So you want to write a novel.

(Listen, you should know me well enough by now to know I wasn’t going to let a chance to use that GIF go by.)

Congratulations! Welcome to the fellowship of the pen and ink! We have plenty of room at the giant table o’ authors. What’s that? You don’t think you’re worthy of that title yet? As long as you’re actively working on a story, friend, you’re an author. It’s a long, bumpy road with switchbacks, sinkholes, steep hills, sudden drop offs, and long stretches of nothing – and everyone’s path is a little bit different, but remember: anyone who’s ever set word to page has been on it and we’re all on it together.

A question writers, be they seasoned pro or brand new wordsmith, get all the time is: Where do you get your ideas?

We hate that question. We hate it with every synapse in our gray matter. We’ll do anything we can to avoid answering it, including pointing and yelling, “Hey, is that Jason Momoa?” and running away while our interrogator is distracted.

It’s not that we don’t want to answer. It’s not that we’re hiding some sort of precious alchemical knowledge or runes from the Illuminati handbook. It’s not that we don’t like the person asking (I mean, we may or may not, but that has nothing to do with the question). It’s not that we’re afraid of someone sneaking up to our hidden wellspring and stealing a sip o’ plots.

The reason writers hate that question, the reason we’d rather stick a fork in our legs than answer it, is that We. Don’t. Know.

Creative brains are weird places, my friends. They make things that react and talk back and sometimes very rudely insist on going east when we’ve been planning for them to go west for six months (more on that some other time). They also make connections more analytical brains might not. Sometimes, that happens when you’re actively searching for a spark. Sometimes it happens when you’re laying in bed, minding your own business, and a shadow triggers a memory that reminds you of something you saw on a nature documentary when you were 6 and have been meaning to learn more about for the last 33 years.

Some writers use prompts to get things moving. A writing prompt can be anything from a single word to a picture to a history lesson about a tree that grows in a cemetery in Mexico that supposedly springs from the body of a vampire. What’s fascinating about prompts is that you can have 100 people use the same one and get 100 different stories, because each of those writers has lived their own life, had their own experiences, and has a different frame of reference for the word vampire.

Sometimes, it’s a song lyric that starts your trek through the unknown, your personal interaction with a phrase or a specific instrument or even a single note. And, as before, 100 people can write 100 different stories that start with listening to the same song. A rabbit crosses the street in front of you. Christmas lights reflect off a puddle. You drop your phone in the toilet. Someone does something nice for you. Someone says something horrible to you. You buy piri piri instead of the green Louisiana gold hot sauce and something hilarious happens when your spouse eats it. A stove clicks on, your coffee maker finishes up, you blow out a candle. Whatever it is, something triggers a sense or a memory or a wish and there’s no going back.

Time to do some research on whatever concept, character, place, or sensation your mind pulled from that input. Does research mean poring through multiple books on the same topic? Sometimes. Author Ann Leckie (The Imperial Radch series) tells her online students (of which I have been one) that, for a writer, everything is research. Smelling flowers. Going to the museum. Sitting in a cafe and letting people move around you. You never know what’s going to feed the little kernel you want to grow into a story.

Leckie also mentioned that she’ll go to the library and pull down whatever books catch her eye, whether it be multiple books on the same topics or a single book on a great many topics, because one never knows when one will come across a concept that slots an angler fish into space or a garden into a cave. There’s treasure in them thar pages, but you won’t know which ones you want until you find them, so learn physics or grow some vegetables or read a book about bee keeping.

The disparate elements you collect may not make sense to anyone except you, but that’s okay. They don’t need to. Quite honestly, until they start coming together into characters and a plot and a world, they don’t even need to make sense to you; your brain grabbed on to beekeeping for a reason. Trust it.

An example? Certainly.

I have a novel I’ve been working on seriously for about six months. It’s already gone through multiple partial drafts and while I love my concept, I’m not a huge fan of what I’ve written thus far. When I get bogged down or frustrated, rather than forcing myself to make words, I let my mind wander and land wherever it lands, because thinking and researching are part of writing (thanks again, Ann).

Most recently, it landed on Venice (I was trying to refine my setting and there was a story about Venice flooding on the news and I remembered my trip to Venice and how unique it is and… voila!). Suddenly, I could see the setting in a way I hadn’t been able to before. I went to the library and grabbed a bunch of books about Venice. Well, Venice and Renaissance furniture; seeing the setting down to the minutiae was helping me move forward, and I figured the more of it I could visualize, the better the story would be.

One of the books about Venice mentioned Madame de Pompadour, longtime mistress of Louis XV. “Hey,” my brain yelled, “remember when Doctor Who did that episode on Madame de Pompadour and you bought that biography because she sounded really interesting? It’s on the shelf.” So I pulled it down, read it, requested more books about Madame from the library, and now I have a sold concept for a character who’s been a little amorphous but I really wanted to keep around.

The first book on Venice I read contained a long section on banking from the 12th through 17th centuries; my alternative Venice now has an economy. An economy that involved trade with a great many countries, including China, and resulted in Venetian folks of means having extensive collections of both local and imported ceramics (I bet you know where this went). And because I went to see an exhibit on Katherine Hepburn’s stage and screen wardrobe and was quite taken by the sleeves on a very specific wedding dress she wore in one play, I know what that character’s very fancy Royal Ball dress looks like.

See what I mean? It barely makes sense to me, and I’m the one who connected the dots.

Will some of this tangled web get hacked out with a machete? Yup. Carefully pruned around a very specific and obscure bit of trivia? Most certainly. Will everything I keep end up in the book? Nope. The reader doesn’t always need to know everything the author knows, but it shows in the world-building and character construction if the writer doesn’t know (one of those things you don’t notice is present but absolutely notice if it’s absent).

Will I end up cutting stuff I spent tons of time on and really love? Already have; this story started in a sunken New Orleans and everyone had deep sea creature DNA grafted onto their human DNA. None of that was time wasted, though, because it somehow led to me landing in an alternative future Venice with no fish people but in which everyone carries a sword suited to their personality.

If this all sounds weird and complicated and a little hand-wavy, well, it is. Like I said, the reason we live in fear of the “Where do you get your ideas?” question is because it sounds weird and complicated and hand-wavy. Random bursts of electricity, tenuous and barely adjacent half-memory half-factoids, married to antique monetary system hybrids that would terrify Doctor Frankenstein and his monster.

I’ll admit it does sound like a magic trick worthy of Houdini, and maybe it is a little bit magical.

The really amazing part is that we each have our own journey. Only you can take an idea and make it into the story you want to tell. So get a library card, invest in a good reading light and a bunch of notebooks, and find a favorite pen. You’re going to need them.

Next time: How to organize that metric crap-ton of information you find yourself buried under.