Where do you get your ideas? It’s the question writers hear more than any other. So often, in fact, that it’s become kind of an inside joke—an eye-roll inducing cliché when writers talk amongst themselves. But here’s the thing: I completely get why readers ask it.

Getting ideas seems mythical—especially when you’re just starting out. I remember when I first knew I wanted to be a writer and I patiently waited (for years) for a fabulous, high-concept idea to fall from the sky. It didn’t help that I often read interviews with writers who talked about ideas for novels popping into their heads fully formed on their daily commute. Or having a dream with all the story elements in neatly in place and then hurrying to the computer the next morning to let the story pour effortlessly from their fingertips.

As soon as that happens to me, I told myself, I’ll get busy and begin my writing career. It took me a long time to realize that those magical-sounding stories were one in a million and that like most things in life, the rest of us have to work at it.

But how do you work at generating ideas? Ah, for that there is a secret sauce. Or rather, a magic question. What if?

If ideas were puppies, this simple question would be the bit of bacon in your pocket that had them sniffing at your fingers and ultimately following you home. Once you know how to use what if to your advantage, you’ll find that ideas are all around you.

Have you ever gotten a new car—especially a car in a color or model that you think is fairly unique—and then you drive it off the lot and suddenly that same car is everywhere?

It’s not that dozens of other people think you’re a trend-setter and followed you to the dealership to copy you. It’s that the cars were there all along, but now you’re tuned in and good at spotting them.

The human hand can detect a difference of 2oC, whereas the Thermal Imaging viagra samples for sale camera used in Veterinary Thermal Imaging is 40 times more sensitive. Nobody has sufficient time to examine deeprootsmag.org viagra prescription these thoughts. These commonly used herbal medicines include Damiana, Sarsaparilla, Ginseng, Gotu deeprootsmag.org order cialis online Kola and Saw Palmetto. References are provided and are linked to the cause of onset as well as severity of the patient, the hepatic condition, non-hepatic condition of the patient, substance abuse problem if any, and psychological stability is taken into consideration by the committee. 4.Surgery A liver or portion of a liver transplant is decided by the doctor is generic sale viagra not required and this is a tension free task that saves time and. Ideas are like that. So here’s how to tune-in to the ideas that are floating all around just waiting to be discovered. When you hear something interesting in a news story, in a conversation, in a documentary, even in another book, let yourself daydream about it. What if things had turned out differently? What if things aren’t what they seem? What if there’s more to the story? When a writer’s mind wanders, they see it as an opportunity instead of a distraction.

Children are great at doing this before we teach them that they have to stop. One night at the dinner table, one of my sons was complaining that he had been having hard time falling asleep lately. My then seven-year-old daughter turned to him and said, “Just tell yourself a story about your day.”

His response was something really refined, like, “Huh?”

“You just start with something that really happened and then change it,” she explained. “Like the other day a boy at school was chasing me and later that night I wondered what would have happened if he’d caught me? And then what if he’d put me in a golden cage high in the treetop like a bird? But why would he want to keep me locked away? Is it because I have some special power that makes me dangerous? Is he afraid of me?”

She went on like this for ten minutes or so and her brother just stared at her with his mouth hanging open. She has the makings of a great writer. If there were a secret formula for ideas, it would look something like this: Daydreaming + (350) questions=Book idea.  Although for the record, math was never my forte, so take that formula with a grain of salt. And also note that books can’t have just one idea—you need a lot of great ideas to build a compelling plot. Some of the best plots come from two or more seemingly unrelated ideas colliding in a unique way.

Ideas are the easiest part of being a writer. You just have to train yourself to notice them and then follow them around, peppering them with questions until a whole world has sprung up from your imagination.

And then comes the hard part. You actually have a write the book.

For the past thirty days, I’ve been furiously writing along with hundreds of thousands of other writers as I attempted to reach my NaNoWriMo goals. For those not familiar with this crazy acronym, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It happens each November and the rules, though not easy, are simple: Write a novel (or at least 50,000 words of one) between November 1^st and November 30^th. If that sounds insane to you, you aren’t alone. I’ve written two novels so far and both of them took me considerably longer than a month to draft.

When I first heard about NaNoWriMo, I was sure it wasn’t for me. Fast, messy drafts aren’t my style and trying to write that way makes me miserable. Crafting the perfect sentence (or what seems perfect at the time—I’m not naïve enough to believe that revision won’t always be necessary) is part of the fun of writing for me and so having a crazy month where the goal is quantity over quality seemed like a recipe for disaster.

But during the previous few months, I’d been in a bit of a writing funk and I decided it couldn’t hurt to give NaNoWriMo a try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? So I jumped in with both feet and though I didn’t “win” by making it to the finish line of 50,000 words, I wrote more last month than I’ve ever written in thirty day period before and I learned a lot about my writing process along the way. So win or lose, I’m counting it as a huge success.  Here are some of the things I learned this month:

• I am still a careful drafter

  Even with a huge word count goal and a ticking clock, I was still making judicious use of my backspace key and staring into space a lot searching for the perfect word or image. While some of my friends were posting status updates on Twitter with things like: “Yippee! 6500 words today” I was feeling really accomplished if I ever broke 2000. But I still increased my word count in amazing ways–I had a few days of 3000-4000 words and that is an enormous improvement for me.  I’m not sure my status as a slow drafter will ever change, but that’s okay because another thing I learned is…

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• Momentum is huge

  Because I knew I needed to make every moment at the keyboard count, I spent a lot more time daydreaming about the story even when I wasn’t writing. I was completely immersed, thinking about the world and the characters almost constantly. So even though (by some standards) I wasn’t writing enormous piles of words every day, I was figuring out plot points and character arcs during most waking hours and that really moved the story forward. I spent far less time during writing time asking myself “what comes next?” My subconcious had already done all of the heavy-lifting on that question.  For me, that was the biggest take-away from NaNo—allowing myself to be swept up by the story and not lose momentum.

• Writing is more fun with a crowd

  The social support NaNoWriMo offers is invaluable. Writing can be such a solitary pursuit and feeling like I was part of something bigger, like I had all of these friends to cheer me on (even though I’ve never met them in real life) was really fun. On days when I was feeling tired, or stuck, or uninspired, it was helpful to know that thousands of other writers were feeling some of the same things and pushing forward anyway. If one of us can do it, all of us can do it.

So would I do NaNoWriMo again? Absolutely. Next year, I might even win.