Lisa Young

Where do ideas come from? Woody Allen apparently has a million ideas coming to him 24/7. If one idea gets some feet and starts running – well, he has a screenplay in no time. Ideas must be lining up right outside his brain waiting to get in and get their chance. I’ve never been one to buy into that whole “what if” exercise – the famous writer’s tool.“What if” never yields a thing for me. But it’s been a while since I tried – so let’s see. A Brainstorming Session of “What Ifs”: What if the floor lamp keeled over and the bulb busted and glass went everywhere? I’d have to get up and clean it and I’d probably end up going to bed as soon as I was done cleaning up. What if time stopped? I’d be stuck living a Monday night for the rest of my life. What if this house started growing and an attic appeared and I went up into it and found a world where everything was just as I wanted it? What if sports were banned? What if TV were banned? What if it were illegal to go to a movie?...

Novelist Lisa de Nikolits tells us how she gets story ideas and how these ideas evolve… My brain is an attic filled with psychotic people. And each of these crazies has one thing in common; they’re all obsessed with words. They scurry around with their buckets and pails, pushing wheelbarrows that spill words and fragments of sentences, and each word or sentence is umbilically attached to the embryo of an idea. They’re ravenous, these crazies; they have an aching need for these words and ideas to take shape – they long for me to relieve them of the burden of the tiny letters and they beg me to shape the fragments into coherent sentences and thoughts. I feel the weight of these madfolk in my head; their rat claws bite the undulating surface of my brain as they run, they twist little ankles in their haste to push their way to the front line, and they’re not shy to give my skull a good thwack either, when they’re feeling particularly insistent.   They get their...