Where do stories come from?

I am often asked where I get ideas for my stories and that is both an easy and a difficult question to answer. Ideas are all around us, if we are paying attention, that is. My series which started as a novel, which became the Angels Have Tread Trilogy and is now the Angels Series, started as a joke. The joke started many years ago when I worked in the IT Industry. As a woman, managing some very intelligent but highly opinionated male techies, you might say that I encountered some resistance to my presence as their boss. In retaliation, I often threatened that one day I would write a book where I wiped out all males. Well, the idea stuck with me for almost 40 years but it was the appearance of a novel strain of the Covid that reminded me of my long forgotten threat. By then I was retired and living in the country but as news of the virus spread I began to wonder, what a world without males would look like?

The first thing I considered was reproduction. That seemed easily solved by artificial insemination. If men were dying in hordes surely they would freeze their sperm. Women who wanted careers were now doing that with their eggs. As news clips showed China rapidly assembling hospitals, I considered the immediate impact of even larger numbers of deaths. How would they dispose of them? And critical industries. Say what you like, but utilities, truck drivers, garbage collectors, heads of business and politicians are still heavily populated by males. As videos emerged of people in Wuhan being locked inside their apartment buildings, I imagined key males in my story being sequestered and women brought in to be quickly trained up.

As Covid spread to other countries, I wondered how the world I was imagining would cope. Some would fall apart. Maybe disappear altogether. Communication links would fail.

Many fantasy writers start by drawing maps and building the world for their characters. Covid, in many ways, was doing that for me. Now, all I needed was a story. And that came from a writing assignment.

We were asked to write a scene, about 1,000 words, in which a character is put under pressure. I imagined a researcher trying to find a cure for a world wide pandemic. The clock is ticking but what was it counting down? It coukd be a ‘save the world’ moment but I wanted something personal. Maybe it was too late to save adult males but what if younger males could be saved. What if boys appeared healthy but then suddenly died for no apparent reason. My story was changing focus from the pandemic to something more interesting. I began to imagine the post pandemic world, peopled with women who’d survived. Life was settling down. The realisation that boys would die at 20, was now part of the landscape. Where was the conflict? Back to my researcher. What if she’s on the verge of a breakthrough but someone wants to stop her and they use her son?

The book I wound up writing used many of these elements but it acquired a number of sub-plots. My researcher, Dr Harris and her son Josh became one of several story lines that cross paths. Why? Well, that is a topic for another blog. For now I simply wanted to show how ideas, internal and external, come together in the writer’s mind. Writing is less about creating something new than it is about observing what already is. Sometimes we see things in new ways but often we merely articulate what others are already feeling.

So, when asked where stories come from, my response is that they are all around us. Sometimes they sit for years waiting for the right moment to demand attention. Other times they jump out at us. It really isn’t important where they come from. What matters is that we let them in.

If you have an interesting idea for how you came up with the idea for a story, leave a comment below.