Where do your ideas come from?
Everywhere. Quite literally. I’ve discovered that all that’s necessary to find a good story is the willingness to ask “what if…?” The last part of that question can be just about anything. What if cars had skis instead of wheels? What if human bodies required methane and not oxygen? What if someone has kids to feed but the only way they can immediately do so involves running illegal moonshine?
In other words, the only innate requirement to be able to tell stories is a sense of curiosity. Everything else, including the willingness to engage in thought experiments to see how far an answer might go, can be taught. That curiosity doesn’t have to be broad, either; many successful creators — perhaps even most — focus on just one or two areas.
I used to believe that curiosity was innate to all human beings, but in recent years I’ve learned that it actually isn’t. I do not understand this mindset, or where it comes from. I only know it exists. I worry how many stories will be lost through that simple lack of curiosity, and I consider it unfortunate that such things can happen.
My point is that the only thing necessary for a story idea — or, in fact, to create anything at all — is the need to answer a question.
The nuts and bolts of creating things can be taught, whether it’s a story, a piece of music, a sculpture, a blanket, or anything else that comes about as a result of human hearts, minds and hands. It’s the curiosity that has to come first: what if I could figure out a way to knot these strings together to make a piece of cloth? What if I heated meat over a fire instead of eating it raw?
Everyone’s curiosity will run in different directions, but most of us have a few commonalities in our questions. In my case, my deepest curiosity is about how human beings organize and run their societies — and how individuals function within those societies. Thus, much of my work involves individuals learning how to navigate, adapt to, and potentially even change those social structures. It also leads me to find out why those structures developed as they have, and how they might have differed had some aspect of their development been different.
Those are the questions I find myself asking over and over: why are things the way they are? And what if something had been different?