Mommy, where do ideas come from?

For the remainder of this week I shall steal other people's topics and claim them as my own.

Today I will write about where ideas come from. For most people ideas probably come from a "what if" scenario. Not Dead Yet certainly did. My then boyfriend and I were discussing our zombie contingency plan, and he said he'd want to get to a boat and sail away. That in itself is not that original, but then I started thinking, what would happen after that? What happens once you're free and clear and survive the zombie apocalypse? And a script was born.

I don't remember where most of my other ideas came from. Some came from working at a school, although I've decided I can't write about school. Every time I try I feel like I'm not doing the kids justice.

I have been making a list of ideas to pitch when Not Dead Yet finally gets me some goddamn meetings and every time I think of a new one I write it on an index card and tack it to the magic bulletin board.

One is based on something I saw on the History Channel. I like to think about the minor characters in a given historical event and think about where they may have gone after the event was over. This idea is one of those.

One idea I got from visiting a historical site on a trip a few months ago. A tourguide told us such a cool story I couldn't believe nobody had ever made it into a film. It turns out that they have, but it was a shitty made-for-tv '80s movie nobody saw. This one is currently my favorite pitch because it's the easiest to research.

Another idea I got when I decided to come up with something high concept. I sort of ran through ideas about the future of our planet and suddenly a freaking cool story idea came to me, a considerably more modern idea than the other two.

The current project I'm working on was all science and logic. I decided I wanted to write a martial arts film a la House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon so I made a mental list of elements from those stories. I picked a location with which I am familiar where the story could take place. Then I thought it out. Those films are always about a doomed love. How can I have a doomed love in the place I have chosen to locate my story? I made a list.

I went on like that until I had a story, and oddly enough it has so far been pretty easy to put together. Everything in this story will happen for a reason and will be true to the style I am emulating except it won't be Chinese.

You never know where the stories will come from. Where do you get yours?