Where Ideas Really Come From

Recently, people have been asking me, “Where do you get your ideas from?” As it happens, my current book has an impeccable pedigree. Future works, however, may not be as explicable.

At the end of an incredibly dull day last week, I decided to perk up my evening by checking out a free music concert down by the lake with a friend. We had no clue who was playing, but after the day I’d had, the local seniors’ kazoo band would have been an improvement. Shouldering our camp chairs, we made our way to the park, where it became apparent, from the number of cowboy hats dotting the audience, that we were in for a country and western evening.

I’m not a big fan of C&W. The music is energetic and pleasing in a predictable way, but the whiney, adenoidal delivery of the pity-party lyrics drives me crazy. A good C&W performer can make a love song sound like a last minute plea from death row. Still, given that the alternative would be sitting at home feeling sorry for myself, I was willing to be entertained by someone else’s pain. We set up our chairs on the weedless grass at the edge of the park.

(Surrealistically weedless - like none. This is utterly amazing, because two years ago, the province passed a law banning the sale and use of pesticides and herbicides. Since then, despite backbreaking hours of hand-pulling dandelions, plantain, thistles and vetch, my lawn and every other privately owned lawn in this town now looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland while government-owned property remains a lush monoculture of pristine blades. Is City Hall smuggling in bootleg weed killer from south of the border? If so, this would explain the shocking hike in my property tax bill.)

The headliner, Jason McCoy, stepped onto the stage. The crowd, which now filled the park and spilled out onto the streets around it, went wild. I was too far away to see what he looked liked – heck, I’d have had to be sitting on the stage to do that - but I googled him later and he’s firmly in the cowboy hunk category.  His first few songs were the standard busted-truck, dead-dog offerings delivered with an appropriate nasal twang. Then he launched into a song about never arguing with his wife in the interests of getting laid on a regular basis. The melody and chord structures were standard, but the lyrics were funny, and one line in particular struck me as unusually clever:

 “It’s a mighty fragile ego system.”

I immediately began plotting out a novel about an image obsessed couple who adopt a Chinese baby because it’s fashionable and the child turns out to be disabled in some obvious and unglamorous way. The instant I got home, I sat down at the laptop and looked up “fragile ego system” to see if my brilliant idea had already been commandeered.

I found a surprising number of articles, comments and blogs written by people apparently unaware that “eco” and “ego” are different words. (Okay, one of them is just a prefix. Even funnier, don’t you think?) The best was a set of council meeting minutes from a California town considering a new development. In addition to the ego/eco confusion, one woman “felt that annexations are inedible” and she “doesn’t want to see her rates go up farther [sic] and have water shortage and conservation because then have [sic] existing water is being adverted to the other side of the bridge.” I decided malapropism would make an excellent characteristic for my socially sensitive protagonists.

(For those of you who don’t have my twisted writer’s sense of humor, advert, when used as a verb, means to call attention to in speech or in writing. Picture a tour guide standing on bridge saying, “And if you will direct your attention to the other side of the bridge, ladies and gentlemen, you will see even more water.”)

Rock climbers in Virginia have named a difficult climb Fragile Ego System, which is, hilariously, located on Gonad Wall.  Hollywood and Brooklyn appear to be hotbeds of fragile ego systems, (Brooklyn? Really?) and it’s a fairly common derisive accusation flung about in forum bun-fights. The phrase is not, however, in the lyrics of any song. The actual line, that I finally found on a C&W website, goes like this:

“It’s a mighty fragile ecosystem.”

Before I write my novel about the disabled Chinese baby with malapropic parents, I’ll have to make up a story for when I’m asked where the idea came from. The truth makes no sense at all.