| [BACK]
I'm in the middle of Michael Crichton's newest novel "Prey" and as a fan who has read most of his books I found myself discovering that Mr. Crichton has been writing "what he knows" since his career started more than 30 years ago.
What does he know?
Science. Medicine. Technology. Computer science. In short, everything that only a geeky kid who entered science fairs in high school could love. He makes all that stuff in textbooks easy to understand for people who avoided courses like that in college.
From The Andromeda Strain to Westworld to The Great Train Robbery to Sphere to Juraisic Park to Twister to ER to Timeline, Michael Chrichton has taken his interest in the various sciences and technologies and churned out a body of work that reflects areas that are of interest to him.
I have absolutely no interest in, say, bio-technology and will not spend any time reading up on it for fun or to broaden my horizons. There are plenty of other things I am interested and am knowledgable about and, guess what?, these are the things I've always written about.
I was a fairly active tennis player at one point in my life. So I wrote a play about three guys who play tennis (Check it out. "Men's Singles" published by Dramatists Play Service). I had (and have) an interest in UFOs so I wrote a screenplay about it. What I realized as I read Michael Crichton's new book is that the best stuff I've written over the years had to do with areas I knew a lot about. And I don't mean internal or psychological. I'm talking strictly about areas of interest.
I'm suggesting here that if you're looking for a new idea and can't find anything, make a list of the things you know a lot about or things you're good at. Maybe it's some goofy hobby that your friends kid you about. Maybe it's your job.
Maybe there's only one thing you "know" about. I mean really know about it.
And maybe, just maybe, there's a story in there. |
