Where Do You Get Those Ideas????

Barbara Haworth-Attard

One question I get all the time from school visits or readings is where do you get your story ideas from:

My answer is: everywhere!

I listen to conversations between people in coffee shops, etc. Yes that is creepy, but I believe it is public domain. Old newspapers give me great ideas. Think we are weird now? We were way weirder back fifty years or so. Every small town museum I go to, I ask if they have any old diaries. Lots of great ideas in old diaries, plus they are very important reading if you are doing historical fiction of any kind, to get a feel for the language of the day. One interesting entry was from an 1852 diary of a young man was that he had “intercourse with Miss Brown and it was a very enlightening discussion.” Obviously, the language had a different meaning than that today!