Where do you get your ideas?
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| Title: | Where do you get your ideas? |
| Creator: | Marion Zimmer Bradley |
| Date(s): | September 1988 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Darkover |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Where do you get your ideas? is a 1988 essay by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
Bradley's Letter from MZB in Darkover Newsletter #42 is very long and complicated. One of the many topics she tackles is the questions she gets from fans at cons and book signings.
The first part of the essay is about where Bradley gets her writing inspiration.
The other part of the essay is about "channeling" and the topic of visionaries, quacks, and self-appointed people who claim to have religious and metaphysical truths: "Have fun with your space brothers — but don't believe a word they say."
Excerpt
It's part of the job, and most of them, even the ones I've been asked ten or twenty times that day, I can muster some kind of polite answer. Even the persons who ask me that time-dishonored old chestnut. Where do you get your ideas? get something like an attempt to give them some insight into the creative process, though it would be much easier to do as Stephen King does and say "Utica" or "A post office box in Schenectady." My usual answer is that the kind of people who have ideas become writers, and people without them, don't. I still remember trying desperately to understand that everybody doesn't have ideas in an endless flood; the question should really be "how do you avoid having ideas?"
But, be that as it may, there has recently been one question which sends me almost into frothing at the mouth. That is the question asked soulfully, usually by a youngish hyperthyroid female, with a crystal around her neck and glassy eyes, "Mrs. Bradley, how much of your work is channeled?"
As I say, this question makes me froth at the mouth.
My usual answer is, "None whatever; as the late Walt Kelly said of Pogo, it all came out of my own personal head-bone."
The question always makes me angry, because it implies that I am not capable of thinking it up myself. Of course, there is a very real sense in which every work of art is channeled; a sort of theory of Platonian archetypes; a feeling that this book somewhere exists in perfect form and I have mainly not to invent it so much as listen for it. But that doesn't seem to be what they mean. I once spoke of reincarnation, saying I was not sure I believed in it, but my audience sure did; that if I had a dollar for every earnest young woman—and not a few young men—who solemnly assured me that they had been Morgaine—or sometimes Lancelot—in their past lives, I could open my own publishing house; and the book many fans want me to write next is MY LIFE AS MORGAINE LE FAY or perhaps MY LIFE AS A GREAT PRIESTESS THROUGH THE AGES.