It’s not Garamond. Let’s be clear about that. But where do book ideas come from? Some writers seem to have endless amounts and others struggle to come up with a single one, but all book ideas–I believe–come from answering one of a few questions.
(1) What if?
“What if” books are often fantasy (“What if tiny people lived in the walls of houses?” — The Borrowers, The Littles, and many other books), but not necessarily. The Life of Pi starts with “What if a boy and a tiger cross the ocean together in a small boat?”, but this doesn’t constrain its tone or themes.
By every choice you make in a day, you change your world. What if you had made the other choice? For one of the most influential books in this vein, see Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, which examines the difference that results from leaving a window open or not.
(2) What would this character do?
Although “What if” books are not necessarily action driven, most character-focused books are not. As with all statements about writing, there are exceptions.
Answers to this can range enormously in length and style. Gene Wolfe wrote science-fiction and fantasy that was much more focused on the internal lives of its characters than the non-Earth worlds they inhabited. From Marcel Proust’s magnum opus (running to much more than a million words in French) to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, many of the masterpieces of literature answer this question.
(3) How did we get here?
A popular storytelling mechanism since ancient times, from Anansi stories in Africa to Kipling’s Just So Stories, to many non-fiction historical books, the key question is how the world arrived at a particular state. The book may be focused on key events, or on people, or even on the geography of a place.
(4) What happens next?
A lot of action and suspense novels answer this question, but so do a lot of science-fiction novels and other kinds of speculative literature (from alternative histories to literary imaginings of the futurer).
There is no shortage of ideas for books. You can do a simple search online and find hundreds of suggestions for how to start a book, and each book created around a question is likely to be different, even if the question is the same. I cannot write the same book my son would write, nor can anyone else write the book I would in answer to these questions.
If you’re finding yourself short on ideas for a book, consider whether you might actually be stuck on how to tell a story. Because you can always start with that simplest of questions: What if everything were different?