“Where do you get your ideas?”
Is probably the question that I get asked
most often, when it comes to writing.
(If it’s not about writing, the question is usually, “why are you so
weird?”
And my answer to that is
always:
dill pickles.)
I’ve read other author blogs and been to author events where
this question comes up time and time again.
Authors can’t answer the question because there is no real answer.
Mostly, ideas just come.
Stephen King once said that
he gets his ideas from “everything,” and as vague as that is, he nailed it.
Ideas are floating around us all and every
once in awhile, these “floating ideas” light the creative fires in your mind.
In my novel,
Impish, the
ball got rolling with one of the most bizarre true stories that I’ve heard in
my life.
I heard the story while I was
clerking at a law firm during law school.
One of my fellow clerks, a smart and funny girl with a dicey track
record for recognizing social dos and don’ts, recounted her experience in
taking the
LSAT.
She had to take the test twice. The first time she sat down to take the test,
she was excited and nervous. She started
answering the questions. About an hour or so into the test, she suddenly got
that old, familiar signal from her bladder that she would soon have to leave
the room.
Now, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of
familiarizing yourself with the LSAT, the trickiest part about that test is the
time limit. Most of the questions can be
figured out, if given enough time. But the
test is designed to force you to come up with answers very quickly, and even if
you are very quick with your responses, it can still be difficult to answer all
the questions in time.
A couple minutes passed for my friend, who tried her best to
ignore the calls of nature, when she realized that this feeling that her
bladder was going to explode is not going away.
She knew that if she got up to go to the bathroom, she might not be able
to finish the test in time, but she also knew that if she stayed, she would
soon be sitting in a puddle. The
decision was a difficult one, and in the end, rather than take a quick bathroom
break and do her best to finish the test, she calmly stood up, turned in her
test, and signed the form that indicated her forfeiture of her score.
A few months later, she was back in the testing center for
round two. Not wanting to face a similar
predicament, she emptied her bladder several times before the test even
started, and wore an adult diaper, just in case.
Yep, you read that right.
She wore an adult diaper so that she wouldn’t have to miss any of those
precious minutes using the restroom.
Now, I know that people sometimes have to do extraordinary things—like
that guy in the fantastic
127 Hours— to survive, and I know that
there are people who genuinely need assistance with adult diapers (and I’m not
poking fun at that), rather, the situation was so awkward that I could hardly
come up with a response.
When I asked her, as discreetly as possible, if she actually
had to use the diaper, she just smiled, and wouldn’t say.
From then on, she became known in my mind as
the girl who
didn’t play with fire or go around
kicking hornet’s nests, but
instead, chose to wear a diaper.
The summer ended and we went our separate ways, keeping in
touch occasionally, but that story stuck with me. It became one of the seeds that eventually
evolved into my new novel, Impish.
The girl who wore the diaper became a central character in
Impish—a friend to the guy who accidently sells his soul to hell.
I wanted to capture the academic passion
someone could have, and all the eccentricities that would come along with it.
