"Where do you get your ideas"

That's the big question every fiction writer gets asked---constantly. At least once during every classroom visit, at every reading and every time you meet someone who read your stuff. My mother, Janet Lunn, a popular Canadian children's writer for 50 years, still doesn't know how to answer it. "Under a rock", "In the back garden", "From my imagination", "Thin air" all get tried but never satisfy. We've laughed together in exasperation at not being able to answer a question about something that comes naturally to us both.

I recently read "How The Mind Works" where the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's posits the foundation of human brain development as entirely the result of Darwinian natural selection. For the most part it is fascinating anthropological sociology. But when he touches on creativity, he speaks only to basic human intuitiveness stating that we're all creative simply because each of us can figure out why the light goes out when the fridge door closes [my example]. He points out, rightly, that the distance between Einstein and a simpleton is minuscule compared to either from a chimpanzee. School teachers insist that we're all creative because we can splash paint on paper in ways that no one else might. Neither of these explains why some people create original thought from nothing while others can not.

I can't explain it, either. I've raised 5 children and none of them shares this, no matter how hard and long I've tried to nurture it. They see the world from a literal plane and original conceptual invention is beyond them, as it is for the majority of humanity.

In the end we may never understand what sparks creativity. The best anecdote I have for how baffling it is comes from a comment my mother made while editing my book "The Aquanauts". Referring to a particular science fiction concept I'd created, she asked in all seriousness, "Where did you get that idea?"

Took me completely by surprise. "Someone left it on the doorstep," I replied.