I think any writer, published or unpublished, gets asked this at least once a week. To people who don’t write it’s the irresistible question…well, that and “why do you do this to yourself?”

Maybe that’s just me.

The truth for most of us is that we don’t know where we get our ideas, and we scramble for a answer that sounds good enough to make the asker go away. We then spend the rest of the day wondering “where do I get my ideas?”

Just a few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me a slightly different question, she didn’t care where I got my ideas from, she wanted to know what it felt like when an idea popped into my head. I gave her the only answer I had:

It’s like being mugged.

I can be walking around minding my own business and an idea will creep up on me and smack me over the head. I usually have about a minute to write it down before something else grabs my attention and its lost forever, but during that minute the idea holds my full attention. So far I’ve been lucky and haven’t had a book idea while defusing a bomb, but I figure it’s only a matter of time.

It’s actually a far better question than “where do you get your ideas?” because no matter where my ideas come from, its not going to be the same for anyone else, because my life experiences are different. Finding out how an idea feels means that you can imagine that feeling in your own mind and see if that helps you find your own ideas for a book*.

What does it feel like when you get an idea? Do it creep up on you with a cosh, or does it knock politely?

* This is a technique called modeling that I picked up from NLP