A friend recently asked, "Where do you get your ideas from?" I'm hardly in a position to offer advice. I hopelessly litter my writing with all manner of useless metaphors and wannabe-clever literary constructs. This paragraph would be a good example.

On my table right now is Rules of Thumb by Michael Martone and Susan Neville, a random book I picked up from the Writing/Publishing shelf. It has an entry about the "busy attributive," of which I am frequently guilty.

"You look great tonight," cooed the skinny, hairless Dave, while Lucy, who was busy straightening the seam of her stocking, brushed against the man she hoped to seduce, the hirsute and virile Ryan.

The attributive clause (otherwise known as that thing that comes after the quotation marks) is not a place where writers should feel free to dump plot information, character sketches, or authorial asides. It has only one basic job: to help convey how a particular piece of dialogue has been spoken.

And even this role, by the way, is limited. Because a good piece of dialogue should—by virtue of word choice, rhythm, and syntax—convey tone.

That's a direct quote from Steve Almond's entry The Busy Attributive: A Case for Said. If you look back at my previous attempts at writing, they are crowded with busy attributives. Damn.

The definitive book for aspiring writers, in my humble opinion, is William Zinsser's On Writing Well. That has shaped by writing more than any class or workshop I've taken.

It's about the craft of writing. It's written for anyone who has to write, whether it is a blog entry, a magazine article, a term paper, a grant proposal, a legal document, a technical document, or marketing copy. Here's one of my favorite entries:

…the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.

I don't always review my pieces before I publish them. That's my unforgivable error and marks me as a novice. But when I can, I swing my cleaver and cut whatever fat I can. The result is always a better piece.

Thus, I'm hardly one to offer advice. However, I'm not beyond taking a stab at an answer. So where do I get my ideas from?

Books. I sometimes comb through books I've randomly picked from the shelves. Opening to a random page, I'll sometimes find a paragraph that intrigues me. Then I'll write about it.

People. That's an easy one. I'll sit someplace that's good for people-watching. Then I watch. Sometimes a friend and I will do some "Creative Gossiping," where we'll pick on random people and weave a scandalous story about their lives. Then I'll write about it.

Life. Sometimes I'll leaf through the journal in my brain for a story. The good ones are succinct and memorable. Most of the time, they're stories I've already told dozens of times. I'll filter them through a "Is this too personal?" filter and choose one that makes sense. Then I'll write about it.

Writing prompts. I am subscribed to a couple of mailing lists that send me weekly writing prompts. These are random topics or sentences meant to jumpstart a writer's mind. I also keep a long list of ideas that I've accumulated over time. Whenever I need a topic, I go through that list and pick one. Then I'll write about it.

I rarely know how my stories will end. That's probably obvious, given the varied quality of my endings. I prefer to focus on the beginnings and let the endings work themselves out. But that's another reason why I'm still a novice.

Not knowing an ending is fun. When I begin a piece, it's literally an adventure. I let my mind wander. Like a stream of consciousness. I "hear" the words in my head and have a conversation with myself. (Maybe that means I'm crazy.) (No, I'm not.) (Who said that?)

Some stories take on a momentum of their own. I can't stop typing as soon as I start. To break me away would be like forcing me to stop in mid-piss; I technically could do it, but it would hurt and I sure wouldn't be happy until I got it all out.

Sometimes I arrive at the ending and it's a happy surprise, similar to Bob Ross's happy trees and happy accidents. It doesn't take much to delight me. Other times, I'll mull over the ending for hours and finally give up, saving the piece for a later time. I have dozens of unfinished pieces on my laptop.

Once I'm done, and perhaps after a few reviews (if I'm lucky), I'll eagerly publish the piece. Days later, I'll rereading, then revise it. Dumb, huh?

Another Rules of Thumb entry by Jiro Adachi, Writing That Sings, offers this advice:

Here me now or regret it later: Everything you write should be read aloud. … As a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, I can tell you on good authority that you have been listening to the English language at least five or six years longer than you have been writing and reading. And, most probably, your ears also had eighteen or more years of familiarity with the language before you began to read or write with a writer's sensibilities. For these reasons, your ears know when things sound okay, good, beautiful, strange, awkward, or just plain bad, before your eye can pick up on such things. By reading your work aloud, you are using a most valuable editing sense: your hearing.

That makes a lot of sense. And damn, that's another thing I don't do. What a novice.

. . .

Do you like to write?