It’s almost a cliché that when people hear you write fiction, someone will inevitably suggest, “I have this great idea for a novel. I’ll tell it to you, your write the book, and we’ll split the money.”
I’ve never had anyone say exactly that to me, but occasionally someone will say they have a great idea and want to write a book. Someday they’ll get around to it.
Or they ask: Where do you get your ideas? They imply it’s some kind of special talent to find those components for a story.
There’s a lot to unpack from those assumptions. First one is that the idea is the most important part of the process. Here’s a hint: it’s not. Ideas are a dime a dozen. I can get four or five good ideas from the morning news. I already have more ideas floating around in my head than I’ll ever be able to use.
The real trick is sorting through those ideas, letting them play out, and seeing how they can develop.
My own theory about the genesis of stories is that they happen when at least a couple of ideas start rubbing up against each other to produce friction and conflict. It usually takes several good ideas to generate a novel’s worth of plot.
The second assumption is that writing even a good short story is easy. It’s not. Developing characters, plot, situation, background, integrating them, and finding the right words to express all those elements takes an enormous amount of mental energy.
Writing demands discipline as well, the determination to put your butt in the chair and keep your hands on the keyboard long enough to create. Even a short story takes many hours of work. I generally spend anywhere from three days to a week creating a first draft of most short stories, and then take at least a few more days of editing.
A novel can take up to a year of work. It’s true that I’m not the speediest of writers, but I take pride in giving the process the time it needs to produce the best possible work.
So… Ideas? They’re the easy part. The work is everything else it takes to create a story. And it’s hard.
Spring? Maybe. Probably not. We’ve all seen the meme about the twelve seasons, which can be applied to most states, but often does seem to describe North Carolina’s crazy weather shifts. 
It’s snowing again. Fourth time in the last two weeks. This one isn’t supposed to amount to anything, just a few flurries. I hope that’s right. We don’t need anymore. Weekend before last we got three inches of mostly sleet, some of which is still on the ground. (Nicely compacted into treacherous sheets of ice!) Sleet was actually a blessing, though. It could’ve been freezing rain and brought down trees and power lines. But sleet bounces off, so we dodged that bullet.
Theo of Golden is a remarkable book with an extraordinary story. Not just the plot of the novel, but the background of the work itself. The author is 70+ years old and this is his first novel. It was initially self-published but generated enough buzz to cause Simon & Schuster to republish it and give it wide distribution. Word of mouth has propelled it to bestseller status. I heard about it on a Facebook group for readers where several members raved about it enough to make me think it might be worth giving it a try. I am forever grateful to those people.
