where do book ideas come from?
Hi friends—
August has been a little slow, news-wise, so I thought I'd try to answer a question I've been asked a lot: where do you get your ideas?
The short answer is inspiration can come from anywhere. I've gotten the most mileage out of long-form narrative journalism, podcasts, and nonfiction books. Let me run through the specifics of how I came up with both book ideas.
For Rose Gold, it started with me learning about Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP). One of my closest friends is a school psychologist, and she introduced the illness to me—she's run into milder forms of it with a couple of her students. The more research I did on MSBP, the more fascinated I became.
For one, the perpetrators of MSBP are usually mothers, interesting in itself as women commit far fewer violent crimes than men. Plus, a mother is typically thought to be the most protective, supportive person in a child's life. MSBP turns that notion on its head. Secondly, I find the motivation behind MSBP both intriguing and heartbreaking. Perpetrators act out of a need for attention or love from authority figures within the medical community. People with MSBP almost always have their own childhood history of abuse and/or neglect. There's another strain of this disorder known as malingering, which is faking an illness for material benefit (money, drugs, dodging the law, avoiding court appearances, etc.) To me, these motivations are far less interesting, perhaps because they're more ordinary. Getting inside the head of a character willing to hurt someone for money wouldn't be that unusual. But trying to portray a person willing to hurt their own child so they could win love from a doctor? That felt like a meaty challenge.
My only real requirement for a novel idea is that it has to be something that obsesses me, a topic I would happily spend months diving into. After deciding I wanted to write my book from the point of view of a mother with MSBP, I began researching. The three most helpful texts were: 1- Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood by Julie Gregory; 2- Michelle Dean's deep dive into the story of Dee Dee and Gypsy Blancharde on Buzzfeed, and 3- a medical manual called Playing Sick?: Untangling the Web of Munchausen Syndrome, Munchausen by Proxy, Malingering, and Factitious Disorder by Marc Feldman.
For my second book, I jotted down all the things that had been captivating me, or—in the case of the Minotaur maze scene from Dexter—terrifying me. (I watched that episode 7 or 8 years ago. To this day, it is easily the most scared I have ever been in my entire life. You can google the clip. I will not traumatize you by linking here.)
Incorporating all of these things into one book would have been insane, but I did end up using a few of them in book 2.
More specifically, I was listening to a podcast called Stuff They Don't Want You to Know, a show that "delves into the murky world of everything from cults to lost cosmonauts and allegations of the paranormal, applying critical thinking to the world's most prevalent conspiracy theories and, more often than not, discovering the disturbing grains of truth hidden in the heart of paranoia." The hosts are silly and don't take their tin foil hat theories too seriously. The particular episode I was listening to is called The Kennedy Curse, which, by the way, is a gripping story. You should listen if you're unfamiliar.
During the episode, the hosts mentioned Derren Brown, who is an English mentalist and illusionist. I think he's pretty well known in the UK, but I had never heard of him. I watched his Netflix special called Miracle, where he openly tells audiences that what he's doing isn't real—yet a lot of them believe he has the power to cure their ailments and read their minds. He'd also written a book that pooh poohed neurolinguistic programming—another concept that intrigues me—so I bought and read it. For me, much of this part of the process is just following my interests and waiting to see where I end up.
A character began to form in my mind: a charismatic and uber-successful mentalist who is famous enough to go by one name only, like Oprah or Beyoncé. Her name is Rebecca, and she decides to retire from show biz, buy an island in Maine, and start her own wellness center. There she creates a community called Wisewood that functions the way *she* thinks society should—no phones, no Internet, no contact with outside friends or family—and uses whatever techniques she deems necessary to help her guests reach their Maximized Selves. Eventually, the other main characters began to take form too. They're two sisters: Kit, a member of Wisewood, and her older sister, Natalie, who leads a normal life in Boston. The novel begins with Kit telling Natalie that she's decided to stay at Wisewood indefinitely. The story unfurls from there.
Although I still have a ton of work to do on book 2, I've begun casually searching again for future book ideas. The idea, research, and plotting phases take me a considerable amount of time—for example, I listened to the Kennedy Curse episode in August 2018 and didn't start writing book 2 in earnest until mid-May of this year. I don't put pen to paper until I've finished the aforementioned phases, so it's nice to start a slow drip of ideas long before I need to execute anything.
Here are some of my favorite sources for ideas:
Articles
The Cut by New York Magazine - I beg you to bookmark this story, which I read several months ago and haven't stopped thinking about since. I couldn't figure out a fresh angle that excited me, but apparently Netflix is on it.
Longreads, although I've found it to be more 'miss' than 'hit' lately
Podcasts
Limited series, like The Dropout and Dr. Death
Books (in my current TBR pile)
Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders
American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit (the Netflix adaptation is SO GOOD, please tell me you're watching it)
Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck
If I could still distill my advice for finding a book idea into one sentence: cast a wide net, then wait for the topic that haunts you.
This turned into a longer letter than I was expecting, but hopefully it was interesting. At the very least, you have some new newsletters, podcasts, and books to check out! And if you have any recommendations for me, I'm always looking for new sources.
September will bring a number of book-related events and activities, so I should have more news to share next time.
Friendly reminder—here are the US retailers where you can pre-order my book 🙃
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books A Million | Apple Books
IndieBound | Kobo | Google Play
And UK retailers (more to be added soon!) Amazon
7 months until publication!