The Confabulator Cafe

Author: jarnett

  • Combo One

    I seem to keep coming back – again and again – to this laundry list of authors: Robert A. Heinlein, Alan Moore, Ian Fleming, Neil Gaiman, Alan Lightman. These are the writers that have inspired my attempts at writing stories and influenced how I put one word after another as well as how I organize one idea against another.

    Back in the ancient days of the early to mid-90s, I first tried to write comics exactly like Gaiman and Moore and boy did I fail miserably. Once I got over trying to create the next Miracle Man or Sandman and settled in to telling stories that were occurring to me I did a lot better. I toyed with the idea of writing fiction, too, and that’s when I tried aping Heinlein.

    When I was a songwriter for the bands I played in, I would tap Heinlein again for song titles and themes. A couple songs were pretty successful though anyone listening to them and looking for a hidden meaning or if I was trying to adapt a book into a song would be disappointed. (And don’t bother trying to find any of my songs anywhere. I have copies and so do the guys I played with but this was way before the internet and music software were so ubiquitous.)

    As I started trying to write fiction on a dedicated word processor (anyone remember those?), I used thinly-disguised characters and settings from Heinlein and Gaiman, especially. I was trying to write fantasy and science fiction so it was natural to turn to masters of those genres. Later, after I discovered Einstein’s Dreams, Lightman taught me how to write emotions and so it was natural to pull from him, too. That led to me really dissecting Moore and Gaiman’s comic stories for emotional content. Goldmine. I was attending Fiction University.

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  • Storyteller’s Vagary

    Q: How does an idea get developed?

    A: In the dark with another idea rubbing up against it.

    Q: How does an idea get developed?

    A: One thought plus one notion equals One Idea. Take three or four Ideas, apply Heat and alchemically a story appears in the mist.

    Q: How does an idea get developed?

    A: Ideas + Heat = Story.

    Not very helpful answers to an odd question. These are the sort of answers that I’ve read from several authors, the sort of thing that’s been frustrating as I have tried to grow as a storyteller. It doesn’t really mean any one thing and can be interpreted so many different ways that it’s ultimately meaningless. I’ve tried to relate what I do to percolating coffee, sauteeing vegetables, aging whiskey or fermenting wine. None of them have been good analogies and all have been even worse metaphors.

    Dreams are part of the mix, to be sure. Anything that recycles or goes over an idea until it coheres is helpful. They’re not the most important thing because they’re irregular and for some reason I don’t always remember them. I can do the self-hypnotizing thing and try to remember them, and that works, but it’s not the most reliable thing I can do.

    For me – and I’ve been struggling with how to tell you this – developing a notion into an Idea is kind of mystical. I know, it’s not all that helpful. Being truthful, going back to the Idea Still, it really is a mystery to me how an Idea gets turned into a story. It’s one part Interest, one part Need and who knows what else. What I can and will share with you below (and this is my fourth attempt at quantifying all this) are two things that I do to facilitate the mystical process.

    WRITE IT DOWN

    Easiest thing in the world to do, just put pen to paper and throw down whatever’s coming to me. I’ve got notebooks and scraps of paper everywhere. The best one is a spiral notebook divided into three sections of about sixty pages each and it’s half full of scribblings about this and that. When I use one of the ideas or notions there, I cross it off.

    Writing things down solidifies them in my mind. I’ve got so many things vying for my attention in my head that if I tried to hold on to things in there alone I wouldn’t be able to access them. I know some writers can do that, I can’t. I have to write things down.

    WALK IT OUT

    The best thing I can do for my writing is to exercise on a regular basis. My favorite thing to do is take a three-mile powerwalk first thing in the morning before the chickens are up. That part of the day where the city is just waking up and the possibilities of the day are endless is where I get a good chunk of thinking done. I often come home from that walk with an insight into the story I’m working on. I’ve solved plot problems, work problems and any number of other things on that walk.

    I can’t emphasize enough how important exercise is to a writer. You have to move your body to stimulate your mind. It’s science, look it up. The data is there.

    It’s difficult to synthesize what I do into five or six hundred words. I hope that the more I think about it, the more I walk it out, I’ll be able to give a more concise and satisfying answer. Maybe not though. Perhaps it’s best that some things are more mysterious than others, yeah?

  • The Work Standard

    Music and whiskey are the secret secrets, folks. Music and whiskey
    My NaNo Workspace in 2011

    You’d think that writing would consist of only a pen or pencil and paper or butt in chair and fingers on keyboard. It’s a  little more than that, sometimes and every writer that works on a computer has his favorite piece of software or favorite kind of pen. We all have rituals and peccadilloes that help us get into the Zone, where all the best writing happens. We use physical tools to trigger the necessary mental state.

    Yeah, it’s weird. Stay with me, though.

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  • Time Again

    “Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.” ~ Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

    As I type this, it’s my present and I’m writing to you in the future about my past. You will read this in your own ‘present’, which will still be my past, so I am traveling in time. Or at least my words are.

    I’ve often thought my favorite book was supposed to be  a classic SF tome like Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars. I’ve read and loved them both multiple times (and discovered connections between the two), but Lightman’s book affected me more than they did. I’ve read Einstein’s Dreams, essentially a meditation on Time, by Alan Lightman a dozen times since it was recommended to me (and others) by the writer Mark Waid at a comic book convention in Kansas City sometime in the 90s.

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  • Paying Attention or Paying Money?

    Harlan Ellison tells people who ask him where he gets his ideas from that there’s a company in Schenectady, NY, that sends him a six-pack of the things for $25 a week. I’ve always loved that answer because it reveals the ignorance of the questioner and allows the answerer the opportunity to pontificate.

    And, being honest, a lot of writers like to talk. It’s part of why we’re writers: we have something to say.

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  • About the Cafe Blog

    Hello!

    We’re the Confabulator Cafe, a group of writers based in Kansas (with one in Texas) at various points in writing careers. Some of us have already been published or are about to be, some of us are ready to start sending query letters to publishers and agents, some of us just plain enjoy writing. What most of us have in common is that we have participated in National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. We also have in common a love of Story whether written, filmed, scored or told over a cup of coffee (or any other beverage). The Cafe is our campfire, if you will, the blog our very own Crier.

    What you’ll find here is us interviewing each other, asking about what we like, how we do what we do and why, how we’re influenced by each other and the world at large and so much more. Each week there’s a new question for the bloggers that’s answered Monday through Thursday and on Fridays everyone in the Cafe chimes in on the Ephemera question.

    We hope you’ll join us by dropping this blog into a feed reader or stopping by often to sample the foamy thoughts of our word baristas. We live on coffee and sweets (especially during NaNo) and we brew our own blends here. Feel free to join the conversation in the comments section of each post and let us know what you think.

    Your friends,

    The Confabulators