From the Intergalactic Medicine Show forum at www.hatrack.com:
Where do you get your ideas?
I love this question.
Lately, I’ve been going to old photographs and drawings to spark my creativity. I keep a collection of images on my laptop that I think go well with whatever project I’m working on; when I get stuck or need a new idea, I go through the photos, pick an intriguing aspect and get back to work. For example, right now I’m rewriting my novel, The Lord of All Fools. LOAF takes place in a world very much like WWI America/Europe, so I’ve been going to the American Memory collection at the Library of Congress’ website and browsing old photos from that era. I found this great photo of a bunch of British kids in a trench during a bombing raid. I had no idea that trenches were so narrow. There looked to be barely enough room for the kids to squat down. That image sparked an idea that will translate into desperate run through the trenches of a war-torn city (once I’ve written it).
Sometimes, my ideas start out with a goal. I had just finished my first draft of LOAF, and I wanted to see if I could write something short and very action-oriented. When I’m writing off the cuff (like I am now), I meander terribly. So I wanted to keep the situation—whatever it turned out to be—limited. At the time, I was interested in breaking into Baen’s Universe, another great online magazine. Baen’s focuses on upbeat action; I set out to craft a story specifically to make a sale to them.
(Yes. I believe in targeting material for a market. I like to make money for what I write whenever possible…)
What I came up with was the story of a communications engineer on a starship that has just been eviscerated by an enemy attack. The attack occurs within the gravity well of a gas giant; without power, the starship begins to be pulled toward the gas giant, so our hero has to get off the boat. He can’t wait for rescue. Unfortunately, I…um…meandered. 🙂 The flash fiction piece (less than 1000 words) mutated into a 7000 word, convoluted short-story called Fingers, which is dull, introspective, and which I love, but can’t find a market for.
Fingers was the story that convinced me that outlining my plot was essential to my writing process, by the way. I learn more from my failures than from my successes, I guess.
The trick to finding ideas, for me, is to be aware and engaged. [It’s been] pointed out that writers gather ideas from everywhere and everything; that’s true, sort of. You have to be observant. This aspect of writing has changed for me as I’ve gotten older. When I was an angsty, angry teenager, with ideas and hormones surging in equal portions through my body, coming up with ideas was a LOT easier. This was because I wasn’t mature enough to have developed a quality filter. Consequently, although I was bursting with ideas, they were all terribly cliché. As I’ve gotten older, and more practiced in my craft, I’ve (hopefully) trained myself to not spend time on worthless ideas. But that quality filter comes at a price of lowered production. I balance the two by trying to pay attention to where I am and what I’m doing so that I don’t miss anything that could spark a story. (NOTE: It’s really important that writers don’t wait for that spark, though. Getting an idea is fine; but inspiration should not replace hard work and diligence)
In 2005, my novella Blackberry Witch, won 2nd place for its quarter in the Writers of the Future contest. I got to take part in a week-long workshop with KD Wentworth and Tim Powers. After the workshop, I went walking around Seattle with the exceptionally smart Michael Livingston. Everything was a story to us. We fabricated fantasy universes out of pebbles on the asphalt; we were freaking machines of invention.
We were paying attention. You’d be surprised at all the wonderful stories you can find if you’re looking for them.
how did you go from the ideas to the story?
Ahhh, process.
*********WARNING: SPOILERS***************
Well– I wrote up where I got the idea for The End of the World Pool in Edmund Schubert’s Side-Show Freaks. After Laurel Amberdine passed the story seed to me, I brainstormed it for a bit. I brainstorm by asking questions.
For reference, here’s the seed:
“A place which remains in perpetual darkness, no matter what kind of illumination is attempted.”
The first question, of course, is “Why can’t there be light?” My first answer was “Because the place is outer space, in the middle of an asteroid that has some sort of black hole devouring it.” My brain was in science fiction mode, from just having finished writing Fingers. I put that idea aside– because I knew I was going to be burned out on science fiction, and my brain wasn’t in a place to do the research required for a black hole story. Also, I know that hard-sf is not a genre at which I excel.
So…what next? I didn’t want to write science fiction; what places have I been that have been absolutely dark? I’ve been in caves, spelunking; I’ve been caught in the middle of a rainstorm after dark in the Italian alps; and I’ve been swimming at the bottom of a little lake in Texas where the water was so muddy, you couldn’t see the surface if you looked up.
The little lake won out because I’ve also been on the verge of drowning. So there was some terror associated with the memory.
I had my dark place– a lake, or a body of water…a pool. Because pools are these nice, safe, clear things, where kids splash around and squeal, and horse around. Except when they haven’t been cleaned in 20 years. Then their nature gets subverted. I’m a subversive at heart, and the idea appealed to me.
But even a murky pool doesn’t stop illumination, if you’ve got something like a flashlight with you to take down there. What will extinguish light? I knew at this point I was writing a horror story, so I settled on a mystical/supernatural phenomenon. A water spirit– a rusalka, to be precise, though I never say so in the story. (At least, not in the finished story. In the original draft, the idea of a rusalka was brought up by Grant.)
I had my antagonist and part of my setting. Because rusalka are liminal constructs– they inhabit the borders between water and land, and according to some myths, are most dangerous to boys entering puberty, I also had the age of my protagonist. Question time: why would the boys be near a scummy pool? How would they meet the rusalka?
By this point, I was ready to start plotting. This is the outline I came up with, unchanged from when I wrote it:
Pilot Jacobs is an eleven year old boy helping his father (Ulysses), uncle (Hector), and cousin (Captain) repair an old home. Captain dares Pilot to dive into the stagnant swimming pool; Pilot takes the dare, and swims down and down—at the bottom he finds sand instead of concrete. At the very bottom of the pool is a dark area. Something touches his leg; when Pilot opens his eyes he can see nothing at all. Nothing permeates the darkness of the pool. Scared, he swims for the surface, and thinks he sees a ovely hand retreating back into the darkness.
When he comes out of the pool, he can’t stop thinking about the deep quiet there beneath the water.
The next day, Pilot tells Captain about the thing touching him at the bottom of the pool. They resolve to go looking for it. They tape up an old flashlight, and put on swimsuits and swim masks. They get to the bottom of the pool and find that the flashlight doesn’t work at the very bottom of the pool, though it comes back on as they ascend.
“Did you ever feel like you needed to breathe? Down there, I mean.”
Captain picked a string of brown goo out of his hair. “What? Yeah, I mean, ‘course I did.” He shook the slimy thing off his finger. “Except.”
“Hmm?”
“Except…all the way down there. When we couldn’t see anything, I didn’t think about it. I guess.”
Pilot nodded. “Me either.” Not until he’d seen the light. Not until the flashlight had come on again.
The next day, the boys meet Turk Bass, a general contractor who their fathers hired to do landscaping. Turk is foul and mean-spirited. He tells the boys of the murder of Illyana Burkeson in the house, and how her husband Clay Burkeson was never seen again. Later that evening, Pilot sees Turk slip into the water for a midnight swim, and he hears someone with him. A woman’s voice, strangely accented. Suddenly, Turk cries for help—Pilot watches as something pulls him under the black water. He calls for his father who dives deep into the pool to rescue Turk.
When Ulysses comes out of the pool, Pilot can tell he’s been changed somehow. He is distant and distracted. Pilot knows he is thinking about the pool and the deep silence down in the bottom. Captain and Pilot conspire to stay near Ulysses to prevent him from going in the pool again.
They are not successful. Ulysses sneaks away and jumps into the pool. As Captain and Hector work to pump the water out of the pool, Pilot takes a more direct course. He jumps into the water to save his father. At the bottom of the pool, he finds his father in the grip of a creature who looks like a little girl, but who has the corpse of a woman hanging off her shoulders. Ulysses calls the little girl his daughter and talks about making her peanut butter and banana sandwiches. The girl doesn’t like Pilot—she begins withdrawing the darkness around them. Pilot notices that as the darkness withdraws, his father begins to come back to himself. Even though he’s in danger of drowning, Pilot herds the darkness away, freeing his father little by little.
The girl weeps and cries and strikes out at both of them, and struggles to steal Ulysses down a dark portal. Pilot follows half-way, summoning the myths of Egypt to burn away the darkness and raise his father like Horus raising Osiris. Father and son break free and leave the pool.
When the pool is drained, they find the corpse of a woman and a half-born baby girl.
As you can see, the outline does not reflect what the story actually became. 🙂
After making the outline, I began writing. It was really that simple for me. When I got stuck (and in this story, it was only once), I went hunting for some spooky imagery to put me on the right track. I was lucky to find Edgar Allen Poe’s Annabel Lee. After finding that, it was just a matter of diligent work to put it to paper.
…meaning, I continued asking questions and writing them and their answers down. When I found an answer I didn’t like, I changed the answer, until I came up with one that felt true.
Like life, the questions never change. The answers we give them do. Which should be in a Chicken Soup for the Soul book somewhere, making me money. 🙂