Where do you get your ideas from?

Ever since I started taking writing serious people who know me invariable asked that age old question: Where do you get your ideas from?

And every time they ask, for the briefest of moments I consider giving them the Harlan Ellison answer.

Or the Iain Banks answer.

That there’s an idea service/little old lady who if you send them £20 each week they give you a six pack of story ideas every Monday morning without fail.

Want that address?

But seriously I get my ideas from everywhere. I can walk into a book store or a comic store and merely look at the covers of books and get ideas for stories. But mostly I get ideas for stories from three places:

The news.

Bad movies.

Life.

Because nothing inspires you more than life. And if life does inspire you to create anything then mate, noone can help you.


Also, READ everything you can lay your hands on. I expose myself to as much written work as possible. Be open minded. Inform yourself. Be proactive active in your learning.


Wake up and pay attention


Pay attention


Pay attention


Pay attention


Next post, I’ll talk about the genesis of my desire to be creative and what fired my imagination and how I owe a knight of the British Empire, a journalist from Tacoma and designer from Toyama a huge debt of gratitude.

Also I'll start to catalogue the battle I know I'm going to have with my lecturers when I hand in my proposal for this novel.


TTFN

The Book Proposal

Final Major Project: Proposal and Synopsis
By Joseph Elliott-Coleman (Trading as J.E.Cole)

In this document, I will,

1. Describe the form my final major project will take
2. The story I intend to write.
3. Offer a brief explanation of the reason d’être.

1:The proposal

It is my intention to create and produce and illustrated prose book that will be approximately 120 pages in length. The book will feature written prose, around a minimum of 7 full page images and a maximum of 20 full page images in total. Including the cover and frontispiece and the book plate there will be a minimum of 9 images. It will be produced and uploaded to the print on demand publisher lulu and be professionally printed and bound in a paperback landscape format (9” x 7”).

2:The story

The story asks the following questions as its premise.

Do you believe in magic? Do you believe in the supernatural? The late Sir Arthur C Clarke tells us that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Is this true? Have we become come so dependant on science and technology for our answers that we have lost our ability to appreciate and comprehend and supernatural? Is the universe is now merely a mystery to be unravelled and explained and not a thing to be held in wonder?

Whatever happened to myths and legends? Whatever happened to folklore? Have they stopped being relevant? Or are they only warnings from a simpler time when the supernatural was so much closer and near at hand?

What if that which we had long thought of as mere folktale and legend actually existed and lived side by side with us? Today. In this country and every country? What if we walked side by side with the myths and legends and we couldn’t perceive them? What if there were people who fought tirelessly in the shadows to protect us from threats that we could neither perceive nor understand. What if gods and goddess still conspired against each other? Though not in the hallowed chambers of their mountain hideaways palaces but here, in the council estates of Hackney, Dagenham and the neighbourhoods of Golders green? What if all the legends, myths and folklore actually have some basis in reality? What if vampires and werewolves walked the earth but everything that we knew about them was grossly inaccurate?

What would happen if this all suddenly started to change? What if the walls of perception started to weaken and we slowly started to become aware of the magic and supernatural around us? How would our world change if we knew that God actually existed?


3:The reason d’être

My reason for setting myself this brief is two fold.

Firstly, I wish to create work in the spirit and with the same values as the great illustrators of yesterday. I want my work to encapsulate that same draftsmanship accuracy and bravura as the pen and ink masters of the turn of the 20th century. E. H Shepard, Joseph Clement Coll, Charles Dana Gibson, Alfons Mucha and Arthur Rackham to name a few. Although this is a high bar I’ve for myself I believe that you should always aim to create work that stands toe-to-toe with those whom inspire you.

Secondly I want to create material that inspires the reader in the same way that I was inspired to be a storyteller when I was a child. I find that too often people aim to create work that is merely acceptable and rarely attempt to create work that fantastical.

This is my reason for creating this project. It is my hope that you will assist me in creating the images that convey the sensibility that I am attempting to encapsulate. It is my hope that you will help me create images that are fantastical and not merely acceptable.


-J.E.Cole

Boo!

Hello and welcome. This blog will serve as a diary of sorts cataloging the creation of my first and subsequent novels from idea to plot to concept to script stage.
You also see how i go about creating the illstrations for the said novels from the thumbnails to finished illustrations.

I'm hoping to add few youtube uploads here as well.

Here's to success and fulfillment.

See you very soon.