John Nicholson's News, Blogs, Articles and Short Stories

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Where Do Stories Come From?

The question I’m most asked in life, is “do you really play all those records?” I’ve got nearly 5,000 vinyl albums, so no, obviously I don’t. That’s not the point. Having the potential to play them is where the pleasure lies, along with just knowing they’re there.

But after that, the question I’m most asked is “where do you get your stories from?”

It’s an understandable question and it is the thing that seems to amaze the non-book writing public the most. But as I’ve said before, stories are everywhere, you just have to keep your eyes and ears open. We live in an era where every day you can hear a story that is 100% true but completely beggars belief.

But actually, the question of where stories come from touches on a far more metaphysical, far out thing: the imagination.

What is imagination? Where does it come from and how come some people have got a vivid one and others almost none at all? I think you must be born with it because my whole life has been spent half in a dream world of my own making. As a boy I’d make up huge stories around my Action Man dolls. Adventures which would last for days and have many different scenarios played out all over the house. Then I’d play Subbuteo cricket and make up literally a whole season’s fixtures, creating an alternate reality and keep all the stats as though it was real. I would also compile albums of songs from real albums and retool them to make a new album by my own band, designing the cover and everything. I’d write out tour dates. I even went as far as making up elaborate stories about my school life and spinning them to my parents as though they were real. The world I could make up seemed far more preferable to the one I was living in.

I never had to try to invent all these things, they just presented themselves to me. It was literally no effort. And even now, the stories I write do the exact same thing. For no reason at all, suddenly I can see my characters doing something with someone, and I’m off down a new rabbit hole to who knows where. Reality seems narrow, but stories can take you anywhere.

As I’m now in my mid-50s what I regret most is not spotting that I was a storyteller all along and not having made it my living sooner in life. It seems so obvious now that it is the only thing I’m any good at. Too many of us who are not brought up in a liberal middle-class arts environment think writing books is for people who are not like us. We sometimes lack confidence in our own ability and feel we’re intruding on a world we don’t belong in.  We need to get over that blockage because I often meet people with great imagination, who can go on a flight of fancy off the top of their head. People, who like me, look at an attic window in a Victorian house and wonder what happened in there on a snowy Christmas Day in 1926? Who wonder why is there a locked trunk that no-one has the key to. And why is a message written in Latin above the door? That’s just 10 seconds of thought and already a story is growing and developing.

So when people ask me where I get my stories from I always just point to my head and that’s why my publishing company is called Head Publishing. I publish what is in my head. But where that comes from...well...who knows?

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