Robin McKinley: Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Where do you get your ideas?
RMcK: The short answer is: I haven't a clue.
This is the mother and father of all standard questions. I guess this is probably true for all writers. Maybe there is some writer out there who would declare that Why did you make character x in book y run off with the plumber from Vulcan? is their most frequently asked question, but I haven't met them or read their web site.
The reason this question makes a lot of us writers, me for one, wilt, is because there isn't really any answer to it, and trying to say anything at all responsive about it is just so enormous: it's a question like, 'So, how do you write? Tell me everything.' Or, 'So, what is your life history, from birth to this moment we're now in? Don't leave anything out.' Where I get my ideas is part of who I am, and while I have some guesses about some of who I am, the mechanism of idea-production is totally a mystery. I think possibly you're born with story-telling like you might be born with math ability or sprinting speed.
I tend to say that my stories 'happen' to me. I will be thinking idly about one thing or another—it might be something as mundane as the shopping list or whether it's supposed to rain tomorrow—and BANG something tears across the horizon of my mind's eye. It's the energy of the thing that tells me it's a story. In the afterword to Rose Daughter I describe it this way: 'If you were picking up stones in the dark, you would know when you picked up a puppy instead. It's warm; it wriggles; it's alive.' I'm an unregenerate daydreamer, but there's rarely any doubt which are the daydreams (Oldest Person Ever to Win the New York Marathon!) and which are stories. Stories have lives of their own; the writer is their biographer. I don't make the stuff up: I watch it, listen to it, try to learn more about it, poke into its closets and talk to its friends: and try to write it down as well as I can. Another metaphor I use is that of a notion— or a whim or vagary—'catching fire': I'll be playing with an image, teasing at some little idea, it may be something in a book I've read, a poem, a movie I've seen or conversation I've had or an ordinary sleep-dream—even a bit of daydream wrenching itself out of my egotistical control; something that, again for no reason I can define, gives me a slight tingle of 'something there'. Nothing may come of it; or then again it may suddenly flare up, 'catch fire'. I can't tell you how I do it. I don't actually think I do do it, that's the point. I think it happens. I'm lucky enough that quite frequently it happens in my neighbourhood. But it's that aliveness, that energy, of an idea, that tells me it's a story.
Then comes the really hard part: writing it down. This is the hardest work I know—my usual metaphor is that it's harder than digging out old tree-stumps with a pick-axe, and I speak from experience. The story is always better than your ability to write it. My belief about this is that if you ever get to the point that you think you've done a story justice, you're in the wrong business. Time to trade in your word-processor and become a baker or a mechanic.
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