“Where Do You Get Your Ideas?”
Most authors and aspiring authors seem to dislike this question, and it’s unsurprising why. To someone who doesn’t have stories running through their mind like a perpetually playing record, it’s puzzling where someone who seems completely normal on the outside got the idea to write a book about camo-colored, guerilla-warfare fighting flamingos.
Some aspiring authors ask this question of their favorite authors, perhaps hoping to get some easy answer to give them ideas like their idols. Non-writers ask it because they don’t know exactly what they’re asking and are unaware they’ll probably find the answer unsatisfying.
Well, the reason authors don’t like it is there isn’t an easy answer. Ideas come from everywhere, and sometimes nowhere.
As for me, I don’t actually dislike this question. Not because I’m somehow better than any other author, but because I do have an easy answer that’s true for about ninety percent of my stories.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had extremely vivid, extremely detailed nightmares. Most of the time, those nightmares wake me up at 4:00 in the morning and make me too uncomfortable to go back to sleep. Sometimes, however, a nightmare will stick in my mind throughout the next day and week and so forth and so on until it snowballs with other ideas into a story long enough to be a novel.
Here’s where I got the seed of the idea that became Cloud Bear. Since you’re here, it’s the least I can do.
I have a bear carved from blue stone with a mother-of-pearl fish in its mouth. It belonged to my grandpa—not the grandpa who gave me the idea for Cloud Bear’s era placement, my other one. Anyway, I love that bear. The week after I got it, I had a strange nightmare. Yes, it was a nightmare, even though most of the scariness is lost in the telling.
The dream went like this. It was night, and I was looking down at a town surrounded by walls, high in the mountains. Puffy clouds floated above the town in the midnight sky, and stars twinkled above them, with three moons in different phases making the clouds glow spectral white. From the sky, three bears made of clouds emerged from their hiding place of perfect camouflage and charged towards the unsuspecting town below. I knew the bears were going down there to eat as many people as possible. I knew the cloud bears needed to eat people instead of normal prey animals. I didn’t know why. I was eager to see what happened. Unfortunately, I woke up.
You can likely see how this dream became Cloud Bear. You can see how that town became Moonwater. Even though the three adult bears made of clouds turned into one adult male and three cubs with fur that only looks like a sky with clouds, you can see the birth of cloud bears and the attack on Moonwater. You can also see the town having walls became the basis for fortified towns. You may have noticed I even kept the dream-detail of the three moons.
As I said, many of my stories are like that. As they are published, I expect I’ll share the dream-origins of most of them. In this case, Cloud Bear obviously had more growing to go to become the story it is today, but this was its birth. Unless you equate the birth of a story with the absolute first idea I had for it, which then belongs with Zaris and a different dream. Someday, I’ll share how Cloud Bear combined with Zaris’ story, which is an origin in and of itself.
Back to my stone bear, though. It caused that dream by floating through my subconscious; I’m as sure of this now as I was the morning I woke up. I couldn’t be happier about it.