How Do Authors Get Ideas?

This is my month for e-book specials. First I got news that Christmas at Harmony Hill  (Amazon link) was on e-book sale for 99 cents or less and then last week I found out that Murder at the Courthouse, (Amazon link) my first Hidden Springs mystery is $1.99 for the e-book version. So you can go out to your favorite e-book site and grab a lot of my words for less than many greeting cards. I did enjoy creating my little town of Hidden Springs and filling it with characters, some of whom reminded me of people I’ve met in my small town. Of course whoever turns out to be the a murderer in the cozy mystery was never like anybody I knew.

Last week Sarah Loudin Thomas, Cindy K. Sproles and I had our Zoom meeting, An Appalachian Christmas, with readers. Some of you said you wouldn’t be able to attend or maybe you forgot about it. I’ve been known to do that with virtual events or meetings I had planned to tune in on. But if you did want to see what we said, there’s a link at the bottom of this post that you can click to hear the book discussion and Christmas time fun too.  Obviously the picture caught me in mid-sentence. Not the best picture, but my Christmas sweater looks festive.

The people who attended got to ask questions for us to answer. Suzanne, who wasn’t able to attend due to her work schedule, had this question for us.  “I’m always curious to know where the ideas come from for an author’s books. Are they family stories applied to fictitious characters, do they just occur to the author as he/she does research, or are they stories the editors have requested?”‘

I’m not sure we covered that in our meeting except to say we were all inspired by the Appalachian area. Both Sarah and Cindy grew up in Appalachian areas. Not Kentucky, but still the mountains. I didn’t grow up in Eastern Kentucky Appalachian Mountains, but I can identify with the people there who feel tied to their land. Sarah’s first stories were inspired by stories her father told her about his life, and Cindy said she loved all the stories she heard about the mountains through the years. I suppose I went out and hunted my Appalachian stories by researching the Frontier Nursing Service and the nurse midwives and for my book coming out in June, Along a Storied Trail, the packhorse librarians.

But I have written a book, Angel Sister, inspired by the stories my mother told me about growing up during the Great Depression. I’ve also modeled my settings in the Hollyhill stories and the Hidden Springs mysteries after the small town I grew up near.

It’s sometimes difficult for me to say exactly where a story idea comes to mind. Many times it is from something I’ve read. That was certainly true with River to Redemption, that was inspired by the heroic actions of a man in Springfield, Kentucky during the 1833 cholera epidemic. I did like bringing Louis to life in that story.

And yes, my story ideas grow as I research a historical era. My Shaker books are examples of that since I found interesting events and ideas as I read Shaker history and explored the Shaker village near me. That is also an example of a time when my editor did ask me to write more books about Shakers after my first Shaker book, The Outsider, was published. I honestly never planned to go back to my fictional Shaker village of Harmony Hill after that first story, but at the request of my editor, I did go hunting more stories in Harmony Hill. I ended up writing eight Shaker books. And remember if you like to e-book read, you can grab one of them, Christmas at Harmony Hill, for less than a dollar right now for a limited time.  That story has some characters I really enjoyed getting to know.

Other times, I’ve suggested ideas to my publishers by submitting what writers term a proposal. That’s a short description of the book I want to write and the characters I want to bring to life. The time period and historical or other background would be in the description. Then my editor and others at the publishing company meet to discuss which books they think might be ones that you, the reader, will enjoy.

While submitting proposals and getting the go ahead from a publisher might be the best way to settle on an idea, many times I have simply struck off on the story road and written a book with the hopes that some editor will love it enough to want to champion it to her or his publishing company. That was so for all my first fourteen or fifteen books, and was true for Scent of Lilacs and Angel Sister. Those books were written with hope in my heart that someday they would come to life in a reader’s mind to complete the circle of promise between a writer and a reader.

So, I suppose all the ways Suzanne suggests have been true for me as I write books. And I am very happy that some of you have invited those stories and characters into your hearts.

Do you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future post? And were you able to listen to our virtual event?

Check back Wednesday, Christmas Eve Eve. I’m going to let you meet one of my favorite characters from my upcoming release, Along a Storied Trail.  I think you’ll like Perdita Sweet as she talks about Christmas for her.