“Where do y
ou get your ideas?” This is a question I often hear from children, along with “How old are you?” and “How much money do you make?” I like to tell them that ideas are everywhere. “You just have to keep your eyes open, your ears open and your mind open.”
I’m just back from almost two months in Southeast Asia, with visits to four international schools (private schools with instruction conducted in English) in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, along with a teacher conference in the exotically named city of Kota Kinabalu on the island of Borneo. I had many eye-, ear- and mind-opening experiences during my time in Asia, and I’ve been thinking about books that might come out of them.
The experiences alone would not be sufficient to create a book. I think it is a commonly held misconception that to write a non-fiction book you can simply do/see/hear/experience something interesting, write it up, and send it in. Books should be that easy! In reality, the experience alone provides just the rawest of raw materials for a book. It must then be augmented by a great deal of thinking to define an approach, followed by copious research before beginning to write. I haven’tgone beyond the first of those preliminary steps, but perhaps it would be interesting to lay out the raw materials from two of my experiences (one now and another in a future post). If either book ever gets written, you will be able to say, “I knew it when.”
When I was in college, I met an entomologist who was the world authority on fireflies and their flashing behavior. [Read more…]
