Been wondering where everyone get's their ideas from.
Schenectady, New York. I thought everyone knew that. ;-)
More often than not, my problem is trying to avoid getting ideas from places. When I see something cool in a book or movie or TV show, my gut reaction is to think That's awesome! I should put that in a story! The problem, of course, is that if you let yourself do this you're basically just ripping off other people's ideas and making your own pale imitations of them. I have to fight against that instinct every time I watch or read something that really captures my interest. Some ideas are really cool but wouldn't serve the story world I'm writing in at that particular time; others might not seem horribly out of place, but they would be recognizable as rip-offs from other stories, so they aren't appropriate to use if you want to write at a professional level.
It's really easy for a story world to fall into "kitchen sink" mode, where you throw in everything you think is cool and you end up with an unworkable mess. My first series of novellas, a space opera setting, fell victim to that problem; imagine a 16-year-old trying to make a story hold together with elements of Star Wars, Star Trek, murder mystery, UFO lore, anthro fiction, vampires, telepaths, Tom Clancy-style political thriller, and a little bit of This Present Darkness thrown in as well. Those stories helped me get better at the technical aspects of writing, but the plot was a disaster. Even when I started putting together MK2K, I was still doing it, and I've since had to go back and think carefully about which elements served the overall story and which ones needed to be downplayed or eliminated. That's why you don't see, for example, blasters or automatons in MK2K. (Well, okay, there is one automaton — Omega — but he's a relic of a bygone age.) That's also why there isn't a lot of focus on the furry side of the Curse in MK2K; I realized that the animal forms of most of the anthro characters in Metamor are purely cosmetic. Other than when Wanderer and the Duke were turned mindless, how often does an MK character's animal form really play in to that character's psychology? Most of these characters could be completely human and nothing significant about their characters would change. Because of that, I've been minimizing the role that theriomorphs play in MK2K until I can think of something to do with them that is both interesting and serves the larger story.
Overall, then, my writing process has relatively little to do with trying to come up with ideas. Instead, I have a huge cloud of ideas floating around in my head — thanks to all of the books, movies and TV shows that I've soaked up over the years — and I winnow them down until I come to a subset of those ideas that will work together to tell the story I want to tell. In the process, I try to strip away anything that is too distinctly associated with any one existing piece of fiction. I break things down to their component parts and figure out which parts will work for me in what I'm currently trying to do.
Example: Vampires. Oodles and oodles of stuff has been written about vampires. You've got Dracula in all his incarnations, Buffy, Anne Rice, the White Wolf books, and fantasy novels like Jim Butcher's Dresden Files and Kim Harrison's Hollows series, to name just a few. Each has some cool ideas that make for good storytelling, but you can't have all of them. Out of that big cloud of ideas, I had to make choices — Do vampires have souls? Are they really undead? Do they have reflections? What harms them, and why? etc. — to figure out what my vampires would look like. Those choices, in turn, implied certain things about vampire society and vampire psychology, and those in turn suggested specific stories that I could tell with that type of vampire. I could have made different choices, and they wouldn't necessarily have been better or worse — but they would have led to a different set of possible stories that could be told. The same is true of how I handled psionics or magic: I narrowed down my options to establish the mechanics, which then suggested the society, which gave rise to the possible stories that could be told. Of course, the way that I pick my options is often decided by certain key plot elements that I wanted to play with, so it's a bit of an iterative process. You start out with a question (e.g., "What would a murder investigation look like if the cops and criminals could use magic?"), it leads to world-building, and that can lead you to refine or revise the ideas that you started with in the first place.
That's how I operate at least half the time. The rest of the time I'm inspired not by plot-related questions, but by a particular character. Sometimes characters just seem to show up without you really knowing why, and their existence suggests certain stories that can be told with them. As Mark Twain said:
"If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them — you can't help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there's your book all finished up and never cost you an idea."
For me, this sort of thing usually happens after I've been building a story world for a while. That's how I got The Muse, in fact. Callie Linder and Will Kerenson didn't have anything to do with the main story arc I was envisioning for MK2K at that time, but one night I was walking along the street and composing mental narration of my life when I was struck by the absurdity of what I was doing. It occurred to me that it would be a really entertaining trait for a story character, and the concept for Will popped into my head almost instantly. Of course, to make it an interesting story I knew I would have to take this self-absorbed, mundane writer and stick him squarely in the middle of circumstances he was completely unprepared to deal with. I'd previously seen an article in Dragon magazine about planetouched characters with the blood of chaotic outsiders, and the idea of attaching poor Will to a character who was an embodiment of chaos struck me as the perfect match-up. The MK2K setting was already there waiting for me to use, so it wasn't hard to envision some things that might happen to Callie and Will to get them into trouble. From that point it was just a matter of working out the details. And the best part of it all is that, once they had been created, I found other things for them to do that would naturally tie them in with the overall story arc, so my bigger setting was enriched by the fact that these characters had popped into my head.
The best advice I can give to someone who's looking for ideas is to read broadly. Read fiction in all different genres. Read non-fiction — Popular Science, National Geographic and Discover can put all sorts of interesting notions into your head. Read gaming books and magazines. Watch the History Channel. Look at fantasy and sci-fi artwork. Listen to music. Ideas are as plentiful as oxygen; the tricky part is sifting them down into something coherent. :)
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