As an author, someone will inevitably ask you where your ideas come from. My stock answer is the Idea Fairy. I squeeze him until he poops genius all over my hands.

Unfortunately, there is no such critter as the Idea Fairy. That doesn’t, however, change the answer much. Ideas are weird little things. They pop up when they want to, and for the oddest of reasons and at the worst of times. They’ll come to you while you’re sleeping—and of course, you can’t remember them the next morning—or when you’re in traffic, or at work and can’t stop to write them down. They’re rude like that.

There’s good news, though.

Ideas aren’t that big a deal. Seriously. They’re everywhere.

While it’s nice to have a solid idea behind a story, the real magic happens when you sit down to evict that idea from your brain and put it on paper. That’s the part that matters. The execution.

In truth, pretty much any story you can think up will have been written before, in some way, shape, or form. It’s an unfortunate reality to writing. Originality isn’t the act of being original in writing, it’s how a writer morphs an idea and makes it as much her own as possible. That’s originality.

Take an idea and throw it in a room with a hundred different authors and tell them to write a story. What will happen is that you’ll get a hundred different stories. There will, of course, be some comparisons, some similarities, but the overall pieces will each be different because not one of those writers approaches their world the same way; not one approaches life the same way or sees it through the same eyes.

So what I’m telling you here is, don’t stress ideas. They come from everywhere and anywhere, and you’ll be hard pressed to ignore them when they start to flow, trust me.

Oh, I know that seems trite and unhelpful, but ideas really aren’t your problem. Being uncomfortable is.

When I first started writing, I had a few ideas, a few stories I imagined I wanted to tell. They were barely enough to fill a single book, let alone the millions I envisioned myself writing. I struggled through my first book, each chapter kicking me in the butt because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, what I wanted to get across. Despite that, I muddled on. Eventually, I got through that first book, wiped the sweat off my brow and jumped into the next book. And had the same, exact problem.

Why?

It wasn’t really because I lacked ideas. I kind of did, but that was a symptom, not the disease. The disease turned out to be a lack of confidence.

I realized then that all my struggles were connected to my lack of being comfortable while I wrote. I second-guessed every decision, questioned every punctuation mark, every word choice, my formatting, and even the font I was using. There was simply too much going on in my skull for it to focus on ideas. Each sentence was a chore, and my mindset reflected that. I struggled, and my books suffered for it.

It wasn’t until I sat down and made a concentrated effort to learn how to write that I overcame the disease that had kept me stagnant. The ideas found room to take root when I became comfortable with my writing. Once I was no longer focused on the grind of it all and stopped stressing every little comma and colon or em dash, is when those ideas flowered and filled my head.

Now I can’t get rid of the damn things.

To take the plant metaphor further, the garden of my brain is overgrown with the weeds of ideas. (Yeah, that one sucks.) I now have more weeds than I’ll ever be able to pull. And that’s normal.

So, if you’re one of those folks who worries about not having ideas or thinks everything they write is horrible, stop worrying about. Sit down, practice your craft until you’re comfortable putting words on the page, and the ideas will fall into place. Then you’ll realize how little they matter, and that it’s what you do with those ideas that create fantastic worlds that people want to read.

[box type=”bio”] Tim Marquitz is the author of the Demon Squad series, the Blood War Trilogy, co-author of the Dead West series, as well as several standalone books, and numerous anthology appearances including Triumph Over Tragedy, Corrupts Absolutely?, That Hoodoo Voodoo that You Do, Widowmakers, At Hell’s Gates 1&3, Neverland’s Library, Blackguards, SNAFU Survival of the Fittest, Future Warfare, and Hunters (Cohesion Press), In the Shadow of the Towers (Night Shade), and Unbound (Grim Oak Press). Tim also collaborated on Memoirs of a MACHINE, the story of MMA pioneer John Machine Lober.

Tim is co-owner and Editor in Chief of Ragnarok Publications.

Kickstarter Link can be found here [/box]

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Frank “Triggaltheron” Trigg has lived in the shadow of Lucifer his entire life, but now that God and the Devil have abandoned Earth, Frank’s been left to his own devices, which is never a good thing.

The supernatural world’s punching bag, Frank must hold the line between mankind and the paranormal elements bent on staking their claim in the absence of divine rule. Humanity is so screwed.

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