Someone asked me that question and I didn’t know how to answer it. I started writing—making up stories—before I could read & write. I can’t remember a time when something I saw or heard didn’t spark an idea. Not all the ideas wind up in fiction. In fact, the ratio of initial sparks to actual completed manuscripts is lopsided. Lots of things produce that spark. It’s the choices that follow the spark that make—or do not make—a story.
I have early memories of making up stories and of not worrying much about where they came from; the reaction of an audience; or that other people didn’t share my story-creating habit. I knew I was from a family of readers and story-makers and it wasn’t until much later that I learned the truth about writing.
The truth?
The ideas are the easy part the rest is sweat, diligence, discipline, hard work, and the dream, or fantasy, that you’ll have something worthwhile at the end of the journey.
Over the years various people, some friends but more often relative strangers, have “offered” to co-author a mystery. The proposal usually goes like this: “I have a great idea. I’ll give you that idea. You write the book and we split it 50/50.”
What? Are people really that naïve? Many.
Here are two ways to respond to this:
One, I have enough ideas of my own and must triage to figure out which one is worth a year-plus of my time and since I’m not netting and real money on this, what makes you think there’ll be more than a cup of coffee for you at the end?
Two, write it yourself and I’ll be happy to read your manuscript when it’s done.
The first is often met with a flummoxed stare. James Patterson is the exception—not the rule. Most of us DON’T make money by writing mysteries, regardless of the intriguing premise or unusual setting. Responses to the second are hilarious! My favorite—and I’ve heard this more than once—was…. “I can’t type.” The confusion between the automatic punching of keys that move an idea from the brain to the screen and the creation of those ideas, phrases, characters, scenes, dialog, descriptions, and an entire fictional world, astounds me.
Something to laugh about while I chug along creating fiction.
Reading or—more likely—making up a story inspired by the pictures in a book in my preliterate years.
-grin- I just added it up and I’ve been writing fiction for…18 years now. Yet I didn’t publish anything until 2013. Writing is hard work, but at the same time it doesn’t feel like work because it’s a passion.
When it’s going well, it doesn’t FEEL like work, but… the passion is always there. The work is usually there, too.
I’m surprised that you didn’t start writing sooner!? I just assumed you were a storyteller from the beginning. It’s interesting… Maybe you are the reader to writer transformation??? I’ve met a few and they all seem to be in the science fiction genre.