- by Tara Maya
Where DO We Get Our Ideas?
Since my children have to suffer the ignominy of a mother who writes for a living, they sometimes don’t get much in the way of frills. Even the oldest one is dressed in hand-me-downs from a more prosperous friend, and for holidays… well, sometimes we cheat. On Easter, we went out to dinner with cousins and gramps but there no baskets or eggs until a day later, when coincidently, everything was on sale for half off.
You are wondering how this relates to writing. It does. Fortunately for this blog, everything in my life reminds me of writing, even things that should not, even day-late holidays.
The kids are into “Bakugan” right now. My oldest boy was given one as a gift a while ago and ever since has been bugging me for more. These are cute little robot-like dragon-like things that fold up into balls. My son never calls them “Bakugan” but “dragon balls,” (which makes sense because they look like dragons), “transformer balls,” (which makes sense because they transform) or “climate balls” (which doesn’t make sense until he explains they can control the climate).
They are damn expensive, but I found some on sale and hid them inside the plastic eggs. They were a big hit. My son asked to take one to school, which is not normally allowed, but after some negotiation, the teacher permitted the ball to stay on the understanding it would remain in his cubby most of the day. To my surprise, when my son came home that day, he referred to his toys as, “Bakugan” instead of dragon balls.
“Where did you get that name?” I asked.
“I made it up,” he told me.
“You must have heard it from someone at school,” I said.
He looked at me as if I were crazy. “No, Mommy, I just made it up.”
I don’t believe he’s lying. I think he believes he made up the name or he simply can’t remember where he heard it. Of course, there’s no chance he just “made up” the exact same three-syllable name as the company that makes the balls also made up. He’s already trading his original imaginative understanding of the toy for the corporate, collectively sanctioned understanding. Yet he thinks these ideas that are filtering through to him are original.
This is one danger of inspiration which strikes us seemingly out of the blue. Often, it isn’t coming from as far out of the blue as we think. It isn’t as original as we think. We can’t remember where we got the idea, not because it is so preternatural, but because it is so prevalent.
One of my favorite books on writing, Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
