Today’s guest author, Lisa Kleypas, gives us a peek into her process…

Dear Friends,

By far the most common question people ask writers is “how do you get your ideas?” and no, I never get tired of answering because if you give a REAL answer, it is a fascinating and always-changing subject. I love hearing what other writers say when they’re asked this question, but only if they give a real answer.

I’ll get to real answers in a second, but here are a few faux answers:

“Author X, how do you get your ideas?”

A. Why would I tell you, when you might copy me?

B. Oh, here and there.

C. I don’t know, the voices speak to me.

D. The idea store on 12th street.

Sometimes the words “what if” are enough to get a good idea going, i.e. “What if she thought her first husband was dead but he really wasn’t?” or “What if he meets her sister just before the wedding and falls in love with her?”

But before you even get that, I really think it helps if you’ve had some experiences that have made you an interesting person. Happy, shallow people are not interesting. The rest of us, who have loved, lost, experienced pain, survived bad childhoods, have bad credit scores, done things we knew were bad for us, better yet had fun doing things we knew were bad for us, and best of all lived to regret having fun doing things we knew were bad for us . . . now that makes you interesting.

And I think it gives you ideas.

So, armed with life experience and a decent imagination, I start with one character. Could be the hero, could be the heroine. Maybe I want to write about a tortured guy. How did he get to be so tortured? That’s when I start playing around with choices about his background, his goals, his strengths and weaknesses . . . and then of course I pair him with the heroine who is obviously perfect for him, right? No, no. The most fun is to pair him with the heroine who seems to be the polar opposite of what he needs or wants . . . and making it work.

Once I’ve got the set-up of these two mismatched characters, I go around collecting ideas rather like trying to catch butterflies with a net.(In case you think that’s easy, remember that I am short and I don’t leap well.)

Here was the process with Mine Till Midnight: I had the set-up of a sexy Gypsy with a tattoo and diamond earring, Cam Rohan, paired with Amelia Hathaway, the spinsterish oldest sister of a family of misfits. I didn’t want these two to meet in a ballroom. Bo-ring. So I had Amelia scouring through London taverns and brothels to find her wastrel brother, and of course Cam works at the first gaming club she visits.

The next time they meet, Amelia is out walking in a peaceful country field, and she nearly gets hit by a flying rocket (the result of Victorian amateur rocketry experiments, which actually did happen). The way I got this idea was from watching a MythBusters show with my eleven year-old son, about the history of rocketry.

The time after that, Cam is around when Amelia discovers a monstrously huge bee hive in the wall of her new home. The way I got this idea was from my mother-and-father-in-law, who saw honey dripping down from their ceiling one day and discovered a big scary hive in their roof.

So I guess I’m trying to say that ideas are everywhere, but you have to be ready for them with the right characters and the set-up, and you have to know when NOT to use a certain idea, no matter how much you love it.

One of the reasons I have so much fun writing historical romances is that I’ve kept my mind open to the possibilities of things happening beyond the ballroom and the parlor. There are lots of great ideas that, as far as I can tell, no one has touched yet. In-depth historical research is a great source of ideas. Personal experience is good, hearsay experiences from friends are pretty good too. And sometimes a love song on the radio can inspire a whole novel, or at the very least a smokin-hot love scene!

What are some of the great ideas, characters or set-ups you’ve encountered in romance novels? How ‘bout that Laura Kinsale? Ever read that Eloisa James novel in which the hero, the duke, is a “five-minute-wonder?”