The Idea Factory

Probably the most common question authors get is Where do you get your ideas?

The short answer is: everywhere.

But what does that mean? It’s kind of a Zen-sounding thing, isn’t it? Or maybe like Yoda said it. Just like any good Zen koan, there’s an answer in there if you look hard enough, and in this case you need to look at it as an author does.

Because the sources of our ideas are as varied and infinite as the stars. I know—that’s grandiose sounding, but it’s true. My name is Gil Miller, and I want to share where some of my ideas came from.

Take, for instance, my novel Spree. It takes place in modern day, starting in Los Angeles with Steve Wilson and Eddie Jones. Both are two-strike losers looking prison in the eye. They can’t make it as straight citizens, so when Eddie gets word from back in New Jersey that his brother has an operable brain tumor insurance won’t pay for, they hatch the idea of robbing their way across the country, roughly following I-10. When they get to the East Coast, they’ll give the money to Eddie’s brother and use what’s left over to flee the country to Brazil.

I got the initial idea from reading Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough. It’s nonfiction, and it covers Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barker Gang, as well as the advent of the FBI. It’s interesting reading, but it raised one question for me: could someone get away with a crime spree like that in modern times? I talked to several people I trusted and the main consensus was someone could as long as they kept moving.

But I wanted to make it fun, so I came up with a very cinematic concept to tell the story with. And along the way, I threw in some other factors to make the story even more interesting. From what I’ve been told, it works.

Then there’s my Rural Empires series, the first of which is Hillbilly Hustle (formerly titled A Temporary Thing). The original idea for this came from reading an editorial in the Northwest Arkansas Times discussing how Northwest Arkansas is part of the pipeline of drugs moving from Mexico to points east, such as Virginia and other East Coast states. I remember finishing the article and immediately wondering what it would be like if some local good ol’ boy became involved in that pipeline. In fact, that was the original title: Pipeline, a doorstop of a book that came to over 214,000 words and required considerable editing and splitting into two books, of which Hillbilly Hustle is the prequel.

An added idea came at a holiday family gathering when my cousin’s husband suggested I write about two crime families in Washington County, one of which ran meth and the other marijuana. I immediately paired that with an incident I read about in the book Methland by Nick Reding in which he talks about an illegal immigrant who paid for being smuggled across the border by delivering one hundred pounds of meth to two guys with long beards in Rogers, Arkansas. The long-bearded guys ended up being major characters in the series.

In addition, I’ve gotten ideas from songs, from other books (throwaway lines the author didn’t explore at all but that appealed to me), by writing my own versions of stories I’ve read (it’s said there’s no original stories, only individual takes on them), from television shows (I took a great deal of inspiration from Justified and Breaking Bad, as well as Miami Vice and Scarface) “Cleanup Detail,” one of the short stories in my ebook collection One Last Bluff was inspired by the Michael Mann (of the aforementioned Miami Vice) movie Collateral starring Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx, while one of the other stories, “Crosstown Traffic,” is my version of the story of a wounded hitman that my daughter originally wrote. I simply took it in a different direction than she did.

As a member of the Bumbershoots Writers Society, I also have the advantage of discussing small ideas with other people, and those ideas often turn into big ideas. If you want to be a writer, joining a group of other writers will give you valuable resources.

So where do we get our ideas?

We get them from everywhere, as I hope you can now see.

And while we’re on the subject of ideas—and since you can now see they are everywhere—please don’t offer to “give” an author an idea if he or she will just write it. Coming up with ideas is the easy part; writing them is a different matter altogether. If that were easy, we’d all be authors.

Neil Gaiman put it this way: You get ideas from dreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.