The Idea Man
By Wendy Markham (who also writes as Wendy Corsi Staub)
©2005 Wendy Corsi Staub. All Rights Reserved.
For a bestselling author, one of the more curious—and irksome—occupational hazards is the Idea Man. The Idea Man might be a stranger or he might be a friend of a friend of a friend; he might, indeed, be a woman. This creature can materialize where you least expect him: sharing your table at a family wedding, driving your children’s school bus, mixing your gin and tonic at the local bar. But there are a few places he is almost guaranteed to pop up regularly: in your reader mail, and at your next book signing.
The Idea Man’s purpose is to tell you that he has something you need: a terrific premise for a blockbuster book. Sometimes he wants you to write it with him; sometimes he wants you to write it for him. This misguided soul assumes, of course, that every published author is roaming the planet in search of the elusive Idea.
Not true. Every published author I know is roaming the planet with a brain that is positively teeming with Ideas. Some are mere fragments: perhaps an interesting character, or an odd twist of plot. Others are fully formed tales that are just waiting to be transported onto the computer screen. As a result, the very last thing a bestselling author needs is somebody else’s ideas, thank you very much. He has plenty of his own, and there are millions more where they came from.
Where do they come from? I can’t speak for other authors, buy my own ideas are sometimes sparked by the most innocuous sources. The evening news, People magazine, a Today show segment. A child’s amusing comment, an eavesdropped-upon conversation, a glimpse of a familiar face. I never know when something is going to trigger the ON lever in my brain, the one that sets the creative process humming to life. And sometimes, as a story takes shape, I lose track altogether of the original idea that got the ball rolling.
I do know exactly what sparked the idea for my newest novel, HELLO, IT’S ME. I was watching a Dateline segment that featured dozens of September 11th widows who had been pregnant on that awful day. It was an ultimately uplifting, life-affirming story about preserving a part of their lost husbands in their blessed babies, and I sat in tears through most of it. Then one of the wives said something that struck me. She mentioned that for a long time after her husband died, she called his phone just to hear his voice again on the outgoing message.
What if, I thought instantly, she called his phone repeatedly and one day, he actually answered? What if the power of love and a widow’s need for comfort somehow breached the chasm between this world and the great beyond? What if the spirit’s purpose was to teach his earthbound love how to let go...perhaps even to guide her toward finding companionship again?
That is precisely what happens in HELLO, IT’S ME, my March 2005 release from Warner Forever. Widowed young mom Annie Harlowe can barely keep her household afloat, yet she pays her husband’s cell phone bill every month, just to keep his voice alive. One day she calls...and he answers.
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