Where do you get your ideas?

As a budding writer, I feel I must prepare for this one. Imagine. An audience of three thousand in a gigantic auditorium. It is the plenary panel session at Schmoozecon, the world's premiere writing convention, and I am up there in an uncomfortable plastic seat along with all that week's great names. A weedy-looking guy in round spectacles near the back of the room stands up and a girl in a Schmoozecon T-shirt rushes over to hand him a microphone.

'Ahem,' he booms, his thin voice amplified almost beyond my pain threshold. 'Could the panel please tell us, where they get their ideas from?'

I cringe at the question. I cringe at the grammar. I cringe at the guy on my left who has already launched into a brief history of tropes in science fiction. I have just ten or fifteen minutes before the chairperson turns her smile my way with a raise of the eyebrows. What do I say?

The truth is, while it may seem odd to people who don't write, there's nothing special about 'ideas' in the sense of 'those things that writers have'. Mostly, they're the same kind of ideas that everybody has but, instead of dismissing them as crazy nonsense, the way a normal person would, the writer hoards them and makes things out of them. Where I might read a news item about how designers are looking at cities holistically, taking an ecological persective on energy use and sustainability, and think, wouldn't it be cool if a designed city led to unforeseen ecological niches within which entirely new life-forms evolved - the way anybody would - the man in the street would simply slap himself across the face and tell himself to grow up, but I would rush to my computer and write an eighty-five-thousand-word masterpiece called 'In All The Dark Places' (or somesuch) in which brick-eating metropoloids drag sleeping humans into their foetid lairs, strip the flesh from their bodies and use their bones to build altars to the concrete-and-glass towers they worship as gods.

It's like collecting bottle tops, or spent matches. The stuff sensible people would throw away. And then building ten-metre long killer millipedes out of them. That's all.

And, as the chairperson's gimlet eye swivels my way, I take a big swallow, force a smile between my frozen cheeks and say, 'Er, um, I dunno. They just... you know... like, come.' Panicking, I remember a joke. It involves a gorilla at an arms convention. I open my mouth to tell it but the woman on my right has begun a short discourse on the distinction between 'ideas' and 'ideation'.

There, you see, I need something like that for next time.

(This little idea was inspired by The Writer's Technology Companion.)