Out Of Her Depth

AN AUTHOR’S MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

by Brenda Hiatt

 

More often than not, one of the first questions I hear when someone finds out I’m a writer is, “Where do you get your ideas?” All writers get this question, of course. Frequently. So frequently that some writers have come up with pat, tongue-in-cheek answers, like Harlan Ellison’s famous post office box in Schenectady. “You send in two dollars and a self-addressed stamped envelope and they send you back an idea.” The thing is, people really do want to know the answer to that question, even though for most writers that answer is simply, “Everywhere.” Certainly, that’s my answer, if I’m honest. To illustrate, I’d like to share two very different examples.

The first occurred more years ago than I care to admit, back when I was still writing traditional Regency romances for Harlequin. I was gazing idly out of the car window while my husband drove and the song “Venus” was playing on the radio. (I think there’s more than one song by that name. I mean the oooold Frankie Avalon one.) I wasn’t paying much attention, but then came the line, “Venus make her fair/ I’d love a girl with sunlight in her hair.”  Suddenly I started wondering about that specific line. Make her fair? What if the goddess answers his prayer, but sends him a brunette?  Will he know she’s the one, or will keep waiting for a blonde? I toyed around with that idea until it grew into the plot for my next Regency, Lord Dearborn’s Destiny.
The second example occurred more recently, during a family Spring Break vacation to Aruba. My husband and I and our two daughters had all recently become certified scuba divers (during a previous Spring Break trip to the Florida panhandle), so of course we worked in a couple of dives while on that island paradise. It was during a dive to the wreck of the Debbie II that my younger daughter found a wedding ring on the ocean floor, sixty feet below the surface. Cool, huh? There was no way to trace it, but that didn’t stop my writer brain from speculating on all the various ways it might have ended up down there. Maybe a spat, during which a wife dramatically tossed her wedding ring overboard? Maybe somethng more sinister? Once that writer brain grabs onto something, it’s hard to make it let go. In fact, I ended up spinning a whole convoluted plot that eventually became Out Of Her Depth—a book that turned out to enormously fun to write.

So, while I can obviously tell you where a few of my writing ideas came from, there’s no way on Earth I can predict when or where the next one will strike. I just try to stay alert at all times, so I can pounce on it when it does!

 

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