I never get a good idea when I’m sitting at my desk, and I always tell that to students when I visit schools because there they are, sitting at their desks every day, expected to come up with great ideas. I get ideas when I’m in the world. I carry my writer’s notebook with me everywhere I go, to the grocery store, to the movies, to the park, to my friend’s house. I would never leave home without my writer’s notebook.
And I’m constantly finding things that interest me, that surprise me, that move me, and I do not wait to come home to write. I stop and write those things down because by the time you come home you will be thinking about all kinds of things. So I show students my writer’s notebook. I make sure to read from my writer’s notebook, the kinds of things that I’m writing down, show them a rough draft of a poem that I’ve put in that writer’s notebook, and then how I’ve made it into something different.
With stories, I get a lot of ideas in the library. I read a lot in the library, and reading other books will give me an idea for a book. So, many of my story ideas have come from the world around me, and not my own imagination, and I think that’s an important message to students too because they often think that a writer is just born with all of these great ideas ready to go, and that’s just not true. You need constant inspiration.
You do need to be out looking, and you need to be thinking like a writer, and that’s one of the fun things about it, to carry that little notebook in your pocket and act like a spy and imagine that you’re out there trying to discover the next great idea. It’s a really fun way of being in the world. You can never be bored while you’re looking for something exciting to happen.
