“WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?”
“WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?” is one of those cliché questions you hear writers and artists complain about being asked. We do get asked it a lot, but the reason we roll our eyes and sigh about it is we don't know how to answer it. We Don't know how to answer it because we don't know. We have absolutely no idea but we can't say that because then everyone will know we're frauds and then the gig is up.
Really, ideas are everywhere. They are EVERYWHERE, spinning around the universe waiting to smack us in the brain and drive us crazy. They're so ubiquitous, in fact, that they kind of mean nothing at the same time that they are invaluable. The idea for strawberry shortcake came from the same place as the idea for white people to get cornrows, and neither of those ideas affected the world until someone did something with them. We all have ideas every day that sit fallow and forgotten.
I couldn't tell you today when I first had the idea that would become our adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, but I can tell you it sat in the back of my head for a long time.
“Heathcliff is genderqueer.”
I thought about how it would change the story, and I realized in some ways it made more sense. Then I got mad again thinking about how nearly every adaptation made Heathcliff white when he was described as a person of colour throughout the orignal material, and I promptly moved on with my life, because what was I going to do? Make a graphic novel adaptation of a book I'd read once in a single day in high school?
A few years later, Rori and I were talking about the various grand and ridiculous things about which we talk, and Wuthering Heights became the topic, as it does. I mentioned that I thought the story made a lot of sense if the main character were trans. She, having not read the story, nodded and took my word for it. The conversation moved on, probably to dumb jokes or a deep hang about the future of comics, or dumb jokes about the future of comics. That's how we do it.
The idea was in her mind now too, though, and so one could say that's when our collaboration began, even though we didn't know it yet.
AND THEN THE PANDEMIC!!
Around the end of 2021, we got a message from our very patient agent Janna (hi Janna!) with a question. An editor who was launching a new imprint at a major publisher, none of whom I will name for no reason in particular, was looking for queer adaptations of classic literature, and Janna asked us if we had anything for it. I said a prompt “Nope!” and hung up the phone, and we never talked about it again.
Except that Rori remembers the things I forget and she said “What about Wuthering Heights?” I blinked at her for a few minutes, confused because I'm not very smart. Also, we weren't on the phone.
Had the idea left my brain as soon as I passed it along to her, making it now her idea? Did we have shared custody of the idea? Or was it always mine and she had just adopted it?
One of the best things Rori ever did for me was to insist I start writing down in a single place every story idea I had, regardless of how detailed or thought-out it was. As a result, I have pages and pages and pages of story ideas, some a sentence long, others with extensive notes and characters and dialogue. Wuthering Heights never made it onto that list, somehow. I never imagined I would work on it until that moment talking with Janna about the opportunity.
But it was an idea I loved, an idea I wanted to read, but no one else was going to make it, so it had to be us. And now I could bring it out and get to know it and see what happened. Ideas are magical, but they're ultimately meaningless until they push us to take action and turn them into reality. In this blog, we're going to share how we're turning our Wuthering Heights into a reality.