“Where do you get your ideas?” by Charles Stross | Hacker News Reader

“Where do you get your ideas?” by Charles Stross

tor.com

49 pointszzkt12 comments

I've found that writing is a lot like programming.

For a skilled programmer, programming is easy. Designing a complex system might be hard, understanding complex programs may be hard, and designing algorithms may be hard, but the actual act of putting the concepts into code should be pretty easy.

For a skilled writer, writing is easy. Designing a complex, believable plot, characters the reader can empathize with, a detailed universe, and so forth, can be quite hard, but the actual act of putting it onto paper is easy. Of course, as any good writer will tell you, once you've written it down, there are another hundred revisions to go before it's actually ready, a dozen of which will involve a complete rewrite. So you have to be able to put thoughts to paper quickly. Also, at least personally, I've found that I have a short attention span with regards to writing: there's a window of a few hours between when I have an idea and when my mind wants to throw it away, and I have to get something passable written in that time.

When I get an idea for a short story I can often write out 5000 words in a couple of hours. But going from that basket of words spurt out at 3:00 AM to a publishable story would take far, far, longer.

One interesting bit of advice I've heard is that aspiring authors should start with fanfiction--because that allows them to work in an existing detailed universe with existing characters. This lets them get practice making writing easy so that when it comes to actually creating a setting from scratch, they don't have to worry about writing it down. This is much like programming--by the time you're doing serious work, it's expected that coding itself is second-nature to you.

Also, a good read for any HN user interested in writing (especially Sci-Fi/Fantasy) is the classic Turkey City Lexicon:

http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html

as any good writer will tell you, once you've written it down, there are another hundred revisions to go before it's actually ready

Not necessarily. Some writers write publishable first drafts, at least some of the time. Heinlein famously started out thinking that rewrites weren't worth his time (though he still did some on at least some stories).

There is a mention of this in "On Writing Well" where Zinsser tells a story about speaking at a conference along side an author who was able to write publishable first drafts.

Sure, they're out there, but the skill is extremely rare.

> Practice writing. Write every day. If you are a top-notch computer scientist, you probably read technical papers nearly every day. You are a writer too, so practice.

http://www.dreamsongs.com/RPGWritingBroadside.html

I wonder what will happen if/when we get a decent brain/computer interface, and we'll be able to write stories by thinking about them...

I think the value of clear thinking will become most obvious at that point.

    Ideas, hah. The real challenge in this line of work is
    being able to weed the productive ones from the chaff, to
    decide which you’re going to spend the next six to nine
    months turning into something that people will pay for.

It's so true. I remember hearing about both Buffy and Heroes, "how can this not be completely and utterly rubbish" and yet they turned out amazing (well - one series of Heroes, at least). The pitch for Lost is: a bunch of damaged goods people crash on an island. As time goes by we learn more about them via flashback. Weird stuff happens.

I find this post some what interesting, but I'm disappointed he didn't go more into depth on specific examples of what inspired him. I've been reading Accelerando (http://www.accelerando.org/ It is quite nicely free, and I highly recommend it), and I've been fascinated by how many ideas he managed to cram into there. It's an excellent book, but it's so dense with ideas I find myself only able to read it in short bursts so I can wrap my head around some of the ideas it discusses.

Reading Accelerando was like taking drugs for me... I had a buzz that lasted about a week after I was done.

Ze Frank on the subject: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/071106.html (sorta)

OK Hackers it's our responsibility to inspire Charlie. He said so. I personally liked book 2 of the Merchant Princes and Accelerando, but that's not really inspiration.

I recommend his blog http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/index.html because of the discussions of ideas.

I find the machine you use dictates your writing habits. I've used many different computers/keyboards over the years, and I find it helps.

The canonical SF answer is "Mail order from Schenectady, New York", not Poughkeepsie. Stross also got the author of the quip wrong, but I can't get my memory to produce the right one (I saw it in print many moons ago).

P.S. Seems Stross was right about the source. I remembered Barry B. Longyear's It Came from Schenectady. He explains:

http://www.sff.net/people/bblongyear/ItSchenectady.html

http://www.sff.net/people/bblongyear/ICFSFF.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com