First of all, sorry it took me a week to answer this. Hopefully the only post I’ve done lately is enough explanation.
The question brings a few things to mind. For one thing, I really, really wish I had started writing when I was working full-time, but not because it could have helped me come up with ideas. When you’re working intensively on a—let’s say, normal work project, you’re in problem-solving mode. At any moment you might have to come up with a creative idea to solve a problem that can’t wait for a customer who won’t wait. It’s like exercise, in that the work that tires you out also strengthens you to do more. When I started writing full-time about a year ago, I found it hard to get into that problem-solving, idea-generating “zone.” It took months and various self-trickery to find some semblance of it, and it comes and goes. So if I could go back and write part-time while working full-time, I definitely would.
But with regard to the specific question, which I’ll summarize as “do interactions with people generate story ideas better than solitary focus,” I will say that I think it depends on two things: you, and the type of story you’re writing. Let’s look at these one at a time, starting with the latter.
Reality TV became popular because someone decided that the drama in life, or at least in the lives of some people, was sufficient to hold an audience’s interest. Apparently a lot of people agreed, and the genre proliferated. I actually have a theory that the petty dramatic incidents people watch on TV these days tend to make them look for and create more conflict in their own lives. So, life imitating “art” which is imitating life. Whether or not this is true, if you were writing a story in, say, the realistic fiction genre, or teen romance, about ordinary people suffering and triumphing in ordinary situations, then I would say the answer is definitely yes: you’ll get ideas from life. In any case, there’s no reason not to carry around a notebook or learn where the voice recorder app is on your phone, to take notes about funny or otherwise interesting incidents that happen to or around you.
If you’re writing fantasy or sci-fi, real life doesn’t have nearly as much to offer. The kinds of action you find in those sorts of stories, such as chopping off arms or saving the kingdom for the ten-year-old princess, or finding some ancient artifact with the ability to rob humans of free will for metaphorical purposes, just doesn’t benefit as much from the specifics of real-life incidents. Some genres are on the border, like paranormal romance or magical realism. And obviously there’s a place for realism in any story, so if you’re not worried about anachronism, even the way that some couple you overhear in a cafe words their real-life dialogue may be useful.
Of course politics are politics, and you might conceivably be able to translate some middle manager’s grand scheme for sabotaging his rival and getting the promotion to head of the marketing campaign for paper towels, into an epic plot involving the fate of kingdoms (or planets). But I think in those sorts of cases you’d be better off reading history (not that I do, much).
With regard to the question of who you are, and why that matters, consider two people, an introvert and an extrovert. The introvert might overhear conversations at the office/restaurant/this very Starbucks I’m sitting in now, and get some ideas for specific conflict or some other aspect of a scene. But he’s more likely to be wearing headphones and tuning the others out, like I’m doing now in this very Starbucks. The extrovert, on the other hand, would probably know all the regulars, their kids’ names, the problems they’re having with their S.O.’s, and be as likely to go up and talk to them as overhear them. If you have the extrovert skill set, I’m guessing you’ll probably be good at mining gems out of conversations, whether you’re involved in them or not.
Of course, if you’re an extrovert, you probably have a suitcase full of stories in your head already and don’t need to hear them again to be able to synthesize new variations of them, which of course is what fiction is. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations…though, strangely, there’s nothing new under the sun. That sounds like a digression, but think about it. You’re a person like the rest; you’ve lived through thousands of life incidents; do you really need the specifics of the one at the next table? Of course, once in a while you do come across a gem, and clearly many such finds have found their way into books and screenplays throughout the centuries.
If you want to know how I come up with ideas, I’ll tell you. I was terrified about this issue when I first committed to starting the project. I wandered around for a month or more thinking of plot machinations and character motivations and trying to plan it all out so I wouldn’t fail in the writing phase. Maybe that works for some people, but it didn’t for me. I mean, I came up with characters and some scenes I wanted to write, but it was slow and discouraging.
One day I said, “this sucks,” and just started writing. After a couple of weeks of getting used to it, what I found was that ideas just flowed right out. And that became the primary reason for rule #1, which I’ve often talked about in this blog. Write Every Day. Just do it.
If you want to write about things that happened at work, great. If you don’t, you don’t have to. But don’t wait until you’re retired to write, because you’ll be wasting that juice you get from having to get up and fight the fight.
That’s what I think.
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