Ideas

Where do your ideas come from? It is the question asked of every writer and one very few can come up with an answer to. The most common answer is "real life." This is especially true of stand-up comedians.

I think that saying "real life" is mostly true, but very misleading. I'm pretty sure Ms. Rowling never met a little boy talking about his adventures at wizard school. Still, Harry Potter was well-received, very creative, and never criticized for being unrealistic. That's because the characters are human, regardless of what a narrator might tell us. He thinks, talks, and acts like a real person does. When we read his actions in the story, we think that we would have made the same choice (or the courage to make that choice).

But how do we get that skill? How do you know what a fictional character is going to do? You can't study people who don't exist. So learn from the ones that do exist. Find out what things people do and why they do them. Everybody has their own stories, so there is plenty to learn, but you start finding patterns and similarities between the what and why of people's actions.

My results from these studies is that people are a conglomeration of the forces that drive them. If a person's number one priority in life is to not be emotionally harmed by a person, it means they will act shy and distant around people. But if this person's second goal in life is to find true love, then they will eventually open up if a person is continuously and genuinely kind over enough time.

The short version is this: ideas for situations can come from anywhere; ideas for how people act come from knowing how real people act.