Letting the Ideas flow

Ideas don't make a story, they say.  That's true, but ideas are the glimmer that kick-start a cascade of connections which do make a story. 

For example, one of the ideas I keep returning to is the breakdown of the technology we've come to rely on for our lives.  So I had this idea for a society after the fall, where all the shiny leading-edge tech had collapsed.  My characters were surviving, but not with their virtual reality realtime interfaces with the on-line world.  And this is the point at which the SF writer's best question and old friend kicked in.  What if?  I asked.  What if the technology that still existed now threatened the existence of that society?

What followed was a cascade of ideas about how the tech and its interfaces had developed - and what the consequences were when the whole system collapsed.  It involved implants, and the way that these interacted with the people who carried them.  The whole story unfolded within a matter of minutes from the point where I got the original idea.  I keep a notebook close at hand, labelled 'Ideas', and I grabbed it and started writing.  An A5 page of notes later, I had the focus for my story, and my main character had suggested herself.

This isn't the first time that I've had a whole story presented to me in one burst.  It often happens.  And when it does I grab the nearest piece of paper and a pen and scribble furiously while my mind adds to the initial spark, and sorts and sifts ideas.

The key thing to do at this moment is relax. It's not a case of forcing the process. It's one of letting the ideas unfold.  And sometimes they combine with elements of what I'm reading at the time too.  My story Cat 'Flu is one of those.  In a River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins put forward an idea for transporting data via a virus.  So I took that and combined the idea with my favourite big cats to create a data-running Resistence.

Over the years I've learned to relax and let the ideas flow, to let them be born in whatever way they want.  And I know that if I do that it always results in something useful, and often in a fully-blown story I can use straight out of the box.

So now I'm off to write up one those ideas, and that too is a process of letting the ideas flow.  How I love the creativity of writing.