How Authors Come Up with New Ideas

I get asked how authors come up with new ideas so often I thought I'd let you in on an inside secret. We don't.

Inspiration is everywhere, in the last Star Wars comics we read, something funny our nephew referenced, or a classic SciFi film. We take these ideas of inspiration and use them. At times melding them with another idea or two in a Frankenstein's monster kind of way, but still, the initial idea already existed.

I'm a firm believer that no new idea is yet to be found. It's already been done. Instead, it's our job as storytellers to take eighty percent of what someone already knows and loves and then change it that last bit to try to put a new twist on the idea.

After all, isn't Fast and Furious just Point Break with cars? I could list a dozen revenge movies that are all the same. And superhero films, yeah, mostly the same origin stories; orphans, long-lost heritage, super smart and rich, etc.