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If there’s one question that writers are all too familiar with, it’s ‘where do you get your ideas?’ However, as novelist TJ Klune revealed during a recent appearance, perhaps a more appropriate question might be, ‘what happens if you’re not the only person to have that idea?’

“Stories come from the weirdest and weirdest, weirdest places,” Klune told the audience at his Emerald City Comic Con 2025 spotlight panel. “In 2015, I had this really cool idea that was going to be about a group of teenagers, a group of teenage boys who have to protect a young girl with mysterious powers who comes to their little small town. It's a really cool book, and then in 2016, Stranger Things came out. I was like ‘motherfucker’.”

Somewhat surprisingly, that wasn’t the only time that kind of thing happened, Klune continued.

“Before I wrote Under the Whispering Door, and I went in the direction I did, I had this idea in my head from stemming from the movie Beetlejuice,” he explained. “There's a very small scene in the movie Beetlejuice, where Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin basically go into the waiting room of the afterlife, and it's the bureaucracy of the afterlife. I wanted to write a full book about that. There would be like this idea of when you go to heaven or hell, you would be based upon the merits of how many points you got in your life — and then the very next year, The Good Place came. I was like, ‘…motherfucker.’

If there’s a moral to this story, it might be that some ideas are too good to belong to just one person… or, maybe, that as soon as a good idea comes to you, you really have to get it out there as soon as possible.

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