After sharing my work with more people lately, I keep getting the question of, "Where do you get your ideas from?"
What a silly question! Doesn't everyone know? I get them from a leprechaun I kidnapped from Offaly. I keep him locked in a dog kennel in my garage and every time I need a new idea, I hold a gun to his head and threaten to blow his little green brains out unless he tells me a good story. Oh don't worry, I toss him a beer now and then to say thanks and keep him happy.
Seriously though, I'm not quite sure where they come from, and I don't think other writers really know either. Your brain just starts pondering about something silly, and then it leads to another thought, and another, and like magic you realize you just created a new story.
But it is a question that really got me thinking about why my brain works the way it does, and why I think about the strange things I do. So I'd like to give you a bit of a glimpse at some of the experiences that have shaped my life as a writer.
One such thing is that I come from a family of wrenches and motorheads. Every time we get together the conversation always includes engines, classic cars, and our next riding trip. I've been riding dirt bikes and driving sand rails since I was in grade school, and I can't think of a better way to celebrate a warm weather holiday than to go to the woods or the Imperial Sand Dunes with my family. I love the thrill and adventure of the ride, and falling asleep at the end of the day listening to the lullaby of passing engines. Whenever I catch the scent of gasoline in the air I'm instantly transported to a memory of a ride, and smile even on the worst of days.
Another place my stories come from is fear. Everyone has a biggest fear in their life. For some people its fear of failure. For others its fear of public speaking. For me, its aliens.
Yes, I am deathly afraid of aliens.
Most people laugh and assume I'm kidding when I say that. I'm not. Aliens are scary things. They could be hiding anywhere and could zap you into their spaceship at any moment. That is terrifying.
I think the fear started when I was a little kid and my mom let me watch that movie Fire in the Sky. Its based on a true story about Travis Walton, a man who lived in Snowflake, Arizona, who was abducted by aliens. I couldn't sleep for weeks when I was a kid because I was so afraid of the power and control aliens could exert over us pip squeak humans.
A few years later, my dad and I were riding out quads on one of our trips up to the woods. Ever since I was little, on every family riding trip we take, my dad and I always go on a ride at night with just the two of us. Some of my best memories are of following my dad through the darkness, trusting that he'll light the way for me, just like he used to follow his dad when he was a kid.
On this ride, we stopped in a clearing to admire the stars. We sat in silence for a while, then started talking about just how damn big the universe is and all the possibilities it holds. And then my dad, not knowing that my fear of aliens had actually caused me to rearrange my room so that my dresser blocked the window in case the aliens tried to suck me out while I was sleeping, says, "I'm not sure if they exist, but how could you not entertain the idea of other intelligent life forms when the universe is so big? Especially because Earth is part of a young solar system, and look how far we've come. There's got to be something more advanced out there, don't you think?"
My ten year old face drained of all color. "You mean like aliens, Dad?"
"Yeah, I mean aliens. And especially with that guy who said he got sucked up by Heber."
"How far away are we from where they snatched him?"
"If you cut across the mountains, which aliens could if they were real, less than a hundred miles away."
Oh. Dear. God.
This is the moment that my fear of aliens went from being a silly childhood fear to an adult phobia. On that ride home I wanted to cry I was so scared, especially since when you're driving a quad through the woods at night all you can see is a wall of darkness behind you and nothing else. Those aliens could have grabbed me at any moment and I never would have seen them coming. It was a traumatizing experience, but I went on to write a good short story about it the following weekend.
Fast forward a few years.
Again my dad and I are on one of our night rides together, this time at the sand dunes. We drove out to the third set of dunes (this was before they put up that stupid wall to separate Mexico from the U.S. of course) and again stopped to admire the stars.
Now the third set of sand dunes is the equivalent of being in the middle of Sahara desert. There's nothing there, and hardly anyone ventures out that far. I've never seen anyone out there at night, and have only spotted a couple of people during the day over the years.
So again, my dad and I are in the BFE part of the dunes looking at the stars on our traditional night ride when we start to hear a noise. At first we ignore it, but it started getting so loud and close that we both had to comment on it. It sounded like a weird shuffling, scuttling noise, followed by clicking. Eventually it bugged my no nonsense, extremely logical, fearless father enough for him to yell, "What the hell is that?"
The sound came closer.
I asked my dad, "Do you think its an alien?"
"Probably. They're all over this area."
Crap!!
"Why would they be walking around? That's kind of weird, don't you think?"
My dad shakes his head. "Not really. It's easier to sneak up on us if they're on foot."
Shit!!!
"Let's get out of here," Dad says. "They may not be friendly and we don't want them to catch us. They can be real bad news."
OH MY GOD!!!!
So we go to start our bikes. Mine kicks up right away, but the starter button on the Polaris my dad borrowed from a friend was broken. As a back up, there's a pull start cord he'd been using all weekend. He yanks the cord, and it snaps in half. Without that cord, we can't start the bike at all. It's an automatic, which means you can't even roll it down a hill to make it go. My bike weighs half as much as the Polaris, and we have steep, 200 ft tall hills to climb.
Double shit, we're screwed.
Three hours later, shaking with exhaustion, we did make it back to camp with both bikes. Everyone said to me, "man kid, you must have been really worried, you're so pale even your freckles are white!"
I was worried. The ride home was a scary one because it was rough, and several times my dad and I almost flipped trying to tow that big honking bike back, so I was afraid one of us would get hurt. But I was more worried about being in the middle of nowhere surrounded by aliens who were trying to sneak up on us, because everyone knows they snatch you from secluded areas.
Looking back I can see how silly the conversation was, but it terrified me for years until I figured out what my dad meant, and further spurred my phobia. I understand now that my dad wasn't talking about visitors from the sky type aliens that night. He was talking about illegal aliens, the ones who sneak across the border into America, the ones who prompted the building of that big ugly wall I mentioned earlier. Do you see how confusing that conversation of aliens was? It did a lot of unintentional emotional damage.
Now my poor better half gets to deal with my irrational fear of aliens. At first he didn't believe me and thought I was trying to be unique or something when I admitted my fear. A few months after we started dating, I asked him to take me to a movie since he's not a big fan of going to movies and I am.
That night, I wanted to see Paranormal Activity. My better half couldn't remember the name of the movie I wanted to see, so I told the ticket guy, "two for The Fourth Kind."
My better half looks at me and says, "are you sure you want to see that?"
"Of course I'm sure. Why would I not know what movie I want to watch?"
"Okay, whatever you want."
See what happens when you get a little snappy, ladies? Your dude doesn't save you from what is sure to be a terrible experience. I knew I wanted to see Paranormal, but I had mixed up the titles with Fourth Kind without even knowing it. And of course after acting like a bit of a jerk, my better half didn't warn me that I asked to see an alien movie, not a ghost movie. Thanks, darling.
So we go into the movie and a few minutes into it I say, "wow, this is a really long preview."
"What?"
"This preview for that awful alien movie I'll never watch. It's really long."
My better half lets out a chuckle and says, "yep, they're making them longer these days because the economy is bad and they really want to make sure people like the movie before they spend the money to see it."
"That's silly. Don't mock me. I'm just saying its long."
I know. Total bonehead ditz thing for me to say. You'll have to forgive me, though. At the time I thought I was going to see the ghost movie, not the alien movie.
A few minutes later it clicks in my head and I shout, "Oh my, God! We're watching the alien movie!!" (Thank goodness this airhead episode happened after my better half found out my IQ was higher than 90 or I'm sure we never would have spoken again).
Now my better half starts cracking up laughing. "No it's not, it's just a really long preview."
"I can't believe you let me get tickets to this! We have to leave."
"No way, I just spent five hundred dollars to watch this preview and we're watching it."
"You suck."
"I love you."
Oh yeah, he thought he was sooo funny by letting me get tickets to that movie and making me watch it. Guess what two people didn't get any sleep for three weeks after that stunt? He has never made me watch an alien movie since (except the Alien movies because those are different) and always saves me whenever a friend says, "I got this alien movie we could watch," by karate chopping the movie out of the person's hands. Good man.
So there you have it, a partial answer to the question of "where do you get your ideas from?" I think most of them started in childhood with something that scared me, and then through a series of misunderstandings the fear heightens and continues to grow. This makes for a lot of sleepless nights with nothing to do but think about what could have happened if...
And that's really all a story is, an idea that begins with, "what if?"
Mine just happen to be a little on the strange side from my mother letting me watch too many scary movies as a kid, and my conversations as a child in the adult world that resulted in misunderstandings when one party thinks only of the real and rational, and the other thinks of the impossibilities of the universe that could be true in another realm.
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