Like most authors, occasionally I’m asked that familiar question, “Where do you get your ideas?”

Because I write crime fiction, most often I answer, “My family.” 

I have more than a few relatives who’ve done time. I remember one Thanksgiving when an uncle and two cousins had a lengthy conversation comparing the chow at the various incarceration facilities where they’d had the pleasure of staying.

There we were, all of us eating our holiday turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, listening to these gentlemen compare jailhouse cuisine. That’s a different sort of Yelp review.

Truth be told, idea sources are many and varied. That’s what makes “Where do you get your ideas?” a trick question. A good story is a layer upon layer of ideas, so layered that there could never be a single source for all the ideas that go into a story.

The idea for the plot may come from a news story. An aspect of a character may come from someone glimpsed on the street years ago who for some reason stuck in my mind ever since. That aspect then may get combined with a personality trait of someone close to me. This is how layered characters and stories come about.

As an example, there is no single source for the main plot driving All Debts, Public and Private (ADPP), my next book due out in August. The plot involves the kidnapping and ransom of a young woman who’s grandmother was lucky enough to win the lottery. But the idea that eventually lead me to write ADPP had nothing to do with kidnapping or lotteries.

It was a story an old friend told me in the early 1990s about a crime scene in his small Kansas town that occurred in the 1980s.

There was a violent death in a trailer. Naturally this was big news in the trailer park and throughout the small farming community. Neighbors kept trampling in and out of the trailer to get a look at the body and the crime scene—all with law enforcement’s blessing.

There is a scene in ADPP inspired by this anecdote, of course. But there was something more in that anecdote than a good scene. There was a deeper idea about how law enforcement operates in a small town where everyone knows most everyone else. Or at least thinks they know them.

Eventually the anecdote and the idea it contained lead me to ADPP’s main character, Sheriff Billy Keene, and the conflict between how this young, inexperienced lawman comes to view the people he grew up with—and how they view him as he works to enforce the law.

Of course, that lead me to then having to begin figure out who the character Billy Keene is. Again, multiple sources of inspiration, multiple layers and hopefully, depth of character.

But that’s a line we’ll cross at a later date.

Hope all is well!

-Mr. Chad