Where do I get my ideas

Good afternoon, Self!

I've been asked more times than I can count; where do I get my ideas for novels?

The answer is: many places. A few times, I've been half-awake, lying in bed early in the morning and will have just left rem-sleep and an idea comes to me. So, yeah, sometimes I dream them up. Other times, I think up a catchy title and build a story around it. I listen to a variety of music when I write, and once, I reached a minor impasse on a story and leaned back for a short break. The song that was playing at that time was an old, old rock song that I had listened to for over forty years. As I veg-ed out, I actually listened to the lyrics and realized that in all those years, I had never really known what the song was about. As it turned out, the song dealt with a funeral and the emotions that the lyricist was dealing with concerning it. One line in the song spurred a thought, and that thought bumped into another thought and before I knew it; I had an actual train of thought going. The thought led to my alternate world novel, It Happens Every Day. Another novel inspired by a line in a song was Taken Apart. Demonic possession was never something that I ever thought about, but this song made me think about what it would be like to have another consciousness crawling around inside my mind, controlling every function of my body. It was creepy but gave me the idea for the novel.

Another time, many years ago, I was car-pooling with another guy and it was his turn to drive, so I sat back and stared at the countryside as we rode along. My employer was based in a town 18 miles from my home and if you know Oklahoma, you know that there is a lot of country between towns. Not exactly wide-open spaces like you find in the Dakotas or one of the other Northern Plains states, but enough that you see farmhouses, barns, gullies, creeks, stands of trees and etc. With my eyes on the landscape, I started picking out places that would provide breastworks and other cover in the event of a battle. From that came the kernel of the idea for my novel, Gulf of the Plains.

At work, either waiting for a job to finish, or while loading DTs into an optical reader/sorter; real mindless stuff that everybody had to contend with, I used to daydream and if my co-workers knew that from those few minutes of robot-like-activity came the ideas for at least half of my novels, they would be astounded.

Well, those are just a few instances, and there are others. A really great series of novels that I wrote was somewhat derivative of several other novels that I read. The idea came from the similarities between the pantheons of gods worshipped by a variety of different cultures that had little or no contact with each other. Were the attributes of those gods universal, or was there a race of humanoid creatures that paid a visit to those cultures over a period of thousands of years? I don't profess to know the answer to that question, but it gave me the idea for the series. It's too bad that I will probably never publish those novels. The reason for that is that I am not comfortable with some of the subject matter. Perhaps I should publish them anyway and take a chance on them becoming extremely popular. But I really don't want to answer a lot of questions in the news media about whether or not I believe what I wrote, or why I chose to have my characters break so many of our culture's taboos.

With that, I will leave you today. May you all find something to read that you enjoy and may it stay with you all the days of your lives.

Derek A. Murphy
Author of Behind the Stone, Congruencies and others.
Available on Kindle