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Ideas pay off when you really grab a reader.

This is the first and primary litmus test I use when I'm evaluating an idea-does this idea have the power to keep a reader turning pages?

 I find my relationships with ideas take the following course:

1. Think of good idea. Often feels like being struck by lightning. Nice warm glow permeates body. (Thinking of bad idea takes about ten seconds, and is the mental equivalent of wadding up a piece of paper and tossing it into the garbage.)
   
   
2. Madly embrace idea as the best one I have ever had. Let the obsessing over idea begin. Wife exhibits saintly patience as I continually ponder various aspects and execution of idea.
   
   
3. Dance around with the idea, gathering related ideas that can deepen the story, do initial research, and then start writing.
   
   
4. Start to worry that I am not doing justice to the idea (usually when you get to the middle of the book. I describe middles of books as where ideas, badly executed, stumble and die. Think of a book you didn't care for, and it's often the middle that seems wanting.) Keep plugging away, hope that I'm doing right by the idea, do my best to keep it fresh and interesting, remind myself I've done written books before and try not to fall into the paralyzing trap of eternal second-guessing.
   
   
5. Finish the book with a last bit of confidence that I did the best I could, and hope that readers will enjoy my take on the idea. This reader did, in one of the kindest e-mails I have ever gotten:

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Last entry I wrote about how I came up with the idea for the characters in Collision. Today, I want to write about how plots start.

Yes, plot and character are absolutely intertwined. Characters drive plots when they're trying to reach their goals. But every plot needs a spark, a start, that drives the characters into action.

In this case, the spark was an image in my mind: a man's business card being found in a dead man's pocket. The image came to me, unbidden, a few days after I'd started thinking about the two main characters in Collision. And I knew the dead man was not a copier salesman or a road warrior or a doctor; the dead man was the most wanted assassin in the world, and now he was dead, and the business card in his pocket belonged to Ben, the business consultant in my being-born novel.

Why would the world's most feared hitman have an ordinary man's business card in his pocket?

I call this the Kick. You have to have a way to get the characters into the flow of the story, and sometimes you have to give them a kick. This is especially true with my characters, who tend to be ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Sometimes an unsuspected past catches up with them (as in Panic), or they are in the wrong place at the wrong time (as in Fear) or-in Collision-they're being used.

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The question I get most from readers: where do your ideas come from?

So that's what I'll talk about this week.

Let's begin: what if an ordinary man got to have an adventure with a Jason Bourne/Jack Bauer kind of hero?

It is perhaps odd for a novelist to admit that any book idea could be fueled by film or television, but I think it's silly to pretend to ignore the pervasive influence the cinematic arts have on us all-including writers. (And yes, I know Jason Bourne comes from the Ludlum novels, but I for one prefer the recent film versions.)

This was the first grain of the idea that grew into my new thriller, Collision. Where most novels have one protagonist, I would have two: a typical businessman, a road warrior type with Bluetooth headset that we see crowding every airport terminal, a man devoted to his work, cocooned in his safe and comfortable life; and a disgraced spy, a highly trained operative who can kill you a dozen different ways. The drama, I thought, would come from the conflict of the two men: their resentment at being forced together into danger, their differing approaches to solving their problems and overcoming a dangerous conspiracy that threatens far more than their lives, but our national security.

But as I wrote the book, I realized the drama, and the suspense, was coming from a deeper conflict.

These two men are opposite sides of a coin.

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Jeff Abbott is our guest blogger during the week of July 14th. If you have any questions for him, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some brief information about Collision:

The international bestseller returns with his most ambitious, multidimensional, and tightly crafted thriller yet, a breakout achievement featuring his hallmark blend of ordinary people in extraordinary danger.

Already an international sensation, with his books translated into fifteen languages—in the UK alone, Panic has more than 400,000 copies in print—Jeff Abbott is a master of the action-packed thriller. Now, with Collision, he delivers a meaty, twisty, white-knuckle ride designed to propel him onto the bestseller lists in his home country.

Collision is the story of two men living very different lives—one, a successful corporate consultant who is mourning the murder of his new bride; the other, a former CIA agent known only as “Pilgrim,” whose current assignment for a fringe espionage agency is so treacherous he doesn’t trust even his own boss. When they are thrown together in a violent, unexpected event, the two men realize that they’ve been framed in an elaborate setup. Unsure who to trust and who may just be trying to draw them into the open, the unlikely partners have no choice but to work together. But with everything at stake, Ben has no idea that Pilgrim is harboring some shocking secrets of his own—secrets that will soon force Ben to confront just how blurred the line has become between best friends and bitter enemies.