Ren asked Cidney Swanson:

This question contains spoilers… (view spoiler)

Cidney Swanson Hi Demigod_whisperer,

I'm glad you're enjoying the books. I am married to a very slow reader and sometimes I think he has more fun reading because he doesn't ever miss *anything*!

Your question is an interesting one because it brings up a couple of different parts of what it means to come up with ideas. In one sense, it is almost impossible to say why any given idea comes up. But it is also true that those of us, like you, who like to write tend to be prone to imagine stuff. At some point, for me, the stuff I have imagined either goes away and I forget about it or it keeps coming back and I can't forget about it. And that is when I get curious.

With Rippler, the story started with a picture in my mind of a girl kneeling by a river near where I grew up. As I "looked" at her, she began to get see through and then vanished entirely. I wondered why she had turned invisible. I also had this absolute certainty that she hadn't noticed she'd vanished. So that brought up a second question: why didn't she notice?

As my brain wrangled those questions, I started to find a story in my head. I like adventure stories, so I knew there had to be some danger associated with what became "rippling." So during the day when I was folding clothes or cooking or walking the dog, my brain would be wondering things like, "What might be dangerous about having an ability to turn invisible?" and "What would dangerous people be willing to do to steal or copy or somehow use your ability?" and "How did the first ripplers get their abilities?"

Well, brains love questions, so my brain began working on the answers. Some of them came quickly. (Bad guys would want to force you to do stuff for them, so you'd be in danger of being kidnapped.) Others took forever. (What motivates my bad guy--Helmann--and why does he think it's okay to do what he does?) Eventually, all those questions and answers became sort of story-shaped.

My stories tend to be really lumpy and ugly when I finish them the first time. (This is called a "first draft.") I set them aside for awhile and then I go back and re-work them so that they are more interesting, more consistent with how people really behave, and so on. It takes me about 5 or 6 complete re-writes before the story is done, but not everyone needs 5 or 6 tries. I needed something like 15 for Rippler, but once I had that story completely figured out, Chameleon and Unfurl and the others were much easier to write because I had figured out the "rules" of rippling and why the people in my stories were behaving the way they were behaving. (This is a part of what's called "world building.")

I hope that helps answer your question.

Read long and prosper,
Cidney

PS Would you ask your parent(s) if it would be okay to post your question and my answer on my Tumblr? No worries if it's a no. Have them email me cidneyswanson at gmail dot com if it's a yes.

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