Ideas and Coincidences

One of the questions most writers get, at one point or another, is, "Where do you get your ideas?" The answers are undoubtedly as varied as the writers--the answers to everything you can ask a writer are as varied as the writers you ask, so why should where ideas come from be any different?

My ideas don't seem to come from any single place--it's more that I put a bunch of different things together because I think they're cool and "ooh, shiny!" I am, in many ways, a magpie; it doesn't surprise me in the least to find my ideas come from the bits and bobs of things that attract me, and from the oddments in my attic of a head (full of useless junk collected for no apparent reason).

My first romance came from a desire to write fiction, the decision to write romance, and a piece of research that started a cascade of "What if...? And what if...? And then what if...?" The fantasy comes from a romantic idea I have of John Donne, of a guy who caused trouble as a youth who then went on to be a thoughtful and intelligent clergyman, a desire to play with the disarray at the end of Elizabeth I's reign, and a wish to consider the necessity of death for change, and the necessity of change for growth.

On the other hand, sometimes ideas are just in the air, available to anyone with sensitive enough antennae. Two or more writers will start working on stories that bear striking resemblance to one another, but the writers didn't know each other, and none of them have friends in common who can pass information along. This isn't my idea--sadly I can't remember for sure who said it or where I heard it--but I believe it happens. First, because it happened to me. There I was, quietly mulling over an idea in the privacy of my own head, when another writer mentioned that she was working on a story that had almost the same premise. Weird but true. (And someday I will write that story I was incubating--and because it's my story, it'll be utterly different than her take the premise.)

An even more extreme example came to light for me this this week when I read two Regency-era romances that had a number of qualities in common:

• A duke named Marcus;
• a ne'er-do-well brother;
• an unwanted marriage brought about by the machinations of a family member;
• and a bride who didn't see herself as appropriate duchess material.

It's not likely the authors borrowed from one another. I don't think they know each other--one lives on the east coast, the other in the midwest. The books came out within a month of each other, which means neither author could have read the other's book and borrowed elements, and the books were published by different publishers.

The most important thing, though, is that the things in common, however uncannily alike they are, are surface details. Everything else is different. The dukes, the duchesses, the ne'er-do-well brothers: All are completely different from one another. The family member who creates the situation and the motivation for doing so are completely different. The details of the plots, the turning points, the lessons to be learned--all the things that make the story unique--were different.

It is a truism that there are a limited number of plots. What that number is varies depending on who you listen to, but the largest number I've ever heard has been in the teens. If hundreds of books come out every month--and they do--then some of those plots have to repeat. A few times. What makes one book different from another?

Execution. Mies van der Rohe said, "God is in the details," and that's as true in fiction as it is in architecture. What each writer does with that plot--whether it's one of three possible, or one of 17--is what makes each book different. Skill is also involved; a truly skilled writer can freshen the tritest idea. But that's execution too.

If you're a writer, what does this mean for you? Well, it means that when someone has the same idea you had, it doesn't mean she somehow stole it. It means that how you tell the story might be more important than the plot itself. It means ideas are strange and wonderful, and they come from a lot of different places, and sometimes they come to more than one of us at a time. What makes a story mine (or yours) isn't just the idea; it's what I do with the idea, how I put my personal stamp, my Katyness, on the idea that makes it mine.