Harlan Ellison famously answered a similarly phrased question, “Where do you get your ideas?” with the breathtakingly simple “Schenectady.” Neil Gaiman, author of Neverwhere and Coraline, is asked so frequently that he wrote a whole essay on the question. In it, he says: In an interview for her book A Room Away From The Wolves, Nova Ren Suma said: Mercedes Lackey, author of the Valdemar series, once said: The late author Joan Aiken, who wrote The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, wrote: Lisa Kleypas, author of Devil in Disguise, answered: Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, author of the memoir Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, wrote about ideas as part of the creative process: KJ Charles, author of Think of England, wrote a short essay about inspiration: Andrea Davis Pinkney, author of Martin Rising, told Scholastic: Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Only Good Indians, wrote about why he writes and touched on inspirations: Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming, wrote about writers block and ideas: Some authors have fewer ideas. Alix E. Harrow, author of The Once and Future Witches, wrote in her newsletter about her lack of ideas: The great Toni Morrison said, in a 1979 interview: When asked about the impetus for She Walks in Shadows, the all-women Lovecraft-inspired anthology, author and editor Silvia Moreno-Garcia named Facebook: When asked about Pet, Akwaeke Emezi told The New York Times: Likewise, Helen Hoang told EW about the initial spark for The Kiss Quotient: But I think N.K. Jemisin, Hugo Award–winning author of The Fifth Season, said it best: (See also “Carving A New World”) Is there a difference between how writers get their ideas and writers’ processes? Between ideas flowing and the well drying up? I think there probably is not. The things that inspire us, the way we do the work, and the very concept of ideas are all interlocked concepts, and not necessarily definable. As Lucas says in Empire Records, “Who knows where thoughts come from? They just appear.”
