Where do authors get their ideas? (with real case examples)

One of the things I get asked the most by readers and writers alike is, how do you come up with your ideas?

I once saw Stephen King joke about buying them from an ideas shop. Sadly, there’s no such place.

For me, mostly, they pop up during everyday life.

Asking ‘what if’

The very first saplings of What Happened Next came from a piece of graffiti I saw on a telephone box.

It was shortly after the Covid vax was rolled out, and I was on a lunch break of a job that I rather hated. I’d driven to the shop and was on my way back to the office with a meal deal when I spotted this piece of graffiti – yellow spray paint on green metal. It said, simply, ‘VAX KILLS.’

And I scoffed at it, like I scoff at most conspiracy theories. But then I started to think – what if they were right? Just for the sake of a piece of fiction. What would it look like if millions of people just started to drop dead one morning? How would the government handle that? Especially when they’d been the ones encouraging the vaccine roll-out.

Then you start to think about where in the world you want to observe this mass death. And who you want to experience it, and then you really start thinking and your idea snowballs from there.

And all of this branches from simply asking a couple of ‘what if’ questions. In my genre – dark / thriller / suspense – you generally want to ask ‘what if… [insert worst possible scenario]’. And it’s surprising how often you can make straightfoward scenarios suddenly deliciously sinister.

The news

All of the strangest, most twisted and convoluted stories are happening right now, all around us, so the news is a great place .

After Covid, I saw a news story that Australia was considering sending anti-vaxxers to live in ‘communities’ in the outback, far away from society. And that gave me the idea of Distanced Living Centres.

One idea is never usually enough

Often, one idea doesn’t give enough plot or driving force for a whole novel, and so you’ll end up patching a few together.

These two examples above – I had the idea of the vaccine killing off millions of people – but I felt that wasn’t really enough on its own. But, combined with this dystopian reality where anti-vaxxers had all been imprisoned in far-away camps, this gave a nice second layer, and it gave my surviving characters somewhere to head towards.

People we know

Sometimes, you get the roots for stories from people you know. Occasionally, a friend will tell you something that happened to them, or a situation or a setting that they were in, and you’ll find yourself thinking, ‘that would make a great story.’

A long time ago, a colleague of mine – who was in his sixties at the time – told me about his childhood. Because his dad was in the military, the family lived in a British army base in China. And he and a few of the other British boys used to sneak out into the city. They’d taken to collecting cigarette cards. And to bolster their collection, they used to slip into night clubs, run by Triads.

My eyes lit up.

I could see that this was a great starter for a story. And I asked, ‘what if they witnessed a murder?’ and ‘what if they got caught?’

And it became the basis for my short story, The Bad Lands, which I’ll be releasing for free later in 2025.

I hope that helps to answer

I hope that helps to answer the question of where authors find their ideas, and points at some places where you can begin to find ones of your own.

Ask ‘what if?’ to build on the ideas, and fuse some together for stronger stories.