From the September/Octoober 2002 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

The Writer’s Page
Where Ideas Really Come From

By Tim Wynne-Jones

ids always ask writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” Over the years I’ve found all kinds of ways of answering this important question. Mostly, I lie. I say things like, Ideas come from the Idea Store. A kid once told me he had been to the Idea Store. Another liar, I suspected. Except that he could describe it in detail. Detail makes a difference. Detail makes the liar a storyteller.

“It was huge,” he said. “There were aisles and aisles and aisles and there was lots of furniture and stuff for your house. And there was this giant blue and yellow sign . . .” That was the giveaway: the kid was talking about the Ikea store. He was only a letter off. Mind you, the Ikea store isn’t such a bad place to go for ideas. Especially if you want to write a story about, let’s say, a lonely dining room suite who pines for company . . . but I digress.

There is a place where ideas grow. It’s not a store. It’s an island. Sri Lanka. That’s what it’s called now, anyway. A long time ago, before it was Ceylon, even, that fabled island in the Indian Ocean was known as Serendip.

Serendip is where ideas really come from.

Serendipity comes from the word Serendip. Serendipity is the word we use to describe making a fortunate discovery by accident. For instance: you walk into your bedroom, trip over your skateboard, go flying, and there, when you land, lying right in front of your nose, is the watch your grandmother gave you that has been lost for three weeks. It’s lying under an empty Fritos package.

That’s serendipity.

The term was coined by the eighteenth-century British writer Horace Walpole. Horace Walpole discovered Serendip without the aid of skateboard or Fritos, but simply by reading a book, a Persian fairy tale titled The Three Princes of Serendip. Walpole wrote to a friend about that story. The princes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

Ah! That changes things a bit. “By accidents and sagacity.” These princes weren’t just lucky; they were also smart — attentive to the worth of their inadvertent finds. Sagacity comes from the Latin sagacitas, which, among other meanings, refers to the keenness of scent in dogs. That seems to suggest that if you want to find the lost watch that your grandmother gave you, you had better keep your nose to the ground. Serendipity is about how, sometimes, it takes a skateboard to get you there.

Word games can be a bit like skateboards: they can trip you up, but they can also take you on an exhilarating ride. When you shift the letters around in a word to get a new word, it is called an anagram. A lot of serendipitous things can be found in anagrams. There was a time when people thought that the words hidden in names held mystical meaning or magical power. Louis XIII of France even kept an official anagrammatist at his court.

Lewis Carroll would have made a fine court anagrammatist to his own monarch, Queen Victoria, if he hadn’t had other fish to fry (and no particular affection for Her Majesty). One can imagine her coming to him in a regal tizzy over Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, a man Victoria passionately disliked. What might she have made of Carroll’s anagram of Gladstone’s name, “Wild Agitator! Means well.”

An anagram is an idea in dark glasses and a wig. Here’s a list taken from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language: astronomers = moon starers; conversation = voices rant on; revolution = to love ruin; sweetheart = there we sat.

In my novel Stephen Fair, Stephen plays a similar kind of word game. Faced with an English assignment called “Me, Myself and Why,” Stephen writes a poem using only words that can be formed from the letters in his name. He literally makes a poem out of himself. It’s amazing how many words there are in a name. At first all you can find are the easy ones: a, and, it, he. It helps to know that there is an animal in everybody’s name, even if it is only the lowly ant. But there is so much more. I remember a seventh grader exclaiming suddenly, “Oh my God! I’ve got Smashing Pumpkins in my name!”

It’s important to learn how to play at writing. To wander off the path. To get lost. Getting lost is something teachers might wish certain students would do, but the teachers are seldom prepared, pedagogically, to assist them in the process.

When in London recently, I traveled up to Oxford to visit a friend, and when I came back, I got off the train one stop too early. I got off at a station called Strawberry Hill instead of Teddington, where I was staying. I decided to walk to Teddington. England isn’t all that big.

I didn’t know that Strawberry Hill was named after a famous estate, a gothic mansion, built in the eighteenth century. The home of Horace Walpole.

I would like to say that my reckless act of serendipity led me to discover the home of the very man who coined the phrase. But I would be lying. I didn’t see Strawberry Hill, just a lot of shops. (And none of them was the Idea Shop.) Accident can only get you so far.

Getting lost is an art. Indeed, there is a work in the Tate Modern Art Gallery by Kathy Prendergast called Lost. Lost looks exactly like a map of the United States. Except, when you look closely, there is no Cincinnati, no Los Angeles, no Baltimore — just Lost Valley, Lost River, Lost Creek, Lost Hills, Lost Swamp. These are real places, and in finding them Prendergast asks the viewer an intriguing question: how can somewhere be lost and on a map at the same time?

This brings me in a suitably circuitous way to an important issue with regards to creative writing: having a map is only of limited use. Teachers, more often than not, stress the notion of outlines and strategies. Maps. A map, however, is mostly useful as a means of getting somewhere fast. It’s like an expressway. I’m convinced that there is no highway to Serendip. After all, it is an island. But even after landing upon its shores, if it’s ideas you’re looking for, you’d do best to take the road less traveled and keep your eyes open for those little lost places. That’s where ideas are.

A few years ago, I was invited to speak in just such a place, a village called Elizabethville, Pennsylvania; the locals called it E’ville.

Great, I thought, arriving late on a Saturday night. I’m not simply in the Middle of Nowhere, I’m in E’ville, from which I will not be delivered for several days. What’s more, I was to be put up at the E’ville Inn. A perfect venue in the first sense of the word, which refers to the site of a crime. It was a couple of centuries old, shuttered, picket-fenced, and sitting on a hilltop surrounded by large, wind-filled trees. I checked in and then wandered down to the village to find somewhere to eat. At a gas-station convenience store, I bought myself some comfort food and headed back up the hill to the E’ville Inn. Imagine my surprise to find, parked outside the inn, a black coach drawn by a solitary black horse. Grimly, I thought about my fate: death by cliché. I was halfway through the gate before the door of the coach opened behind me. I turned to see a young man dressed in black and wearing a black hat. I shall always remember his immortal words:

“Can you tell me where the bowling alley is at?”

He was an Amish boy. He and a friend had stolen away from home and taken Dad’s rig to town. Kids at the local school explained all this to me the following day: how the more adventurous Amish lads would hide ordinary clothes in town and sneak out to go bowling. The same kids who explained all this to me also wanted to know where I got my ideas. As if they needed to ask.

There is this about ideas: they are everywhere, but you have to be looking for them. Ideas are the shape inspirations take when they come out of hiding. In the hide-and-seek game of writing, Idea is It. Idea is the one who goes out there and finds the story.

I wrote a story called “The Book of Changes.” In the story, as part of a class project — a fall unit on China — one of the students introduces her classmates to the I Ching, which is sometimes known as The Book of Changes. The I Ching is an ancient collection of sixty-four oracles. It is a book of great wisdom, but it can also be a wonderful starting point for a game. Using three coins, one casts one’s I Ching, which means one determines a hexagram that leads to a particular oracle. The oracles in the I Ching are really fabulous metaphors ripe for all kinds of interpretation. The oracles don’t tell you what to think, they give you wonderful images to help you think, to help you sort out whatever problem you were trying to sort out when you asked the I Ching your question in the first place. You start out by asking a question.

When I thought of the idea of writing a story called “The Book of Changes,” I decided to make it a challenge to myself — a game. I cast the I Ching and wrote the story based on what my chosen oracle told me.

To me, writing is only fun when there is some element of chance to it, when it’s something of a game, when it’s like slow reading. You don’t exactly know what’s coming on the next page, but you’re ready for it, your senses are alert, you are in a state of anticipation.

As W. H. Auden puts it: “I have drawn from the well of language many a thought which I did not have and could not put into words.” Word games make good buckets: palindromes, pangrams, doublets, lipograms, and univocals splash words onto the dry page, and sometimes, in the residue, gleams a bright idea. Not a Big Idea. Let me be clear about this. Big Ideas owe far more to conscious and restrained meditation on an event or issue or theme of real and deep importance to the writer. It would be fatuous to undervalue the importance of this ongoing enquiry that is, in truth, a writer’s lifework. But in my experience, important ideas, by their very size, often seem impenetrable at first. The Big Idea is more often than not like some huge walled-off garden one walks around and around, desperate to know what might be inside but without any means of access. And then, suddenly, and often in a distracted moment, one stumbles upon a small door, a loose brick, a tree with an obliging network of branches that affords a glimpse into the garden, a way to proceed.

To switch metaphors in midstream, word games are rope ladders to that obliging network of branches. If nothing else, word games build up writing muscle, a facility to pull words out of the air when you need them the most. Ideas do not exist in a static state, like fruit on a tree. They come into existence in the very act of reaching out to grasp them. As in Russell Hoban’s How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, it is the kid who fools around who really knows how to win the game.

In the movie They Might Be Giants, George C. Scott is an affable nut who thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes. His family hires a psychiatrist to try to cure him of this delusion. His Holmes is a paranoid: he believes his archenemy, Moriarity, is out to get him. He sees clues everywhere. At one point, he overturns a garbage can and roots through the garbage for a clue, which, of course, he finds. I can’t remember what it is: a candy wrapper, an old cigarette carton — the thing is, to him, it’s a clue. The psychiatrist begins to think maybe he’s right. Maybe there is a Moriarity out there.

As a writer, you have to be something of a Sherlock Holmes. You have to be on the lookout for clues all the time. It’s not an enemy you’re looking for; it’s a story. And anything — anything you trip over accidentally — might be useful in making that story work. Anything might be the missing ingredient. I am not suggesting writers are paranoid and think the world is out to get them. On the contrary, writers are out to get the world, clue by clue. To discover what’s going on out there, story by story. An idea is the first step, and there is, potentially, an idea under every Fritos package. Watch for it.

Tim Wynne-Jones shops at the Idea Store in Eastern Ontario, where he lives with his family. His latest novel, The Boy in the Burning House (Farrar/Kroupa), received a 2002 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.