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I don't know about all writers, but I would guess a fair share of us get this question every once in a while (try every single time someone finds out we write):


Where do you get your ideas?


And I would guess we all answer that question differently, because it makes sense to me that the creative process is just a tiny bit different from writer to writer, and maybe (as is the case for me) from project to project. Sometimes the ideas just come to us; sometimes we have to search them out. Sometimes they come to us in bits and pieces, needing a little glue. Others, they just pop up whole.


So I thought it'd be fun to give some insight into how my creative process works. Show you a few techiniques on how I got some story ideas, which is why I'm declaring this week Where Do You Get Your Ideas week. Today is Montana Monday, where I'll show how sometimes one word will kick off an idea for me.


I was leading a workshop for teens a few weeks ago, and in my group of 8th graders, a couple of the girls mentioned another girl by name: Montana.


"Is that your name?" I asked, the class coming to a screeching halt.


She nodded.


"What a beautiful name," I said.


"Thanks," she said, blushing and kind of sinking down into her chair, which was my cue to leave the poor girl alone and move on with teaching the class how to do character sketches.


But before getting back on topic, I quickly blurted out, "I'm totally going to steal your name." And then I moved on.


And I came home and wrote this:


We always thought Montana's parents were too dumb to understand the irony of their daughter's name. Figured they fell in love on a mountain or something and when their bouncing baby girl arrived, it just sounded good to name her after romance. Cute, even. So I figured they named her something big and foreboding out of ignorance.


Everybody knew she was born weeks early, coming fast and determined, all two and a half pounds of her, in the very back acre of the family pumpkin farm where her mom had been filling the back of a tractor with pie pumpkins. Screamed into the world all wrapped up in vines, taking her throne as Queen of Halloween. Or at least that's how I imagined it. I wasn't there. Obviously.


Two and a half pounds. Seemed like at her size, Montana should've been named something smaller and more fragile. Like Lacey or Sprite or Pebbles. But, nope. They gave her a giant of a name.


Montana was no mountain. But she was earthy and dark-eyed. Like someone who should wear corduroys and fibrous sweaters year-round. Like someone who could tell a bird by its song or a tree by its bark or a city girl by the way she squealed when stepping in a cowpie. A girl who ate biscuits with gravy on them instead of salads with dressing on the side. A girl who liked the smell of dirt and the feel of snow on her cheeks. A girl who knew how quiet it gets at night in the country, and who liked it when the silence was occasionally broken by the shrill screams of an animal meeting a predator somewhere out in the fields.


It never occurred to us that her parents were well-aware of the irony of their tiny daughter's name. That they knew, just by looking at her red, screaming baby face, smeared with pumpkin seeds and dirt, that she was going to be a mountain of a girl. A wall of granite. Hard. Dark. Immovable.


But after she did what she did... and after their reaction... it was clear. They knew exactly who Montana was from the day she was born...


It's rough, for sure, but it feels like a beginning to me. Where would the story go from here? Well, it about could go anywhere. She could win an Olympic medal in weightlifting or go on a killing spree. She could lead a campaign for human rights in a foreign country or become the toughest judge in the county.


The important part was getting off the starting block. And all it took was a name that stood out to me in a Saturday morning workshop. This name came with a character attached, and the story will follow her. Sometimes that's all it takes to get a story started: a single word. I just had to be tuned in enough to recognize that word and go with it.


And no matter what I have this poor girl do in the story she'll eventually end up in... I still think her name's beautiful!