the endless fount of ideas

Interesting little tidbit I noticed on mediabistro.com this morning about a writer who parlayed an article in a NY Times column into a book deal, which also became a movie deal and just a big deal overall. She wrote about how animal training can help with love training, or finding, or something like that. (The article is from 2006.)

The most interesting part of this story to me (well, the literary fame and fortune are pretty cool too) is how she positively plumbed the depths of the Modern Love column in the Times, to the point of manually counting the words in several of the articles. She did her research. And it paid off. In spades. And her idea came from a previous book she'd written called Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched, about people at an exotic animal training school. Bit of a leap, no? But a fascinating example of how to find and breathe life into ideas. It certainly made my head start to whirl with all the possibilities that I can wrestle out of the primordial stew of ideas and plunk onto paper (screen).

Where do your ideas come from? How do you string them together, make connections? Most importantly, I suppose, what do you do when the ideas seem to dry up?

Okay, enough expounding. Time for me to go find my ideas and drag them into the light...

the endless fount of ideas