Getting Ideas for the Story

By Rex Hurst

Joseph Conrad as a seventeen-year-old sailor once heard the story of a man who had stolen, single-handedly, "a whole lighter-full of silver.” This story bounced around in his head for twenty-five years before emerging as one of his greatest novels, Nostromo. It is about a man who, while involved in a fictional South American revolution, stashes away a shipment of silver, only to be unable to reach it again.

One little story blossoms into a novel that has never gone out of print.

That’s why when I’m preparing to start on a new book, I never read fiction. For months I delve into non-fiction, watch documentaries, listen to old people. Then little by little the full story emerges. An idea here, some dialog there, a new character, bits of flesh and bone- all of it comes together.

If I don’t do this, what sparks my ideas? Other people’s work. And then I’m not producing my own, but copying another’s style.

Decades ago, when I was first starting to write seriously, I listened to a lecture by an author who told us, “If you’re going to go into writing, don’t be an English major, because then all you’ll have to write about is other people’s work. Do something that will give you ideas or things that other people will actually want to read about.”

That always stuck with me. And when I delve into the non-fiction world of material, I am always asking myself, “Can this be a good story? Have I heard it before? And if so, is it a story that has been played out? Done too many times?”

It’s incredible how a minor germ of an idea from an obscure place, can spark an entire novel.

My last book, The Foot Doctor Letters, came into being because I was reading about the life of Carl Panzram and I realized that most fictionalized books and films of serial killers never got them right. Thus, I set out to create a fictional serial killer that could have been authentic. Maybe I was too successful because a lot of people seemed turned off by it, but c’est la vie. What I had initially intended to be a two-page short story blossomed into a 267-page novel.

You never know where these ideas will take you. There is a wealth of ideas and new stories just waiting to be unearthed.

Go forth and find them.