I just had a friend ask me where I get my ideas for a story. This question comes up a lot, and when it does, I know the person asking is not a fiction writer and will never be one. Any one who writes fiction will tell you that ideas just pop into your brain, even when you don’t want or need them. 

They sneak up on you when you are trying to grocery shop or when your husband is telling you about his latest fishing trip. They worm their way into your brain like little parasites and try to take your attention away from the characters in your current work. Some are very persistent and refuse to leave you alone. 

When that happens I will write the idea down on a piece of scratch paper and toss it into a basket on my desk--you know, the one that is filled with layers of ‘stuff you will get to later’. Then, every six months or so I go through the basket and find these cryptic one liners like: ‘a woman artist who moves to a small town when she begins to lose her eyesight’ or ‘a princess from a foreign country goes incognito’. 

Sometimes they make no sense at all and I don’t even remember writing them down, but the process kills the brain worms. I cannot begin to explain the slip of paper that reads ‘Yodeling dog, man with six fingers and girl who is looking for a job in a mortuary’.

Writers have very strange brains.

The ideas come easily. Writing the book is the hard part.