The other day I posted a meme on Minds. I've been making memes from quotes by genre authors about the value they found in genre writing, and this one got a question in the comments:

Reading and writing sci-fi feels like exploring endless universes. How do you come up with ideas for your own work?

Ignoring the AI-generated feel of the question, I gave a rather long-ish answer, and decided to revise and expand it for a wider audience. (If you go to the post, you'll see that the questioner responded with a wall o' text that reads an awful lot like the delusions of a schizophrenic. I am unsure if he's doing a bit, or genuinely delusional.)

Ideas are easy, it's writing the story and making it work that's hard. But here are a few ways to generate ideas for stories:

• Mash together genres that don't naturally go together, and see what happens. There was an early 1990s HBO original movie called Cast A Deadly Spell that mixed together the hardboiled private eye archetype, the Lovecraftian mythos, and urban fantasy in general, and it's brilliant.
• Take something that interests or bothers you, and play with it in your imagination. My novella Spring That Never Came started with reading a blog about a 1970s actress who had talent, but never found success, and ended up victim of a still-unsolved murder. That bothered me, and I took that, the 1970s Hollywood milieu, and another idea (or two) entirely, and made an urban fantasy that I'm still quite proud of.
• Find a public domain story or novel that appeals to you, and use it as a springboard. SF writers do this all the time. Heinlein's Double Star is (partly) inspired by The Prisoner of Zenda. Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination is a delirious, brilliant variation on The Count of Monte Cristo that aims far higher than Dumas's tale did, and hits the target. Asimov's Foundation stories famously began when he was pondering Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
  
  Though if you're going to do this, don't be boring about it and redo something everybody already knows, like Dumas or Walter Scott, find something obscure to launch from. James Grant wrote a lot of historical adventures, and very few remember him, as an example. I'm quite sure at least a few of them could be repurposed to a space opera setting, and the cruft (he wrote a lot of triple-decker novels) stripped away for a solid adventure story.

Another form of inspiration that seems to run more strongly in science fiction than anywhere else: writing a story (or series) to demonstrate how another SF author got something wrong (which follows from the fact that American science fiction has almost always been a conversation among authors, with ideas getting tossed back and forth all of the time).

• Poul Anderson's short story "The Critique of Impure Reason" is a hilarious and brilliant roasting of Asimov's robot story "Reason", as well as an ode to pulp science fiction in general.
• C.J. Cherryh was downright offended by Larry Niven's alien Kzinti being not only patriarchal, but literally only having the males be sentient, that she created her own matriachal cat-like race, the Hani, and wrote one of her best series, The Pride of Chanur and its sequels. (With the added bonus that the most alien character in those books is the sole human.)
• My dear friend Sarah A. Hoyt has a book coming out this year that began as an idea when she was 14 and read Ursula LeGuin's prize-winning The Left Hand Of Darkness, and was furious because, as she puts it, "biology does not work like that!" No Man's Land is still being edited (I read it and gave her the editorial letter late last year, but the book is enormous, so it's taking time to make all the pieces fit and work together), but should be out by summer.

Ideas are easy to come up with. Original ideas that have never been done before, that's tougher. Original ideas that are good, and so intriguing that the reader will buy the book just to see how it plays out, even harder.

But nobody who writes fiction has any shortage of ideas. (Well, except William Gibson, maybe.) Ask any author if they need new ideas for stories and, unless they are blocked for some reason, they'll just laugh. Last I heard, Jim Butcher could easily write twenty more Harry Dresden books just on the ideas he had in a notebook ten-fifteen years ago. And that's not his only series, just his most successful. Larry Correia tosses off epic series of books seemingly as easily as breathing. (It's not that easy, but he makes it look so.) I myself have something like seventy folders in my Novels directory, and a fair number of those are for series, not one-offs.

But if these ideas for generating ideas aren't enough, go listen to John Cleese talk about creativity. (With lightbulb jokes.)

I chanced to listen to the radio the other day, something I haven't done often in over twenty years. The radio in the car I was driving happened to be tuned to what used to be called an oldies station, but these days is kind of the same mush on every radio station—a blend of stuff from the '70s up to now, with recordings of the same "DJ" everybody probably hears across the country on some stations, because local broadcast radio is basically dead.

But that's a rant for another day.

As I drove, the unmistakable opening notes to a song I remembered fondly from my childhood started, and I thought something like "Man, I loved this, but I was a kid, rarely listened to the words, and can't even remember what the second or third verses might be." So I listened.

Turns out, there was good reason for that. The song doesn't go anywhere. There's the verse, the chorus, repeat, and done. It's literally three great hooks, some "deep" lines that don't add up to anything, and nothing more.

Now, the purpose of the song was to support a movie about a band, Eddie and the Cruisers. The song wasn't important, per se, to the movie except to have something cool, rocking, and distinctive for the band to play. Those hooks, that feel, was what was important, really. But as a song, it falls apart because it's not about anything, and the melody doesn't go anywhere.

In a way, the song is quite good for what it is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a minor hit from the early 1960s, pre-British Invasion. As that, it actually fits some standards of the time. Short. Emotional. Uncomplicated.

But even there, the shortest songs of the era had a feeling of going somewhere. "Stay (Just A Little Bit Longer)" by Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs is about a minute and a half, but even though it's static in a storytelling sense (it ends with the same plea that opens it), it has real emotional movement to it. "On the Dark Side" tries to do this with the (wonderful, if brief) sax solo.

This is why the song is a nostalgia piece, not something that new generations discover and embrace as their own, in spite of the cult status of the movie for which it was created.

This is a good thing to remember when writing a story (of any length), too. Yes, you need a great hook, something to grab the reader and make him think "Whoa, that's cool!" And if you can do three great hooks, that's even better. but you need more than just hooks. The story has to be about something, and has to have some kind of movement to it, even if you wind up right back at the beginning.

In August 2024, a new video game was released called Concord. Two weeks later, due to disastrous numbers, Playstation announced the game would be taken down, and all players would be fully refunded.

Why and how the game sucked, which it clearly did, is not important here. What is important is that it is, as far as I can tell, going to vanish from all human knowledge. The game, being an online sort of a thing, will cease to be, or at least, playing it will never be an option for anyone.

Something similar happened a year or two ago when Disney+ cancelled, then removed, the Willow series from its service. They did it for a tax write-off, but what they are doing is removing a creation, however awful, from the sum total of human endeavor.

This is not remotely Disney's first memory hole rodeo. The Song of the South has been locked away in their archives, the copyright renewed for the sole purpose of denying its availability to the public.

This deliberate vanishing of creations bothers me deeply.

Heck, I get grouchy about some pulp magazines from the 1900s, like (for example) issues of Railroad Man's Magazine, apparently not being extant, meaning the world is missing out on early short stories by Johnston McCulley (and possibly even a serialized novel or two by him) and others. I still retain hope that Lon Chaney's film London after Midnight will turn up in an attic somewhere, because all we have are still images, and a loose remake from some years later. The fact that it was apparently not good is beside the point. It existed, and should be preserved. 

But the deliberate removal of a creation from human knowledge is another thing again. Those old pulps, and films, disappeared because of neglect. The idea that something can be disappeared by intention is haunting to me.

And not only to me. There are at least two novels about this idea.

Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions is an excellent book (don't hold Auster's NPR fan club, or his being an Important Author, against it) about a man who becomes obsessed with the life and work of a silent film comedian, Hector Mann, whose work disappeared for decades, until copies of his two-reel comedies began appearing anonymously in the mail to various university archives in the 1980s. His obsession leads him to discover what happened to Mann after his disappearance in 1928, and to learn of the existence of a list of films made, but never released, with tantalizing titles. He even gets to view one of them before... well, before what happens.

I've not read The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, and I should correct that. It's another "literary" book that may overcome its pretensions by sheer force of premise. A boy whose father owns a book shop takes him one day to the Cemetary of Forgotten Books, where he discovers a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax, and takes it home. It turns out to be the very last copy of that novel that is known to exist, and the author disappeared under mysterious circumstances. (And the implication, which might be wrong, is that the author made the books disappear when he did.)

Clearly, the idea of creative works being destroyed haunts the minds of creators, and not just me. 

There's a bit of a fine line I am willing to draw. I made attempts at being a screenwriter, years ago, and none of my screenplays remains extant. J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, destroys his notes and outlines so that all that remains available for anybody is the final, completed work. (He explicitly does this to make it difficult for academics to be able to impose their theories on his work after he is gone.) So: if there is a single creator, and they are destroying something never released to the world... it still makes me itchy (despite me being guilty of it myself), but I can sort of accept that.

But for a company like Disney to take completed work, released to the world (no matter how disastrously) and then vanish it for a tax write-off, of all things... that I cannot accept.

It would be better to allow the tax write-off, but instead of disappearance or destruction, encourage the company to release the unprofitable creation to the public domain. Would it not be better to release the Willow series on a Blu Ray set (without DRM), marked with a Creative Commons Zero license, and include the score on companion CDs within the set, also marked with the CC0 license, give them the write off, and let anyone who wants to make use of any and all of the assets as they see fit? I say it would. It goes against everything Disney currently stands for, but the law could be rewritten to encourage such an action.

And Concord? There I'm less sure how to go about it, since I'm less well versed in video games and how online, multiplayer games could be preserved and/or released to fans to remix. But I should think a similar thing could be done. Upload the source files to the Archive, maybe, and make the game engine public domain, too. Look at what's been done with the Unreal Engline, for example.

But there has to be a better path than destroying that which has been created. Has to be.