Where Do Writers Get Their Ideas

From?By Natalia Dang

Joanne Rowling J.K. Rowling first had the idea for Harry Potter while delayed on a train travelling from Manchester to London King’s Cross in 1990. Over the next five years, she began to plan out the seven books of the series. She wrote mostly in longhand and amassed a mountain of notes, many of which were on scraps of paper. As of July 2013, the books have sold more than 450 million copies worldwide, making them the best-selling book series in history, and have been translated into seventy-three languages

Mark Twain• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is

an 1876 novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River. Adventures in the book, mirror his real life adventures Mark Twain’ greatest inspiration for this novel was his mother, his friend Will Bowen and the slaves that he encountered as a child. He mirrored the character of Tom Sawyer after himself.

• “I don’t believe an author … ever lived, who created a character. It was always drawn from his recollection of some one he had known. … [or] from the blending of two or more real characters”

• David Fears writes that “[Twain's] boyhood days … were filled with adventures, escapades and personalities[,] many of which were to find their way into his many novels years later” (6).

William Shakespeare • Shakespeare used to read different plays and stories to

get ideas while writing his own plays. Plutarch and Chaucer were two of his favorite authors. Chaucer's famous poem "Troilus and Chriseyde" was the main source of Shakespeare's play "Troilus and Cressida." Shakespeare is also known for using biblical imagery throughout his plays and referenced passages of Bible, so it is safe to say that he was very much influenced by the Bible as well.

• Shakespeare also found nature an inspiration (for example, no other playwright mentions birds more than Shakespeare) and the marvel of humankind was clearly ever-present in his mind, revealed in the euphoric praise of his lover's beauty, and in the proclamation of humanity's enduring spirit, intelligence and grace:

• What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! (Hamlet, 2.2.314)

Charles Dickens • Charles John Huffam Dickens was

born on February 7, 1812, at Portsea on England’s southern coast and has been generally hailed as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. Many of his novels were inspired by his bittersweet childhood. Dickens, of course, fictionalised many elements of his own childhood. But also in Oliver Twist we meet the boy-worker — “a poor houseless, wandering boy without a friend to help him, or a roof to shelter his head”.

Stephen KingStephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author of contemporary horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy. His books have sold more than 350 million copies, many of which have been adapted into feature films, miniseries, television shows, and comic books.

The Shining is a horror novel published in 1977. While vacationing in snowbound Colorado, King and his wife stayed at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, and found inspiration for the fictional Overlook Hotel and the trapped family in "The Shining.“‘’ In late September of 1974, Tabby and I spent a night at a grand old hotel in Estes Park, the Stanley. We were the only guests as it turned out; the following day they were going to close the place down for the winter. Wandering through its corridors, I thought that it seemed the perfect—maybe the archetypical—setting for a ghost story. That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire-hose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in the chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.’’