Big Magic, Synchronicity, and Ideas

One of the most frequent questions Rob and I are asked is, Where do you get your ideas?

I like writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s answer to this. In her most recent book, Big Magic, she talks about her belief that ideas look for receptive writers. If you agree to explore the idea that finds you, then it’s a commitment. If you break the commitment, the idea goes looking for another writer who might be able to bring it to life. She provides several stunning examples from her own life that are convincing. Rather than reiterating what she has written (buy the book!), here’s a similar example of an idea that found me.

Back around the time of the new moon in Scorpio in November, my friend Nancy Pickard suggested that I try writing short stories for Ellery Queen Magazine or some of the other fiction magazines that still exist. The first thing I ever sold was a short story to Young Miss, a teen magazine with fiction geared toward women in high school. I was thrilled when I received my first check ever for writing anything – $350. Not long afterward, my first novel sold. I also wrote one other short story for a Dean Koontz collection. That one took place in the Amazon. Short stories are a much different form than novels, but I decided to try Nancy’s suggestion.

I ran over to Barnes & Noble and bought several short story magazines. I read three or four stories in each magazine, to get a sense of what they published. I decided to try Ellery Queen first. Nancy had told me they don’t publish much paranormal fiction, so I wrote a straight suspense fiction/mystery story and felt my mother peering over my shoulder as I went to work

It takes place in an Alzheimer’s unit, where my mother spent the last several years of her life. I used some of the characters I met in that twilight place. Alzheimer’s/dementia enabled me to play around with the nature of consciousness without calling it paranormal. I wrote the story in two days, in a kind of possessed state, then gave it to Rob. He made some great suggestions, particularly about the ending. I integrated them into the story and sent it off to Nancy.

Nancy is a versatile writer who’s a master at short fiction. She read it and loved it and introduced me to the editor. I submitted it a few days after the new moon in November. On December 9, two days before December’s new moon, the editor wrote and said she wanted to buy it. I was thrilled.

In between, I had a particularly vivid dream about my former fiction editor, Kate Duffy,  who died in 2009. In the years since her death, this is the first time I’ve dreamed about her. In the dream, we were talking and laughing about life and politics and books, just as we used to do when she was alive, and she referred to my short story. I don’t know if she used the title, but the implication was that I should write a novel based on the short story.

I had this dream the night before Megan and I left Atlanta, where we’d been visiting my sister. During the long drive back to Orlando, spurred on by nothing more than the vivid intensity of this dream, I figured out the plot, characters, the book. When I got home, I started making notes, then wrote a couple of sample chapters. I realized my short story was the basis of the present life where the dementia/Alzheimer’s patient –Rose  (my mother’s name) – is tuning in on a life in a vastly changed future. In this future life, the geography of the planet has been altered by climate change and people like Rose’s future self – Ellie – have developed psychic skills and abilities to deal with it.

So far, it feels good to me, something I can pick up between other projects and run with wherever it takes me.

Thanks, Kate! And thanks to Nancy Pickard and to Janet Hutchings, the editor of Ellery Queen. And yes, thanks to my mother, who is still peering over my shoulder, whispering, Do this. Do that. No, that’s not right. Yes, go there.

Her 99th birthday would have been December 23.