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Having gotten my millionth review on this subject...
Why in the world do people ask you where you get your ideas when writing? Or your humour? The simple and obvious answer is from my imagination. It's not like there's some great blackmarket trade in ideas. "Award winning plot, guaranteed to win you a Nebula!" Bah. So the answers obvious, why do people ask? All I do these days is refer them to Neil Gaiman's essay anyway...
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Hmm. If so, I can only suspect that they are younger and haven't had adequate experiences (as I don't think the imagination can be fueled via a vacuum); or perhaps they get small sparks but imagine that there must be a quick and easy way to Get a Bright Idea Within 30 Days or Your Money Back! Or maybe (and I admit I do find this difficult to believe - don't the most stagnant minds still have at least one imaginative thought in a lifetime?) those who ask are simply not capable of creative thought.
I tend to think (must be the cynicism) the reason is laziness; people want quick and easy. Damned be any sort of effort on their part. They don't want to work at anything and would prefer for results, including ideas, to come without effort beforehand.
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Rather often actually, especially for Uric. "How do you come up with these things?" is the usual way they phrase it. In some reviews, I'm sure it's just admiration, in others you can tell they're quite serious about wanting to know.
I think you're right about them being younger and/or inexperienced. Laziness is probably another factor, though I still have no clue how they think I could give them the answers.
Yipe. A bit harsh, are we?
But then... being interested in the process, wondering how the genesis of an idea comes about... that seems legitimate to me. Sometimes it really can be analyzed. Sometimes there really are particular things somebody does that help them get ideas. (In my case, this tends to involve chatting with certain people. I'm a hopeless cowriter.) Sometimes it's just interesting.
Sure, you get ideas from your imagination. But... let's see. The Wild Hunt. The Roman-era fic. Obviously folklore and history are getting into the mix, connections are being made.... Hopefully Ozma won't mind if I repeat what she's said about her own experiences giving her reason to sympathize with Filch and thus perhaps the notion of looking deeper and writing him in a different light.
Now, trying to trace how one makes things funny is perhaps more uniformly difficult. ;) I have no idea how my friends come up with some of the things they do; the lines I come up with, of course, often seem too natural to me to be able to explain them coherently.
Maybe I'm projecting too much. Maybe this is partly because I feel no compulsion to write if I don't have an idea, and don't really understand it, and the only time I really worry about not being able to come up with ideas for a story is if I'm in the middle of a story and have found a big hole in my imagination that needs darning, or if I'm under some obligation (for example, school assignments). Perhaps I simply don't have enough people asking me silly questions to have gotten annoyed. ;) But I'd tend to think, instead, that most of the time it is at least partly admiring, and if people really want to know, whether out of sheer curiosity or in hopes of trying a similar strategy if there is one, there's nothing really wrong with that. (Not that you're under any obligation to explain, obviously....)
Of course, then again, until they start making a serious nuisance of themselves and you can't keep up, who honestly wouldn't prefer that ideas come easily?
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Then it's not a serious question. It's a rhetorical one, and the topic does concern serious questions (serious to the askee, at least) from my reading.
This is not to say that I haven't read things that I've found brilliant and have been blown away by them. Perhaps I've even thought, "Where the hell did they get that idea?" But I've never phrased it as such.
Obviously folklore and history are getting into the mix, connections are being made....
This is a bit of a misunderstanding, as I consider history, folklore, legend, theory, etc. to be part of the "experience" I mentioned.
I also understand your view on the creative process, but I don't think anyone who was interested in the process would just ask a mundane question like "Where do you get your ideas?". They would, instead, make a connection to the specific thing their mind had latched onto and ask a question based on that. It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, but the person is thinking in that case, and it's not an annoying question if thought has been put behind it. I know I've done that; sometimes, I've been right and sometimes wrong but at least I've thought about something I might not have or made some connection I otherwise might not have seen.
So, perhaps I was harsh, but I do believe that the very basic question of "Where do you get your idea?" (where the question means what it says and only that) is the product of laziness and/or inexperience.
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And those are some of my favourite types of reviews to answer...:)
The review that sparked my question btw, just so you know that they're not all rhetorical, ended with this, "Also I'd like to ask you where do you get your ideas and humor." It got me wondering why anyone would ask that sort of question, since it's not something that occurs to me to ask another author.
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Evidently it's a common question.
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I also don't think it originates in inexperiences, but rather in interest. If I ask you how you came to write about Uric, I don't wnat an easy solution to my lack of plot ideas (generic 'I', so to speak, as I have enough ideas for 3 writers), but I am really interested in it...
It flatters me to hear that question...
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What I find confusing is people who say things like this (quoting the review that sparked this post) "Also I'd like to ask you where do you get your ideas and humor."
There really isn't an answer for that, and I wanted to know why people ask questions like that in the first place. It's true that I am influenced by certain things. My love of history and mythology for one, but there are so many factors that get mixed around in my head. Eventually the only answer is imagination, at least for me, but people don't want that answer as far as I can tell, so I was wondering why people asked.
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You mean you haven't heard about the market ... ?
I thought everyone knew about it! I go there regularly and I often bump into Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Terry Brooks - hell, I even think I saw Salman Rushdie skulking around there the last time.
You know, I can send you a map if you didn't know about it - I know a great little stall run by a green-finned chaffinch who does a mean line in satirical humour ...
I think it's one of those 'how do you create blah blah blah' things ... It's not something anyone can directly answer because you either have an idea and develop it or you don't ... there's no real manual ...