Where Do Ideas Come From?

I got the idea for this blog when I was meditating this morning. Yes, I know, I'm not supposed to get ideas meditating. In fact, that's supposed to be a time for leaving ideas behind. But when my mind loses its quiet focus on my breath and skitters off to someplace else, ideas about what to write or how to fix something I'm currently writing are one of the more productive results it can return with. "Thinking," I remind myself happily as I tuck the idea away, and then I return to my breath.It's the most frequent question fiction writers are asked, wherever we go, whatever age readers we're talking to: Where do your ideas come from?And it is probably the hardest question to answer.I always want to say: They come from everywhere . . . and anywhere. And that, of course, is true. It also gives absolutely no satisfaction to the questioner. So here's an attempt to define "everywhere and anywhere."On My Honor started from something that actually happened, not to me but to a friend of mine, when we were both about thirteen years old.A Bear Named Trouble began from an AP news story, only about two paragraphs long, about an adolescent brown bear that had broken repeatedly into the Anchorage Zoo. How wonderful! I thought. A wild bear who wants to live in a zoo! What a perfect story!Runt came out of my remembering my passionate love for Felix Salten's novels when I was a child, the most famous of which is Bambi. I wanted to write a story that I, and I hoped others, could love as I had loved those.A Very Little Princess and its prequel, A Very Little Princess: Rose's Story, came from fantasies I carried around as a child. I used to pretend I was a three-inch-high doll living in a family of normal sized people.Little Dog, Lost began in a very different place. It started with my wanting to write a story that would work for young readers without giving up the natural flow of my own style. Thus I turned to verse to give lots of white space on the page. Through verse I can deliver sentences in bite-sized chunks without shortening them, chunks that are easier for developing readers to manage. And the topic? From a combination of my own much-loved little dog, a cavalier King Charles spaniel named Dawn, and a friend's service dog, Ruby, a terrier mix with the most astonishing airplane-wing ears I've ever seen. And since stories are always based on a problem—no problem, no story—I simply asked myself what problem would work best with a dog as a main character? To get her lost, of course.But the topic is only the beginning of any story. What brings a story alive is the writer's heart. So always, whatever else I'm writing, I'm really writing both about myself and for myself, about my own longing, my own experience of being "lost," my own joy at being found.What a perfect way to make a living, feeding my own heart again and again and again. And if I do the job well enough, my hope always is that I'll manage to feed your heart, too, wherever my story idea might come from.