Another Day, Another Idea

I have never considered myself a story teller. When my kids were young, I would read to them at bedtime and occasionally they would ask me to invent a story for them. Apart from a silly moral fable called The Left-handed Banana, I never managed to think of a story at these times. Although I have had an imaginary world in my head for fifty years and I now write books set in that world, the stories were all too long and involved to serve as short bedtime tales. So I presumed that I was not a teller of short stories.

This bothered me slightly as it seemed that almost all of the great children's books began as bedtime stories told by their authors to their children. There was nothing to be done about it, however, and I had no option but to assume that I was not that kind of writer.

Years passed and the need for bedtime stories disappeared with them. I forgot the whole business and concentrated on developing the existing book-length stories culled from the history of my imagined land. As a teenager, my son, Mad, was introduced to that land and he began to press for me to write the books that I started so often but never continued with, always being dissatisfied with the quality of my writing. The result was The Gabbler's Testament.

The move to America followed in time and then Mad introduced me to the matter of blogging. Looking back, we both realize that he has introduced me to many things that have changed my life and I often wonder if sometimes he decides not to tell me of new concepts in case they set me off on another wild chase of an obsession. Perhaps this might become the subject of a future post: The Obsessions That Might Have Been.

But to return to this blogging business. It began as a series recounting my impressions of America but then grew to include other matters, incidental thoughts and memories. Eventually I felt an urge to return to my first love, fiction, and then amazed myself by producing several short stories. This ran contrary to all my previous assessments of myself and I could only guess that it was a temporary phenomenon, perhaps yet another strategy to keep myself from the hard work of writing full length books. As I finished each story, the thought ran through my head that this was the last, there could not be another one. Yet time and again I have been surprised by a new idea coming from nowhere, as though I had unwittingly subscribed to a weekly ideas club. Each one arrived neatly packaged but very often with no ending supplied. I have become used to making a start and finding out where the story goes as I am writing it (not to be recommended, incidentally, and contrary to all the rules of writing).

As a result, I have become interested in the source of all these stories that unexpectedly seem to inhabit the remote recesses of my mind. In the latest one, The Phantom of the Blogosphere, a part of the process has actually been recorded. It began two days ago at a time when I was under the most severe pressure to blog, yet without an idea of what to talk about. I dreamed of having that pressure removed, perhaps even to have no blog to be enslaved to and, in an attempt to be humorous, I left a comment to that effect on a friend's blog. As I checked the comment for typos, it came to me that, with a little development, I had a post, an amusing and unlikely fantasy of how things could be in the blogosphere. I began to write at once and blogged it that morning.

So I know how that particular story began; it was the product of a lack of ideas and a dream of "getting out from under". Other stories have different origins. The Tale of Two Tailors and Snowflakes are really vehicles for me to develop some of my wilder political and philosophical thinking, whereas A Very Parfit Knight came from an idea I had when asked by a friend years ago to set down some basic stories so that he could write music to them. Raining Cats and Dogs was a flagrant theft of an idea from another friend's blog and Shameless Self Promotion was merely a development of a moment in the history of my imagined world.

I have no idea where the remaining short stories in this blog came from. They arrived, as I have said, packaged neatly and from an unrevealed source.

In all this there appears to me to be only one common denominator: all were the result of pressure from the blog. At one time I was attempting to post every day and this produced pressure that drained and eventually stopped me. Now I try to blog every second day but don't worry if another day goes by. It's my blog and I'll accept pressure from it only when I want to.

But I am interested in this matter of where ideas come from. Perhaps others could chime in here and give their own experiences and thoughts. Apart from anything else, it could do wonders for the number of comments...