Drinking from the font of ideas (Also Laser Sharks!)

This morning, I found out that some brilliant and/or daft people mounted a laser on a shark just to prove that they could. I rushed over here with every intention of telling you all about how I was right and we really are living in the future. I mean, flying cars are all well and good, but after laser sharks, everything else is just gravy, right?

And then my inner geek became my outer geek and I said: "Heh. Dude... Laser Shark!"

Talk about a gift that just keeps on giving; you could do almost anything with a premise like that. Almost any story can be grafted on. Science fiction? Of course; c'mon, that writes itself. How about something hard...
Military Fiction: The brave men and women in uniform who labor shoulder-to-should to bring together the ultimate weapon, lasers and sharks!
Techno-thriller: Terrorists (there are always terrorists) hijack the laser sharks and threaten to loose them upon an unsuspecting world.
Mystery: A body washes up on a desolate stretch of the Australian coast, burned and bitten beyond recognition. Was it murder? What could possibly have committed such a heinous act?
Spy Thriller: A foreign power is developing a secret weapon at their base beneath a volcanic island.
Romance: A handsome marine biologist meets a winsome laser engineer with a dreadful secret.
Steampunk: Aetheric amplification of Sol's brilliant light reaps unexpected rewards in the submarine base of the nefarious Doctor Villainous Deeds!

The list goes on and on and on. Ideas tumbling over ideas in a rush to get their hands on a real-live laser shark. And it occurred to me that this week, of all weeks, was the perfect opportunity to talk about where ideas come from.

Are they delivered to me by Laser Sharks?

Sadly, no.

I started thinking about this when thriller writer Joseph Finder said this:

Then, he said this:

And got me thinking about just how fertile is the daily news crawl that crosses my screen. Not just for things like digital organ thieves and shark-mounted lasers. Take that same Facebook-borne logic leap that Joe was talking about and graft on a story about an MI-6 codebreaker found locked in a bag in his locked apartment and you have the material for quite a thrill ride.

How about a conservator in the rare book room at Brown University that found an engraving signed by Paul Revere stuck in a medical book? How did it get there? Who put it there? Were they hiding it from someone? Historical fiction, thriller, romance, the world's your oyster with a core story like that. And how about a 400 year old map that was found to have a fortress marked in invisible ink that could lead to a lost city in West Virginia? Really! Where can't you go with a lead like that?

Historical fiction and thrillers aren't your thing? Want something that's sweet, but just a little creepy? How about this story from NPR about how a baby's cells lurk in mom's tummy long after the baby is born.  If you're not interested in sweet and want to focus on the creept, there are cannibal shrimp are invading the gulf coast, Iceland is sending tourists into the heart of dormant volcanoes,  and scientists are getting blood samples and DNA from 5,300 year old Alpine mummy.  

That reminds me, there's a GIANT statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of tombs, being carted around Seattle like a parade float.  That's either a horror story, the next Indiana Jones movie, or a lawsuit waiting to happen. Maybe all three.

Speaking of lawsuits, I found out this week that space lawyers are apparently a real thing. My high school career councilor really dropped the ball on that one. But you want a comedic legal thriller? Fine. A bear fell out of a tree and led to a lawsuit that could literally change the face of copyright law in America. yes, really.

Mysteries? A guy carrying a big bag of money had a heart attack on a train platform at Penn Station and no one knows where the money came from. And how about those thieves that staged an elaborate movie-worthy heist in Connecticut to steal a few truckloads of pharmaceuticals? Heck, just today I found out about a robot petting zoo and a hexapodal walking car that will, oh yes, it will be my next ride.

But I write Children's books you say? This week provided me with a harmonica-playing pachyderm, a kidnapped penguin, and an escaped Tokyo parakeet made it home because it could tell the cops its address. No excuses.

So where do I get my ideas? I pay attention. Because in the end, it's not coffee, or my favorite pen, or a special table at the coffee shop, or mystical muse that brings me my stories. It's not even the friends and news sites that dropped those leads into my inbox. I bring me my stories. I get them by paying attention, by collecting all the various bits of the history that came before me and the world around me right now. And I find the bits that fit together but don't fit with anything else.  And the glory of this weird enterprise of writing is that anyone else can take in the same elements from the same news items and they will create entirely different stories from the same ingredients.

So that's it. And the next person who asks me where I get my ideas gets poked in the eye. Seriously. Safety glasses are advised.  Don't worry, you can get a new bionic eye to replace it. Because this is the future we're living in. 

Oh, and I'd stay out of the water until the batteries on that laser run dry. 

Just a thought.

Filling the void

It's the one thing that all of us have in common.

Every writer uses a different path to get from the start to the finish, but in the beginning, the page is blank.

Okay, it's not entirely blank; there may be some blue lines on it.  Faint ones, arranged in a parallel fashion.  If you are the conventional sort, they are perpendicular, and there's usually a red line along the left side of the page.  If you are like me, it takes about five minutes of staring at it before that margin is crowded with wee caricatures of the people around you, running in fear from an army of cats, robots and gnomes wielding large mallets in a fashion that used to cause my teachers no end of sleepless nights.*

Even if you are a margin doodler, you're still a writer, not an illustrator; until there are words, all the doodles in the world won't make the page any less blank. The page still waits, the words are dormant, the ideas wait in the antechambers of your mind like paratroopers watching for the green light that will send them hurtling down into the white void to come back with a story or not at all.

No matter how you write -- with a cursor or a Cross pen -- in the beginning, the page is blank.

Writers & Fear :: Finding the courage to put your hands on the keys...

Flashback Friday - At the dawn of 2010, I challenged myself and my readers to actually go away (good thing I don't have ads on this blog or I'd go broke, right?) and to get writing.  Of all the posts in that series, this must be my favorite...

---
At the dawn of this year, I stated my goal of getting you to write -- persuading you to set aside whatever is getting in your way and just sit down and put pen to paper or fingers to keys. This is not because I think everyone needs to be a writer (there's plenty of competition out there, thank you) but because I know there are a lot of people out there with ideas swirling in their heads just waiting for permission to proceed.

It's worth noting that in most cases, power isn't given, it's seized by those ambitious enough to go after it. And it's up to you to do so with your literary aspirations as well. At least in the realm of fiction, no one can give you permission to write about a subject; you have to just sit down and do it and to hell anyone who tells you that you can't.

That almost sounds silly, but there are seriously plenty of people out there frozen with their fingers over the keys. I've met a lot of them. I can't imagine what they're waiting for. There's no government agency or academic institution or critic out there with the power vested in them to license authors, at least not in America.

If you live somewhere that does that sort of thing, you might want to consider emigrating to someplace that doesn't.

There are no entrance exams for becoming an author. If you want to write, you just have to put your butt in a chair and your fingers on the keys and do it. That's not to say it's easy or that you'll have immediate success or that a degree in English lit or creative writing wouldn't help you, but formal training is not strictly necessary either.

A lot of bad books come from people with lofty degrees. Remember that Enough so that I remain unconvinced that it helps more than it hinders. I am convinced that in order to be a writer you need only a love of words, the desire to dream out loud and a willingness to stick it out as you figure out how to do it.

Reading is the only meaningful apprenticeship for a writer. The classroom may ice the cake or it may stifle you, but the library and the bookstore is a wide-open field of study, an embarrassment of riches. The only way to learn how to write is to read. Read everything. Good books, bad books, classic books, trashy romance novels, history books, poetry, plays, comic books, screenplays... everything you read has a lesson to teach for good or ill. Everything you write is a reflection of what you've read, as an echo of those you honor and a rebuke of those your revile. Still not convinced? Fine.  

By the power vested in me by absolutely no one at all, you have permission to write.

There. Now you don't have any more excuses.  Get back to work.

10 Places to Find Stories Waiting to be Told

Where do Ideas come from?  It's the question every writer dreads and emphatically answers with "I don't know".  Honestly, I suspect that for most writers that's a bit of a fib -- we may not know where ideas come from in the cosmic sense any more than we can tell you the meaning of life, but we generally know where a specific idea came from, or at least what prompted it. 

If you put enough of those answers together, you begin to see major features of the landscape of this mythical land of ideas forming in the fog.  But I suspect that in truth we don't like to talk about it because either we're all a bit superstitious, or because we're afraid that these private reserves should be held for us alone and anyone caught visiting there treated as poachers of the King's deer. 

Probably a bit of both.

Culled from conversations with hundreds of writers, books on writing, and my own private hunting grounds, here's my list of ten places where unused ideas scamper and play, just waiting for you to snatch them up and turn them into stories:

1. Have a Nose for News.
   Subscribe to news alert services of every political stripe.  Online or on the television or in one of those old-fashions thingies that leave ink on your fingers, I think they're called "newspapers", the news is chock full of ideas.  The other day I got a news release from DARPA about the formation of a committee to promote interstellar exploration within the next 100 years.  My wife sent me a story about a kid who accidentally bought a retired RAF Harrier Jumpjet on eBay!
   
   Case in point: On one day several years ago there was a front page story in the Seattle Times about the University of Washington arguing that they didn't need military-level protections on the lab where they would be studying the 1918 Spanish Flu virus that killed half the country.  On page three of the same paper was a story about a clemency hearing for a militant environmentalist who had expressed repeatedly the idea that humanity should be eliminated from the ecosystem by any means necessary.  That's an eco-thriller waiting to happen.  Or perhaps a great backstory for a dystopian post-apocalyptic epic.  Find the connections that everyone else missed.
   
   
2. Watch TV
   We've all done it.  We were watching a show and thought we knew how the show was going to wrap up, or said "I wouldn't have done it that way".  Guess what: that was a story idea you had there.  The moment your version of the story moved away from what was actually happening on screen, it became a new idea.  I'm not talking about fan fiction; I'm talking about finding a story in someone else's premise that they missed. 
   
   OMG, Seriously, Is that okay?  Yes.  It's not plagiarism because the idea is yours, not theirs.  And ideas cannot be copyright protected anyway.  (Characters can, at least their names and likenesses can anyway.) You're not stealing their intellectual property because your idea will call for significant changes and different characters (you don't want their old characters anyway) and you are going to put it in a new setting and when you're done there will be no doubt in anyone's mind that it has nothing to do with that episode of Grey's Anatomy that annoyed you last night.  Right?  Right.
   
   
3. Talk to People.
   Not just your friends, but people.  On airplanes, in coffee shops, in the queue at the checkstand, you are constantly surrounded by people whose lives are fascinating and diverse.  Develop interviewing skills and employ them.  If you read an article about someone who does something that fascinates you, make a phone call.  The worst they can do is say no, but in my experience, if you are honest with them about what you're doing, they usually won't.  If you use what they tell you, remember them in the author's note or afterword.  Don't rip off someone's entire biography, though, we're talking about idea generation, not literary cloning.
   
   A brief aside about talking to people: Every time I hear of some writer getting their royalty check and retreating to a cabin in the back woods of Maine to write their next Great American Novel, I know that I'll never hear from them again.  Much like technological innovations, with very few exceptions, the great stories and compelling novels come from the field, not from the laboratory.
   
   
4. Daydream.
   It has been said that the greatest difficulty a writer faces is convincing their spouse that staring out the window is work.  Your entire life someone has been telling you to knock it off.  I'm here to tell you they were wrong.  Don't knock it off.  Develop the habit.  Call it meditation and buy a mat and some incense if it makes your loved ones feel better, but however you do it, make it pay for itself by writing them down.
5. Look at photos.
   Whether you go to your mother's closet and take down a photo album or go to Flickr and start clicking on random images and coming up with the stories that are behind them.  I've been known to buy old copies of Life magazine just to page through them and imagine the stories behind the photos.  Sometimes you'll get a character, sometimes you'll find a setting, sometimes the story will spring from the image, whole and ready to be told.
   
   Honestly, this works better for me if I don't know the story behind a photo, so I avoid doing this with family albums unless the photos are so old that even the oldest family members are uncertain as to who they are or what they're up to.
   
   
6. Buy a Map
   The map may not be the territory, but it is a source for many, many stories. I've spent so much time poring over old maps and daydreaming about them that it's practically a second vocation.  I cannot count the ideas that have been generated in that way.  Here, there be dragons.
   
   My second-favorite store in Seattle is Metsker Maps.  It's a source of infinite ideas because they sell not only current maps and travel guides, but also classic and reprints of historical maps, but the local history rooms at your local university or public library are an excellent place to start.  Call ahead, though, sometimes you need an appointment.
7. Read, especially the classics
   Stephen King says (and rightly so) that if you have no time to read, you've neither the time nor the tools to be a writer.  Literary culture is defined as a culture because it feeds itself, evolves and progresses and has specific defined movements.  In part, this is because we get ideas (similar to what I was talking about with regard to TV shows) by thinking about how we would do this differently, or because some throw away aside in one book sparks an idea in your mind and a book of your own.  I say 'especially the classics' to acknowledge that in many ways, Harry Potter is David Copperfield with wizards and wands. Oh Brother Where Art Thou is an unabashed retelling of The Odyssey.  This sort of thing happens constantly and with good reason.  Certain stories are good for all times.  Certain stories just work.
   
   Beyond the current meme for grafting zombies or robots into classic novels, there are story elements to be harvested there that are rich enough to blossom anew in the light of the modern world.  No matter how many times a story has been done, there's always a new twist to be found for the reader/writer who is alert for ideas.
   
   
8. Phone a friend.
   When a bunch of writers bands together, one of two things usually happens: they're just catty and competitive and tear one another down or they form their very own Algonquin Round Table.  When you get a good group of different creative types around a table, people who are receptive, open and witty, ideas just seem to appear out of nowhere and you'll find yourself trading them like baseball cards.
   
   I've experienced this several times in my life in one form or another and when it happens, have your notebook ready and be ready to have so many ideas that you're giving them away.  I've given many ideas away that simply weren't of a variety that I'd be willing or able to bring fully to life and received many others in return.  If you want to do this, chose your circle carefully and do not limit it to just writers if you can help it.  If it's just writers, it will turn into a critique group and in many ways that's a separate thing.
   
   
9. Take it on the road.
   Some of my favorite ideas came to me while I was traveling.  Most of the best came as a result of some odd moment in a road trip, but even if it's choosing to walk instead of driving to school or work or the coffee shop, there's something about the act of traveling that tends to stimulate ideas.
   
   This is number three on my list of writer's block remedies and it's here for the same reason.  Just as a stagnant scene can be renewed by moving it to a new setting, so too can the writer's mind be refreshed by a change of scenery.  Just remember to stop before you get more than ten miles from home.
10. Put it down on paper. 
    This is the oldest writing advice in the world and it's relatively simple: unless your memory is far better than my own, you need to jot down those ideas that spring fully-formed into your brain at 3 AM, or when you're sitting in a boring business meeting.  I sometimes like to imagine all the terribly rude people who are tapping on their Blackberries through every meeting rather than listening to the speaker have just had a great new idea for a story.  Sometimes we forget that this doesn't have to be elaborate or expensive -- for carrying around, I like Moleskines as much as the next guy, but the notebook on my bedside table was bought for $.50 at the local supermarket.
    
    Oh, and one more thing...  I've more than once awakened to find a few meaningless wandering lines of ink on my bedside notebook and wondered what wondrous idea they were meant to capture.  Consider turning on a light or investing in a headlamp if you've someone sleeping next to you.

None of those should come as a galloping shock to you.  Or at least I hope not.  But often it's seeing someone else write it down or admit to it that makes you feel less anxious about the generating of ideas and get on with the writing.  If nothing else came out of that list, I hope you remember this: They really are just day dreams until you write them down.

Do you already have your idea?  Are you wondering where to go from here?  

Try this post from last February: Ten Tips to Get Your Novel Started

Generating Ideas :: Something from Nothing, Part One

As I near the end of the first draft of Howard Carter, I'm already noodling with the next idea in the back of my mind.  I've been jotting down new character and story ideas for the past week or so and preparing a reading list for the next novel as well as preparing myself mentally to begin revisions on the one that's been maturing in the desk drawer.

Which might explain why though I talk a lot about how ideas germinate and how to avoid writer's block and how to get unstuck if you can't, I spend precious little time talking about how to get started in the first place.

Getting started isn't something that I find difficult; usually stopping is the hard part.  

So I don't tend to think about it much.

However, since this blog is about what's on my mind, it might be worthwhile to think about it a bit more than I usually do.  Not only what am I going to do next, but why I chose that idea and how I went from abit of ink on a coffee stained napkin to the beginnings of a story...

Though I have some chapters of Howard Carter to get on the page before I can really focus on the next novel, so here are some past thoughts on the subject, hand-picked for Your Reading Pleasure:

10 Ways To Get Started On Your Novel (A List)

Writer's Block Redux  (Or: I get by with a little help from my monsters)

Writer's Block (The Illustrated Website Edition)

Getting Started :: 10 Tips to Get Your Novel Going

I was reading Gretchen Rubin's blog for The Happiness Project this morning and found the list she made last Wednesday of ways to find more reading in your life. It's a fun project she has going and she came up with a great list with a lot of ideas on how to manage your time for books. 

For the past few weeks, I've been nearing the completion of one project and contemplating the beginnings of the next. Which brought to mind my own list of ten things, in this case, ten ways I've found to get from "I've got this idea..." to "So now where do I mail this completed manuscript?" 

Pursuant to my stated goal of getting you to write this year, I present to you my little list... 

Ten Tips to Get Your Novel* Started

1. Be interested in your story. Writing is hard work and before you commit to spending long hours sitting in a chair stringing tens of thousands of words together to tell your story, you'd better darn well be sure it's a story that interests you enough to make that worthwhile.
   
2. Feed your brain. Your brain generates stories from the stuff you cram in there. Give it the fodder it needs to make new and interesting stories and well fleshed-out characters. Interview everyone you meet, explore every place you go, try new things.
   
3. Everything is research. Accept it. Pay attention. Take notes and snapshots. You never know when you'll need the story about the waitress and the deep-fried Converse sneaker.
   
4. Ideas are not sacred. Don't get so attached to an idea that you're unwilling to allow it to evolve. A story idea is less like the directions from a GPS and more like finding your way through a new city with written directions scrawled on the back of a coffee-stained napkin.
   
5. Write now, edit later. Just sit you butt in the chair and put the story on the page. Editing is inevitable, but it is a stage of its own that can wait until later. Your initial goal is to get the story out of your head, everything else follows that.
   
6. Take little bites. A big idea can choke you if you try to eat it all at once. Writing anything long form is a lot like the old adage about eating an elephant: Start at one end and take it one bite at a time.
   
7. Make stuff up. Research can be a very addictive drug. It's easy to get so wrapped up in the intriguing minutiae of your subject matter that you forget to write a book about it. If it ever gets shelved in a library or bookstore, your novel will be in the fiction section, this gives you license to fake it... within reason, of course.
   
8. Keep everything. Create a file on your computer (or in your filing cabinet if you're a luddite like me) of the random ideas or characters that occur to you as you're writing. Not everything you create while writing will fit the story you're working on. Hang on to those tidbits for later use in this or another story.
   
9. Step away from the Television and/or the Internet. That might sound odd coming from me, but these mediums are specifically designed to catch your attention and hold it. I've recently begun doing my writing on a computer that is isolated from the internet to combat this. My writing output tripled when we got rid of TV and as a bonus we saved a lot of money each month.
   
10. Write with the vocabulary you have. Put away the thesaurus, it's just slowing you down and making self-conscious. Finding your authorial "voice" is about telling the story the way you tell it, not the way Roget would tell it if he were writing it. Your vocabulary will grow organically on its own and in a way that is unique to you as you research and read. Language is a fragile thing and it will break if you try to force it.

It's easy to end a list with the words "And it's as easy as that!" but it really isn't all that easy or everyone would do it.  It's not as easy as that and I think that's an important thing to keep in mind at every stage.  Writing is hard.  It's supposed to be hard.  So don't beat yourself up when you find that it isn't easy.  This is job, a task like any other -- a task that must be performed before you can enjoy the results.  Because at the end of the day, it's the person who puts their butt in the chair and puts the words on the page who will win the race.

---

*I say novel because that's my chosen milieu. All the same, most of these should apply to any written fiction from plays to short stories to novels. As with anything I post here, use at your own risk and freely modify in a manner that best suits your needs. 

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.

Contact Me