Crazy Ideas

Ideas are the easy part of writing. Figuring out how to develop an idea into a compelling story that many total strangers will spend their valuable time and money to read... that's the hard part.

However, "Where do you get your ideas?" is perhaps the single question that writers are asked most often. I usually give a brief, flip response, along the lines of, "I buy them from a dealer at the corner of 12th and Vine." But some of the emails I receive ask questions so specific that I've realized some people would like to see a real answer now and then.

So on this page, I'll answer your questions about where I got those crazy ideas. I'll try to post something here once a month (more or less...). And to make it more interesting than just me talking about where I get my ideas, since every writer is different, I'll bring in some guest writers to talk about where they got their ideas, too.

So where did I get the idea for Esther Diamond,
Maximillian Zadok, and Disappearing Nightly?

Disappearing Nightly was always envisioned as the first book of an ongoing, open-ended, chronological, urban-fantasy comedy series about a struggling actress in New York City, and the befuddled magician with whom she has supernatural adventures as they protect the city from Evil.

The premise of the first book, Disappearing Nightly, emerged out of a joke that I or a friend (I don't even remember now) made casually one day, just making a play on words. But the phrase stuck in my head, and I soon thereafter envisioned a magic act going wrong. But I found that just one unexplained magic-act disappearance wasn't enough juice for a book; however, multiple disappearances all over the city—now that would work!

I had trouble figuring out the denouement of the mystery—why were so many characters disappearing? It must have been driving me crazy, because I did something I never do: I discussed my work with my parents. And sitting with me in a local coffee shop one night, listening to me explain the story, they suggested the solution, i.e. the reason there are a number of disappearees over the course of the story. So... thanks, Mom & Dad!

Making Esther Diamond an actress was a natural choice for me, since that was my first profession of choice (but I was totally unsuited to it), and so I have a great affection for actors and the theatre.

And making Esther an actress led me to the concept that, at least in the early books (it's too soon to say what will happen in later books), the supernatural adventures would always start with Esther encountering something strange in her regular life as a struggling actress. So in Disappearing Nightly, Esther wants to go on with the show... but becomes convinced she'll disappear if she does. In Doppelgangster, she gets emeshed in a strange and deadly situation while working as a singing waitress. In the third planned book, Unsympathetic Magic, her life is mystically endangered due to taking a job coaching young performers. And so on.

However... the story of Disappearing Nightly and the Esther Diamond series is as much a story about the publishing business—and about being a working novelist—as it is about where those crazy ideas come from.
At the time that the above story idea was forming, I had published a dozen romance novels with Silhouette Books, under the pseudonym Laura Leone, but had so far been unable to sell any other type of novel. I had, however, recently won the John W. Campbell Award as the Best New Science Fiction/Fantasy Writer, on the basis of the sf/f short stories I was selling. So, since it was a market where my name was becoming marginally familiar to editors on that basis, I was trying to propose some sf/f novels. So when I found myself thinking about this urban-fantasy series idea, I worked on it. My then-agent liked the proposal and sent it to three publishing houses. However, the market for urban-fantasy was not good, and none of those three houses was interested. My agent then retired the project and responded negatively when I raised the subject thereafter.	One of my old romance novels
So Disappearing Nightly went into my trunk. (In the computer era, my "trunk" of unsold projects is a folder on my hard drive, rather than a physical box.) I go through my trunk once every couple of years and re-read any projects that are in there. In some cases, thanks to the distance from the material that time has given me, I realize it's just not very good; in other cases, I realize I've moved on, and I'm no longer that same writer or still interested in that story. And so I delete the file. (Yes, some people save everything. But I have no desire to hang onto old proposals that I don't even like or want to sell anymore.)
But every time I read the proposal for Disappearing Nightly... I still liked it, still wanted to write the series, and still wanted to sell the book. So I never deleted it from my trunk. It stayed there for eight years. During that time, I sold a traditional fantasy series to Tor Books, and also sold a couple more romance novels, so I kept busy. I also, fearing I'd never get to do the Esther Diamond series, cannibalized the basic premise of book two, Doppelgangster, and turned it into a short story, "Doppelgangster," which has been published twice. (It has none of the same characters or events, just uses the same basic hook: gangsters die mysteriously after seeing their own perfect doubles.)
Meanwhile, the market was changing. TV shows that mixed paranormal elements with real-world settings became hugely popular, such as The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Then some urban fantasy/horror novelists, such as Laurell Hamilton and Charlaine Harris, "broke out" to bigger audiences. So urban fantasy and "cross-genre" fiction were becoming popular and sought-after. So after leaving the above-mentioned agent, I decided to dust off my fantasy-mystery-comedy proposal and see if I could sell it myself. However, one thing the market was clearly asking for was a love story or romantic subplot within a cross-genre series, to attract a larger audience of women readers (who buy most of the fiction in this country) than straight-genre fantasy typically does.	I contributed essays to these two nonfiction books about the popular paranormal shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
So I rewrote the proposal before sending it out. In the original proposal for Disappearing Nightly, Lopez was Esther's nemesis, rather than her love interest. He was a good-looking, self-centered, womanizing opportunist who treated Esther like a sub-par sex object, and who advanced his career on the police force by taking credit for cases that Max and Esther actually solved. Revising a character who only appears in two scenes of a book proposal sounded easy, when I decided to do it... but it turned out to be a hair-tearing project, since the character had to change drastically, or else there was no way a sensible woman like Esther could be attracted to him. With none of my efforts to rewrite Lopez working, I finally wound up removing his scenes from the manuscript altogether and starting them over from scratch. Virtually nothing is left of the original Lopez except for his skepticism, throughout the book, about what happened to Golly Gee and the other disappearees.
Within a few weeks of sending out the new proposal, I got a three-book offer from Luna. Agentless at the time, I hired a new agent to negotiate the deal for me. Luna was enthused about the series, enthused about the finished manuscript I delivered, and enthused about my future there... until they informed me that, due to weak sales on the first book, they'd have to cancel my contract and discontinue the series, after just the one book. (Yes, this is very upsetting. It's also not that unusual an occurrence in this business, and Luna cancelled a number of contracts that year.) By then, they had already prepared a cover for the second book, Doppelgangster (which they renamed Doppelgangsters, for corporate reasons not worth going into). It'll never be used, so I include it here for your interest. Frankly, although Luna was well-intentioned, I thought both of their covers were wrong for this series, completely missing its three main marketing cues: fantasy, comedy, series. And if the packaging misses the marketing cues, then the book's audience doesn't find the book, and sales are weak. (See my five-part article series on packaging, A Book By Its Cover, elsewhere on this website.)	The cover that was never used
The agent whom I had hired back when I had the Luna offer on the table didn't seem to be wildly enthusiastic about trying to sell the second book of a cancelled series—and not wildly enthusiastic about me, either. So I left my (fourth) agent, and I looked for a new one. No one I contacted was interested in me, and several agents told me I wouldn't be able to resell the series. So, not feeling in urgent need of still more dismissal and rejection from literary agents, I gave up on that front and, once again, submitted the series to publishers by myself. A few weeks later, I got a good three-book offer, for Doppelgangster plus books #3 and #4 of the series. Rather than look (yet again) for a new agent, I hired a literary lawyer to negotiate the contract. (And if the books do well—which is always an open question—then the new publisher will reprint Disappearing Nightly.)
Like Disappearing Nightly, Doppelgangster also began with the title. A friend one day said that she had recently seen my döppelganger, i.e. someone who looked just like me. And my mind somehow jumped to the word doppelgangster—which immediately got me thinking: döppelgangers (a perfect double whose appearance means you'll die by nightfall) and gangsters. And, since the book hasn't been published yet, that's all I'm saying!
Anyhow, when people ask me, "How do you know if a book is marketable?" or, "How long does it take to sell a book?" or, "How many rejections should I endure before I give up on a book?"... There is no "right" answer, and I can only answer from my own experience: * It can takes years to sell a book, or only weeks. Or (see above) both. * An experienced, respected, successful literary agent who tells you a book is unsaleable may be right. Or wrong. Or only right in the current place and time. Or dead wrong even in the current place and time. Or (see above) all of these. * If you still like a project when you read it, even after setting it aside for a couple of years, then you shouldn't give up on it. If you still like it eight years after setting it aside, then you shouldn't give up on it. Fashions come and go in publishing, and a good book will find a home, sooner or later, if the writer is persistent enough. —Laura Resnick May 2008

Click here to see where my previous guests
got those crazy ideas for their books.

Where did I get the idea for In Legend Born?

The same place I got the ideas for my 8th and 9th romance novels, respectively The Bandit King and The Black Sheep: Sicily.

I lived in Sicily for a year in the late 1980s. It's an extraordinary place full of amazing true stories, as well as a place that suggests many possible stories to a fiction writer's imagination.

If you haven't found it already, there's "A Note About" In Legend Born elsewhere on this site that explains the origins of my idea for Josarian and his role in Sileria's fate. Namely, a real figure in Sicilian 20th century history, the outlaw or freedom fighter (depending on your point of view), Salvatore Giuliano.

Spoiler warning!

Over the course of his career, Giuliano joined forces with Sicily's most powerful Mafia don, then later fell out violently with the same man—which marked him for certain death. Giuliano, who never married, was betrayed at the end of his young life, in 1950, by the man who was his cousin and co-chieftain.

So if you've read the book, it's probably obvious now where I got the ideas for Josarian's cousin, Zimran, and also the ruthless waterlord Kiloran (whose name I got from an internet handle that a cousin of mine used to use). The idea for the waterlords and their power over that crucial substance comes from the same source Kiloran does: for much of the 20th century, the Mafia controlled most of Sicily's water supply. The idea for the Guardians came from the importance of mystical Catholicism in Sicilian culture, as well as the diminished position of the Church under Fascist and Nazi domination in Sicily for most of Giuliano's short life.

Giuliano is a famous folk hero in Sicily, and I found his tale fascinating for years before I realized I wanted to explore some of its elements in a fantasy novel. When developing my story, I needed a protagonist who could enter Josarian's world and make his role effective in Sileria's fate in a way that Giuliano's role had ultimately not been in Sicily. So Tansen was born. Because in fantasy, a tale shouldn't fizzle out in withered futility; people turn to heroic fiction for a satisfying conclusion. Salvatore Giuliano accomplished relatively little for Sicily, and he spent the final two years of his life just trying not to die. So his story was a starting place for me, not a road map. Additionally, although various events in Josarian's life are a clear echo of Giuliano's, there are also many differences—including the characters and personalities of the two men.

Anyhow, now that I had some of the cornerstones in place, I noticed the main characters of my story were all guys. So I developed female characters to fill the major story roles that I had not yet cast. Mirabar represents the role of the Church, and Elelar represents the role of the latifondisti, the traditional landowners and aristocrats of Sicily; but both women are far more involved and more important in my fictional tale than these elements were in Giuliano's career.

Sicilian culture has for centuries been rich with secret societies, including one called the Beati Paoli, whose members supposedly dwelled beneath the streets of the capital city, Palermo, in the 18th and 19th centuries; hence the idea for the Beyah Olvari. The active volcano of snow-capped Mount Etna has been a prominent feature of Sicilian life since the first inhabitants invaded the island millennia ago, and so an active volcano became a prominent feature of Sileria—and I moved a demanding goddess into it. And the Valdani, like the other international players around the Middle Sea, represent an amalgamation of the various peoples that have, over the centuries, conquered and ruled Sicily: Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Normans, Arabs, Bourbons, Italians, and Germans.
—March, 2007

Where did I get the idea for In Fire Forged
(which was subsequently split into The White
Dragon and The Destroyer Goddess, due to length)?

I had reached the end of the real-life history that had been the genesis of In Legend Born, so the rest of Sileria's story now came out of developing and playing out the alliances, conflicts, enmities, and obsessions I had created in this fantasy world and among these fictional characters.

One aspect of the new material, however, was loosely inspired by another Sicilian legend. See "A Note About" The White Dragon elsewhere on this site. As explained in the "Note," I believe the popular folk legend about gangster Lucky Luciano traveling secretly to Sicily during WWII to convince the Mafia there to cooperate with the Allied invasion is just a legend; but I knew people in Sicily who believed it was true. Either way, I found the idea compelling enough to write a short story inspired by it: "Under A Sky More Fiercely Blue." It's a story, set in wartime Sicily, about a village boy whose typically romantic notions about the Mafia in general, and Luciano in particular, are shattered by actual contact with them. The ideas I explored in that short story gathered steam and eventually became Tansen's complex, loving, and horribly guilt-ridden relationship with his adoptive father, Armian, which is mentioned in In Legend Born, and then explored in detail in White Dragon and Destroyer Goddess as it becomes central to the theme of the books.

One of the characters briefly mentioned in In Legend Born who then becomes a crucial player in these next two books is the waterlord Baran. I found this the most difficult characterization I had ever yet tackled, and it took me a long time to figure him out. The solution for me—which I arrived at by accident, in desperation, after months of struggling, hair-tearing, and perpetual rewriting—was to base him on a dog we'd had when I was a child, a tri-color collie named Elf. She was a delightful, charming, beautiful dog... who was also patently insane. Elf's mad behavior was bizarre beyond belief, frequently comical, occasionally cute, sometimes quite alarming, and often very, very annoying. One of Elf's most memorable gifts was that she regularly agitated our other dogs into fighting with each other even though, in her absence, they got along just fine. Against all odds, though, Elf lived to a ripe old age. Anyhow, once I latched onto Elf as the basis for Baran's characterization, I wrote his scenes in WD and DG by asking myself, "What would Elf do?"

By the way, although I've occasionally adapted some specific characteristics or experiences of people I've known and incorporated them into fictional characters, this makes Baran the only character I've ever actually based on someone I've known in real life.
—March, 2007

Where did I get the idea to write about a male
prostitute in Fallen From Grace?

One night I watched a much-lauded French-Canadian film called Being At Home With Claude, starring Roy Dupuis (best known to Americans as "Michael" in the 1990s TV series La Femme Nikita). Dupuis plays a street hustler in Montreal who's being interrogated by the cops after killing his lover, a regular middle-class, law-abiding gay man. I didn't care for the film, which I found sluggish and pretentious; but I was very intrigued by one question it touched on briefly: What was it like to be a regular person in love with a male prostitute?

Not being a gay man, I wondered about this from a heterosexual woman's perspective. Then I found myself wondering how a regular, sensible, law-abiding, middle-class woman would even meet a male prostitute, let alone get to know him well enough to fall in love with him. And one day I finally realized that what I was thinking about was a possible story. (I often mull something over for quite a while, in the endless maze of bizarre musings that float in and out of my head all the time, before realizing that I'm actually starting to work on a story idea.)

So I started researching male prostitutes. The first upscale heterosexual male escort I asked for a research interview said he'd agree, but only if I paid his usual hourly rate. (I couldn't afford it!) The next one I queried never responded. I also contacted an upscale male escort agency that refused to give me an inteview; but their website gave me a lot of ideas for how Catherine, the owner of the agency in my novel, runs her business and what kind of prices she charges. (I was flabbergasted!)

After these failed attempts, I settled for doing my research strictly via non-fiction books and websites. (Some old friends, seeing the books I brought on our vacation that summer, were pretty worried about me until I explained why I was reading a "how to" guide for hustlers.) And I learned a remarkable amount this way. After a while, I decided there was indeed a story for me to tell. But I also realized, based on the consistent personality types I was finding in my research, that there had to be something unusual about the character I created, or there was no way that any woman I was interested in writing about could fall in love with him; because all my research led me repeatedly to the inescapable conclusion that men who are in "the life" by choice are not appealing people (in terms of love and relationships). This gradually led me to research, explore, and develop the kind of shattered childhood and street-life background by which Ryan, the male protagonist of FFG, winds up in prostitution, as well as the specific loyalties, circumstances, and insecurities that ensure he's still stuck in that life when he meets Sarah.

Having gotten that far, I felt that Sarah's character had to be someone who was around the house all the time, so that she'd see Ryan often, and also so that she'd notice (without actually being nosy) all the odd bits and pieces of his daily routine. I also thought she should be in the middle of a crisis of her own, perhaps a professional one that cut her to the quick. On all counts, I thought making her a writer was the best solution. But I resisted for a while, because I was afraid people would think I was pulling a "Mary Sue," a phrase applied derisively when people believe an author's story is a wish-fulfillment fantasy about herself.

However, I recalled one of my basic beliefs about writing fiction: I don't matter, and what you think of me doesn't matter; only the story matters. So I got over myself, and I made Sarah a writer, which is what the character by then desperately wanted to be. (And, yes, online gossip among readers suggested that I had based Sarah on myself. My discomfort over that is a good example of why I do my best to avoid knowing what BBs, chat lists, and reader reviews say about me or my work.)

—March, 2007

If you have a question about where I got an idea, email me!