one day the usually vigilant old man dropped his guard and left the cage door open. The budgie fluttered out - into the mouth of the cat. The distraught old man saw the feathers and drowned the cat. Inside two minutes he was left with no one. A terrific short story (sadly, the story turned out to be completely made up but hey!).

* Could be something you read or hear. A writer I taught read a newspaper snippet about a ventriloquist who died but his dummy kept talking. Cobblers, obviously, but it made for a spooky short story!

* Jonathan Swift was one of the great satirists of his age. He wanted to make the point that the men in power were small-minded so he invented a series of mystical worlds. In these worlds there were, among others, tiny people with big pretensions and obsequious courtiers who spent their days crawling across the floor until their mouths were full of dust. Since Swift’s day, the book has become better known as a children’s story but originally it was a writer giving voice to his beliefs.

John Dean