Heart to Heart with the Red King.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass

So my younger brother, JT, is visiting again. This evening we conducted another one of our deep conversations. I was lamenting the lost storylines and missing plots that I have been suffering through. JT was as always. . .Well, um, helpful. . .At the very least he was philosophical.

He said that maybe I can't write anything and am plagued by boredom because there are no more stories to write. He said maybe they were all used up. Then he started saying what if we were all just characters in someone else's unfinished novel. This would explain our boredom, after all - if the writer just stopped and left us halfway through the action, what would we be left to do? We wouldn't know what to do because the writer has to tell us what to do. We would be left to some tortuous form of life where we would only be able to perform the last action we were written to do. Not such a bad analogy for most of our daily lives, the tedium and repetitive cycles of modern times. Not even a bad analogy for God, for a writer is sort of a god to the small fictional world they created.

Of course all this enlightened thinking drove me to almost roll my eyes but some of what he said may have a valid point. There do seem to be only so many plots and I, myself, have complained about the lack of exciting new books coming out in the next few months.

So what do other writers think? Are we running out of fresh ideas? Where do we get our ideas from, if they are all gone?