Shaping Creative Ideas From Your Own Past

The one question every writer hears, again and again is "where do you get your ideas?" Although the question is asked seriously, it anticipates an answer like, "a little shop down on such-and-such street. 

Probably not. 

A lot of your best ideas can come from experiences in your own past. To be sure, you probably won't take a whole idea, or a whole piece of your youthful adventure and be able to plot it into something you're working on.

What happens is that you grab "the goodie" from that early experience and bend it to your writer's will. 

Can you do that? Gosh, if not you ... who? 

The Creative Idea That Launched Cheechako

I was about eight years old when I saw my first Tanana River breakup in Alaska. My father was an Episcopal priest and, like the protagonist in Cheechako, we had moved out to Nenana, Alaska from Boston the summer before. 

As I relate in the story, when the siren rang, everybody in Nenana stopped what they were doing, grabbed jackets and headed on the run for the riverbank. "Breakup" in Alaska's interior is a big deal, both because it signifies the end of a really long winter, and because there is a huge (by early Alaska standards) betting pool based on exactly when the ice will go out. The winner goes home with a lot of prize money. 

But it wasn't the breakup as a whole that touched off the CRICKET short story that would be come the genesis for my book. It was something smaller, but very dramatic and very personal. 

The Idea That Launches Your Novel

After all these years, my first few minutes on the riverbank at my first ever breakup are still crystal clear. Someone shouted, "Hey! There's a dog on the ice." By now the ice is a roaring jumble of jagged chunks that have already begun to move, then hung up. For how long? Minutes? Seconds?

So I ran to the dock edge, along with a wave of others, and looked out. Yeah, I saw a dog out there ... mine!

Did I go out on the ice? No. I don't think anyone would, certainly not on purpose. And I didn't feel a bit bad about changing how it happened!  I still remember it all so vividly that, when I sat down searching I couldn't begin my story–and subsequently my novel–anywhere but on that riverbank. 

So if you've been looking for that "launch" idea, chances are good it's already there in your mind and memory, waiting for you to pick it up, blow the dust off and ask yourself ... what if ...?