The Idea Well

One of the most often asked questions you get as a writer is "where do you get your ideas?" This is a hard question to answer because there's not really an Idea Well that writers go to and fish out their next plot line. The reality is, writers are full of ideas. Our wells are using overflowing and the only thing we lack is the time to write the all.

As to what creates those ideas in our heads - well, everything. Writers have unique ways of looking at the world. If we didn't, we wouldn't walk to write about it. And because we can take the smallest thing we see and blow it up into something big, that's how we come up with ideas.

So to give you a bit better idea of how my thinking works, I'm going to talk this week about how I came up with the idea for RUMBLE ON THE BAYOU.

First off, I'm from Louisiana. My parents had a camp on the bayou off the Gulf of Mexico and you could only get there by boat. This is the real deal. I didn't just visit one weekend and decide I could write bayou country and people. I spent a heck of a lot of my childhood at that camp - fishing, shrimping, crabbing and reading books. I also heard all the stories.

Like the one that says the guy who owned the shrimphouse got all his money by running drugs on his shrimp boats in from the Gulf of Mexico. Is it true? I don't know, maybe - heck, probably. It makes for great urban legend anyway. Then there's the small prop planes that used to fly over unihabited areas of the bayou - we saw them sometime. Large items would fall from the planes then they'd turn and leave. Everyone knew better than to go look because most knew it was a drug drop. (and that fact was verified later when I talked to the Game Warden for the area)

So essentially, our camp was on a bayou that was full of alligators and people were dropping drugs from planes. Now one day I watched an alligator eat a ton of floating styrofoam, so apparently they're not overly picky about what they ingest, so I got to thinking, what if an alligator bit into one of the bags of drugs and got high?

And that's the opening scene to RUMBLE - a stoned alligator crashed in the town drunk's swimming pool.

I started with that one little scene and continued until I'd built a full-blown plot and characters around it, and the town of Gator Bait, Louisiana was born.

Next week I'll talk about UNLUCKY (coming October 30th). It's a story about a woman who's luck is so bad she can't even touch other people for fear of ruining their lives. It's sort of autobiographical and I'll leave you hanging with that. :)

- Deadly DeLeon