{"id":23,"date":"2006-09-14T08:45:41","date_gmt":"2006-09-14T12:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/?p=23"},"modified":"2008-07-24T17:43:20","modified_gmt":"2008-07-24T21:43:20","slug":"where-do-you-get-your-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/?p=23","title":{"rendered":"Where do you get your ideas?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The number one question I get is “Where do you get your ideas?” or “Where did you get the idea for [name of novel]?” I get ideas all the time, but most of them don’t stick around long enough to bother with. Those who loiter are put to work doing a character, a scene, a bit of dialogue. Those who won’t go away usually mate with some other loiterer and turn into a novel. Wilderness<\/em>, my first published novel (about the fourth one I finished) was born out of my interest in medieval romance, particularly Marie de France’s sympathetic werewolf in Bisclavret, <\/em>the old Lon Chaney Jr. movies, and wolves. The spark was a dinner discussion with housemate philosophers Lenore Langsdorf and Laurent Godbout among others about the nature of humans, whether we’re animals or something essentially different. I was in the animal camp, and I talked a lot about the werewolf. The next morning I started writing the novel. My goal was to have a real woman turn into a real wolf. Researching the novel I went to Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario during black fly season. What does a Texas boy know about black flies? I had the place to myself and heard the wolves howling at night, but I never saw one, though I wrote the first draft of the wolf encounter scene in the park on site, swatting black flies the whole time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The number one question I get is “Where do you get your ideas?” or “Where did you get the idea for [name of novel]?” I get ideas all the time, but most of them don’t stick around long enough to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faq"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}