DYLAN LANDIS: I think I have a dual answer for that. One is, there's a kind of blender somewhere in my subconscious that involves childhood. Flannery O'Connor said, anyone who has survived childhood has enough material for a lifetime of writing. So childhood memories go into that. Themes that obsess me go into that. Experiences I've had that are quirky, that constitute material, like having worked in a rat lab-- unusual stuff goes into that blender and comes out in some totally different form that's fiction.
On the other hand, I don't think I would call those ideas. For me, the way I write, ideas are lethal. They will kill anything I try to write. An idea for me comes from here-- from the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. Fiction comes from here. It comes from the gut. It comes from the subconscious. It comes from what I call the basement or what Robert Olen Butler calls the "dream space." You can't make that happen. And it does not come-- it's not an idea. It comes from that flow.