Where Do Your Ideas Come From?

People often ask where I get my ideas. Some ask with interest; a few ask with a sense of alarm, as if they can't get over the idea of a church-going choir director dreaming up headless corpses and subtle poisons.
Most writers I know could answer with a question of their own: How do I get them to stop? Every day at least one idea floats through my head that might make a decent book. The problem is choosing one that I like well enough to flesh out the details and finish. In other words, the idea is the easy part.
An idea for an Arthur-and-Guinevere sleuthing team struck my fancy a while back, but I couldn't get interested enough to actually write it. I have several other started mysteries that got shoved onto the back burner. An abandoned idea might be due to other demands on my time (like edits), a plot knot that won't dissolve, or simple boredom: I don't like the story enough to finish it. I call these files "somedays", as in some day I might go back to them. (James Michener didn't write IBERIA for years after he took all the notes and outlined it. I'm no Michener, but still.)
If you are a storyteller, stories grow in your head of their own volition. The work part is writing a story down, toiling over it until it is no longer just a good idea, but a story that others can understand and enjoy.
So my answer to "Where do your ideas come from?" is that my brain is like a tree full of story blossoms. I have to pick the ones that seem promising and then work on them until they become fruit.

Tips for Plotting Your Novel - Percolate & Ferment

Fiction authors are often asked, “How do you come up with your novel plots? Where do you find these ideas?” As a Canadian suspense author, I am often asked these questions, and my answers will usually include something about letting ideas percolate and ferment.


Read Part 1: Percolate Your Ideas

Read Part 2: Ferment the Plot


~Cheryl Kaye Tardif is a bestselling author of 3 Canadian suspense novels (Whale Song (published by award-winning Kunati Books), The River and Divine Intervention). She is also a freelance journalist and popular speaker at writers groups, conferences and book clubs. Her specialty topics are: book publishing options; book marketing (online and offline) and writing advice. Cheryl currently resides in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.


Visit her website: http://www.cherylktardif.com, or her blog: http://www.cherylktardif.blogspot.com

Mystery Inspiration

When I see headlines like this I start to wonder....

“Cow falls off cliff and crashes onto van on highway; motorists unhurt”

Lucky motorists. The article goes on to say that the happy couple in the minivan, were on a trip, celebrating their first wedding anniversary when a six hundred pound cow fell from the sky onto their vehicle. They were inches from death as the bovine fell from an overhead cliff two hundred feet above.

Now when I read something like that, I have to wonder … did the cow fall … or was he pushed? Is a cow viable as a murder weapon? The ‘old school’ of mystery writing praises ingenuity in the method of death. Definitely all trace of fingerprints would be wiped out and well as all the other evidence probably.

How strong would you have to be to push a cow over a cliff? It would be doable other wise there would never have evolved the questionable entertainment of cow tipping. Is that what happened? Two teenagers were too close to the edge and old Bessie dropped off? Was there a lookout with a cellphone watching for the van, rate of travel and cow trajectory carefully calculated on a Blackberry? Do Blackberries calculate? So much research to do… Was it a milk cow?

Oh yes … inspiration for writing whodunits are everywhere and this one seems pretty promising. The only thing is, after it’s all over, would the reader be echoing the words of the mini driver, shaking their collective heads: "I don't believe this. I don't believe this."