You don’t smell so good yourself.

For the past few days I’ve been transcribing a telephone interview I conducted earlier in the week. Painstaking work, to say the least. I’ve gone through the fifty minutes of recording a few times to make sure I have the words exactly right, but at the same time smoothing out all the false-start sentences and deleting the ums and you knows. The final product is about 6500 words long, and it makes for fascinating reading. At least I think so.

Anyone checking out Eureka on Sci Fi? It’s a fun show, and Matt Frewer is just an added bonus, accent and all. Lots of cool gizmos because Eureka is a place with the highest average IQ on the planet, basically. Coolest sunglasses ever in this week’s episode. (Today’s subject line is the grade school response to the title of this show, by the way.)

This morning, in the shower, my thoughts kept drifting to a new story I’m going to start in the next week or two. A loosely themed anthology, non-supernatural, non-genre to which I received an invitation. For a few weeks I’ve had a vague idea of what I wanted to write about in terms of theme and mood, but I didn’t have a catalyst moment and I think I came up with that this morning. Rather than entrust it all to memory, I grabbed a stray sheet of paper when I got out of the shower and wrote nearly two pages of notes. I’m starting to get a handle on the story, though I’m not sure where I’m going with it.

Someone asked me recently about my writing approach (outlining vs. flying blind) and I ultimately summed it up like this. Once I understand who the main characters are, what they want, and what keeps them from attaining what they want, I feel like I’m ready to start writing. I started to say that knowledge keeps me on track, but I corrected myself to say that it allowed me to push my characters off track and watch them struggle to get back on it.

Another person asked on a message board what inspires writers. I think the “where do you get your ideas” questions is derided so frequently because the truth is that ideas are everywhere. It’s impossible to not get ideas every day. A fragment of a conversation heard in passing. A moment in a TV show or film. A headline or a minor detail buried deep in a news story. A cartoon. A mistaken glimpse of something. A sound. A smell. A random firing of neurons. I have pages and pages and pages of “ideas.” Some of them turn into stories every now and then when I find the story within the idea. Most of them will probably remain on those lists I have. Ideas are cheap. They’re the “high concepts” movie people talk about. But to turn something like that into a story takes a lot more, no matter how much potential the idea seems to have.

Because I need to know the characters, and what they want, and what’s keeping them from what they want before the idea grows into a story.