For a writer, the true question isn’t “Where do you get your ideas?,” but instead, “How do you decide which of the many hundreds of ideas you get is worth pursuing?” If the subconscious is a garden, the issue for me has never been one of fertilizing, but rather of pruning.

For example, when I learned that Jacques Futrelle, the author of the “Thinking Machine” stories I’d loved as a kid (such as the classic “The Problem of Cell 13”), died aboard the Titanic, a story idea immediately came to me. What if Futrelle himself had a detecting adventure onboard similar to those of his creation Prof. Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, and died trying to save the doomed ship? Perhaps the only reason there had been any survivors at all was because of something he did, and he sacrificed his life on behalf of those who made it out alive. I’m sure there’s an intriguing story to be built of that, but other ideas attracted me more, so it will be up to someone else to write.

Then there was the time I learned that Charles Dickens, who’d died before completing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, had once offered to tell Queen Victoria how the series was to end, so she wouldn’t have to live in suspense like a commoner. The incident could very well be apocryphal, and besides, she supposedly refused anyway. But what if she hadn’t rejected Dickens’ gift? When if Queen Victoria was the only person in the world who truly knew how the novel was to end, but kept it to herself? After all, that secret would be one of her most valuable possessions. I once thought of writing the last chapter of Drood as told by Queen Victoria, but soon decided that, too, was a tale best left to someone else.

Well, inspiration just happened again. I was skimming The Portable Obituary, an encyclopedia of celebrity deaths written by Michael Largo, who’d won a Stoker Award for his previous non-fiction book. In it, he shares the fact (which might be widely known, but was new to me) that novelist Albert Camus, author of The Stranger, apparently died in a car crash while carrying in his pocket an unused train ticket to the same destination to which he’d been driving, as if he’d changed his mind at the last minute. I’m sure there’s a story to be mined out of this nugget of information as well, either an existential tale of how Camus had come to change his mind, or an alternate history detailing what that train trip would have been like.

In any event, this recent fact, like those two earlier occurrences, will not be written by me. (Who knows? Perhaps they’ve even already been written by others, and I’m unaware of it.) I have hundreds of other ideas I find far more intriguing. So I offer these to the blogosphere to be fleshed out by anyone who wants them.