Legend says that Keith Richards, lead guitarist and co-founder of the Rolling Stones, woke in the early hours of May 7, 1965, turned on a tape recorder and laid down a riff. He dozed off and when he woke some time later, he hit playback and heard about 30 seconds of music followed by 45 minutes of snoring. He’d played the riff while half asleep, on an acoustic guitar, at a slow speed. Mick Jagger said it sounded like country music and not something the Stones would play. Keith refused to give up and continued playing with the riff. By May 10, 1965, that half-minute riff was on its way to becoming the Stones’ greatest hit: (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.
Did Keith dream the riff? Did some rock and roll angel (or alien) implant it in his brain while he slept? Who knows.
That’s how it happens with writers, too. We'll be driving to the grocery store and one of us will say, “Hey, I just had an idea. What if Swagger..." And then ideas start bouncing all over the place.
When back-to-school supplies go on sale, we stock up on spiral notebooks. We’ve got notebooks all over the house with parts of scenes, lists of ideas, names for characters... I keep a small notebook in my purse so I can jot down ideas that come to me when I’m driving around doing errands. Sometimes I spend more time sitting in the parking lot writing ideas than I do shopping.
A piece of music can inspire a scene—like a cut from the Mass Effect 3 soundtrack that inspired the scene where Foster... Oops, no spoilers! JJ types with her headphones on, listening to music on You Tube. The group Two Steps from Hell (particularly Archangel) has been a major inspiration for both of us lately. Song lyrics can inspire a scene or a character’s motivation.
TV shows or movies can inspire. Some shows are incredibly formulaic and predictable. You know exactly what’s going to happen, and hope the writers took the story in another direction. They didn’t. So you begin to think, “What would have happened if..." Another great idea for a story.
One of my grade school teachers used to post a picture on the wall or play a piece of classical music, and we were to write whatever it inspired. We were graded on spelling, grammar and punctuation rather than the subject, and it was fun. A black and white photo in our living room inspired a scene of a foggy night with pools of light at the base of street lamps and an old fashioned car on the road. A Michael Parkes print in my bedroom inspired the beginning of a story about gargoyles.
So to tell you where we get our ideas, I have a simple answer: I don’t know.
Sometimes we do get some satisfaction.
