Where Do You Get Yours?
They say it’s the question most often asked of writers, but to be honest, no one has ever asked me where I got my ideas. Maybe I’ve been asked where a specific idea came from, but that was more of a “how did you think of that?”
Every idea comes from somewhere different. Harlan Ellison said he used to tell people he got his ideas from a post office box in . . . was it Peoria? Brooklyn? Sometimes how you got the idea isn’t very interesting, so you make up a good story to explain it when someone asks. Sometimes you can’t identify the somewhere until after the idea has been used. And sometimes you can’t identify it at all.
I’m fairly certain that Newton did start thinking about theories of gravity and motion by watching objects fall – though I’m not so sure about the part where the apple conked him on the head. Was he the object “at rest” when he came up with the laws that cover inertia? Did the equal-and-opposite-reaction stuff come from playing billiards? I don’t know. I know more about Berkeley than I do about Newton, and we all know where the Bishop got his ideas.
