Ideas are like rabbits

Recently, I chanced upon the diary I kept at fourteen years of age (I used to write poems then), in which with childlike apprehension I had worried that I might run out of ideas and never have an idea for a poem again. I don’t remember what had brought on the fear I had already depleted my stock of ideas, but as it turned out, this was completely unfounded. I had not considered that life will bring experiences, both good and bad, and that with the enormous amount of reading, experiences and emotional responses that are possible, ideas are everywhere.

I have never agreed with the belief that a writer needs to be a recluse and live far from the madding crowd, amidst lakes and hills. While stillness is needed in the act of writing, which is why writers’ retreats work so well, the best ideas, in my view, come from life itself. Human beings, with our enormous propensity for being complex and mysterious, provide material for writing.

I have sometimes found ideas most unexpectedly. At a business lunch an acquaintance was describing her trip to India, where she ventured on a local train and met an animal skinner from a fur farm in Finland. This intrigued me. The busy trains and heat of India, the warmth of skin in sharp contrast to the chill of the frozen north, its solitude and the cold skin of dead animals! This is how my story ‘The Sense of Skin’ was born (shortlisted and published in the Bristol Short Story Prize anthology). A chance comment about the Lantana camara plant from South America that grows extensively in India and finding silver filigree jewellery in Malta, in exactly the same designs as can be found in Cuttack, in my Indian home state of Odisha, had me thinking about connections in the world, in response to which I recently wrote a short story called ‘What the boats bring’.

New places almost always spark ideas. London and India feature a lot in my work, but I have based stories in places I have visited, like Las Vegas, Iceland, Finland, Prague and Dubai. A sense of place can influence and enhance characters and their journey arcs. There is also something about movement; I find that travelling on a train helps me consider new ideas. If all else fails, reading a good book or some poetry helps. It is often assumed that most of us write about our own experiences, or base characters on people we know. There is of course deriving from real life, but why do we forget writers have imagination and can conjure entire lives and communities!

John Steinbeck said, ‘Ideas are like rabbits, you get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you will have a dozen.’ When the practice of writing is inculcated in one’s very routine, the gaze itself changes, and ideas are more visible. And as Stephen King has said, ‘Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.’ Indeed, ideas arrive, often unbidden. It is the writer’s job to structure these ideas and write!

Mona Dash

Mona Dash is a poet, short story writer and novelist.