David Clayton
Hi, my name is David Clayton and I'm a writer.
"Where do you get your ideas from?"
One of the most frequent questions writers are asked is 'Where do you get your ideas from?' So, here we go. Let's look at one of my books and see where its ideas came from.
I wrote the story 'The Booming Boots of Joey Jones' for the 'Treetops' series by Oxford University Press. It is a realistic story about a boy who tries hard but isn't very good at anything.
When you start a story you often need to answer the questions:
Who? Why? What? Where? When?
to give the story a setting and purpose.First 'Who?'.
Who is the story about? Joey but...
...where did I get 'Joey' from?
At school I played a lot of football with more effort than skill. Thus, one part of Joey is me.
- I had a friend called Harold Hulme. He was a nice lad but the most striking thing about him was his feet. When Harold was eleven he took size ten and a halves and went to school in what looked like miners' boots. People said that he could water-ski on them. So, I made Joey a trier like me but gave him huge feet and 'Booming Boots' like Harold.
- Lastly I had another friend called Chris Kirkham who was a great musician but a terrible footballer. One day, he played for us in tennis shoes and scored three goals in his own net! He was the final part of Joey.
Chapter 1 Joe feels lucky
...like the time he messed things up at the school gala. Tank was a good swimmer and was winning the free-style final. But...Joe just had to go mad and lean over too far just as he trod on his slippery goggles.
Tank wasn't expecting to be dive-bombed. Their meeting only metres from the finish was the highlight of the evening. The kids laughed. The parents laughed. Even the teachers laughed. Tank did not laugh.
Why? What?
What is the story 'about'? What is its purpose?
Every story has some sort of main theme: friendship, courage, struggling for what's right etc.
The 'Big Idea' behind this story is 'effort' - that if you try hard enough for long enough things can work out for you.
I got the 'effort' idea from my own life. When I was fourteen I started running every day in the park near my home. I ran for the school but only had a few races until I was sixteen. I kept on training until one day I got a shock. That day, running against adults, I improved by sixteen seconds in one race over 1500m. That summer I became a junior international without a coach or proper training.
Later I had a football team under-14s who finished bottom but one in the league in their first season. They came into school during the summer holidays and finished second from top in the following year. Like Joey's school we were the smallest school in the area with very few good players.
I thought Joey too could improve if he just kept on practising.
Where? When?
Where and when does the story take place?
The dive bombing scene really happened at a gala I attended but the funniest part was that the headmaster of the school was standing right next to the boy who fell in. The man was wearing a new blue suit and got the full blast of the splash and a free wash.
The football in this story is played on muddy pitches. My school pitch in Stockport was always flooding. We used to look out of the window and pray that it wouldn't rain on games day.
My home was next to Woodbank Park which is full of massive trees and very misty in winter like Joey's park. We used to have games there that lasted all day Sunday. Sometimes there were twenty-a-side!
When you write your stories think about these ideas and see how you can use your life to develop a story-line.