The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Influence

  • Influence

    W. Someset Maugham has been credited with stating “Write what you know.” He also has been quoted as say, “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.”

    Sounds as if he might have had his good days and bad days in the creative process, too. And not only that, his edict to “write what you know” has been misused by many composition teachers and abused by their students who seem to prefer the second quote …

    Nevertheless, I write what I know. And then I slip into my “what if …?” mode, steal from every single author I’ve read and every person I’ve known, and assemble my stories out of bits and pieces, and what I end up with is a jigsaw-puzzle-like story of life.

    Most of my characters are assimilation and assemblages, but a few of them are directly based on one or two people I’ve known, at least at the beginning of their “lives” in my novels, until they take off on their own while I follow them and jot down their exploits in “What if …? Land”. What if I gave the sunny-faced girl I remember from my first period Junior English class more responsibility than she can handle? What if I dropped a black basketball player into a small town and forced him to play football? What if I placed a metal detector into the hands of a gay kid and sent him to the scene of a crime sixty years ago? What if I killed almost everyone off except for a teenager who has run away from home and manages to find a place of safety?

    Author influences on me are many and varied, but most of them are from the first books I read while growing up. Walter R. Brooks taught me how to generate humor in his “Freddy the Pig” series as did Hugh Lofting in the Dr. Dolittle novels. Nevil Shute showed me how to create happy endings that could be both satisfying and believable. Robert A. Heinlein was at least the first writer to create living, breathing creatures for me, and his contemporary, Arthur C. Clarke, taught me how to create settings that never existed out of what I knew, or at least suspected. Mackinlay Kantor and Jan de Hartog showed me how to create alternate histories and populate them with almost-real characters. And the list goes on.

    So – write what you know, but then be prepared to break any and all rules of writing. Works for me!

  • When Real Life & Fiction Collide

    I’m not the kind of writer who brandishes the threat, “You might be in my next novel.” It’s not that I have any problem with it — that Joe Buckley thing is hilarious — but it’s just not my thing. I feel weird appropriating the people and situations I know.

    I actively have trouble using real places, because then I feel an intense pressure to get everything right. I’ve got no trouble making details up on the fly. This town has an indoor pool! This town has a series of underground tunnels! These are cool when I’ve invented a town and there are no real-life rules to follow.

    Real world example!

    I was living in Manhattan, Kansas, when I was working on my first novel. Every day I used to drive home from work on Anderson, and I’d pass a street called “Edgerton.” I thought to myself That’s a cool name for a town. My main character should be from Edgerton, Wisconsin. Cool. I make up a town and set two chapters in it. I move on with my life. Good times.

    Fast forward several years later, because this is a blog post and blog time is like that. My husband and I are driving up visit my family in Wisconsin. I happen to be skimming the atlas while we’re driving, and what should I see?

    (more…)

  • The Wild and the Innocent

    This is the edition of the book I got from the library
    Michael Moorcock was one of my favorite authors after I read this in my junior high school years. I read everything of his I could find.

    Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

    This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, places or things are unintentional or used fictionally.

    I’m telling you a true story, but I’ve changed things around to make it more believable.

    All these I’ve read or heard or seen in some form or fashion across books, magazines, films and television shows. You have, too. This is a writer’s attempt to say: “Hey, I wrote this thing that you may recognize yourself in, but I’m trying to reassure you that it’s not really you. Not really. I promise. Please don’t sue me. I don’t make enough money to make it worth your while, okay?”

    One of the books of my youth presented itself as a true story of time travel. Michael Moorcock presented The Land Leviathan as a true account from a distant relation, one Oswald Bastable. I was young and didn’t believe it or at least I didn’t believe it much. It lent the story an air of gravitas that certainly made quite an impression on my teenage mind.

    Looking back through the fog of decades, I believe that Moorcock based Bastable on someone he knew. He likely changed things like physical details, perhaps speech patterns and even little things like nervous habits. It’s entirely possible that Bastable was unrecognizable to the person who he was based on.

    Or maybe Bastable was real and so was the tale. I like to think it was real and that Moorcock cleverly disguised it as fiction to keep everyone guessing. A sort of double-blind, as it were.

    In my own work, I have used names of people I know as a kind of tribute. My comic book friends were in cryogenic sleep on a deep space mission to colonize a new world. A couple of my Twitter friends showed up as monster hunters in a chapter of the book I serialized on my website a couple of years ago. Some of the Confabulators will show up in a future work that I’m near to completing right now. In each case, I did it with no subterfuge and without doing anything that would damage them in any way. It’s fun to do.

    Even though there are people in my stories named after friends, they’re not real. They can’t be. Flesh and blood are not the same thing as words and phrases.

    As far as my own experiences, of course they inform my stories. When I travel I look for settings to use in stories, local color to include in them somewhere. Without fail I will change them to suit the tale because a shopkeeper is a shopkeeper whether in Colorado three years ago or on a distant planet in the far future. I will endeavor to make the story more true by changing everything I can to ensure the internal logic is solid, that it makes for a good read.

    So if you see your name in one of my stories, it’s not necessarily you. Maybe I thought of you when I was writing, but maybe not. Maybe I just lifted your name because I was struggling to come up with something. If that character is dressed like you, acts like you and seems to be you, relax: it’s not you. I promise.

    It’s not a true story. It’s a work of fiction. Names and places were changed. I don’t write biographies. Don’t sue me, okay?

  • A splash of reality

    In L.M. Montgomery’s semi-autobiographical Emily Climbs, the title Emily publishes a novel after years of pursuing a career in writing.  She recounts to a friend that half her family is offended because they are sure they appear in the novel, and the other half is equally offended that they do not appear!

    Emily’s experience has been instructive to me; while I would not ban my daily reality from my writing, I don’t seek to adapt experiences or characters directly from it, either.  Part of this is an ethical decision.  Most of my daily experiences now are in the classroom, and I believe it’s unethical and a little exploitative for me to write too directly about specific students or classroom situations.  Of course, my own experiences there and the understandings that I’ve developed from them influence my writing a lot, but all specifics from my school world must be invented, composite, or otherwise disguised.

    I am a little more comfortable mining my family history for skeletons.  My father is an inveterate story-teller, and stories of his grandparents, my grandparents, and generations of uncles and cousins undergird my entire storytelling vocabulary.  I still try to avoid adapting characters directly from the family, although some of the larger-than-life figures became myths so long ago that I figure they wouldn’t even recognize themselves and are fair game.

    But mostly, my life isn’t that exciting.  Were I to write it down, it would make for very boring books. Indeed, when I was in college I did try to write down stories from my student life, but as it turns out the angst filled coming-of-age of mostly middle class, mostly white, mostly Midwestern college students does not make for riveting prose.  Now I know people from many more diverse walks of life, and their stories are probably pretty interesting–but they are not my stories, and I try not to steal others’ stories.

    One place that I see reality splashing in is when I learn new skills or knowledge sets; my last novel had a lot more specifics of plant life than my first two, since I started gardening between those novels!  Now I’ve started sewing and trying to make more of my own garments–and lo and behold, my characters suddenly have a lot more ideas about the specifics of clothing manufacture.  Certainly, living informs writing, but for me it doesn’t take it over. Reality is overrated, anyway–if the text doesn’t splash me into a reality more vivid, or more gritty, or more refined, or more something than my own reality, then why would I read it?  Why would I write it?

  • Worry Wart

    I write about things that worry me.

    When I think about the stories I’ve written over the years, the common theme is:

    • Flawed characters
    • Struggling to overcome a societal issue
      • usually caused by overreliance or abuse of technology
      • sometimes caused by scientific hubris
      • often compounded by environmental collapse
      • often a result of overcrowding and/or overuse of natural resources

    Why do I write stories that deal with these types of issues? Because these questions and concerns are the ones that plague me every day. How can humankind sustain itself given the rapid depletion of natural resources we’re currently experiencing? Can technology provide solutions? If so, can it do so quickly enough to halt or reverse the damage we’ve done already? And will there be unintended consequences to our corrective actions? As a teacher of technology, I’m constantly bombarded by the wonderful advancements we’re making in science and industry. I’m also constantly struck by how much harm many of those advancements can cause, either directly or tangentially. And it worries me.

    I love science fiction, and one of the major reasons why is that, as an author, I can choose to answer the questions above any way I see fit. I can (and usually do) choose to provide salvation for my characters and the planet on which they reside – a light at the end of the tunnel. Usually that light is much too faint for my characters to see at the beginning of their journey, hidden in the far distance behind many twists and turns. And more often than not when they return from their subterranean adventures, blinking and confused, they’re nowhere near where they expected to be. But sometimes, just making it back to the surface and breathing fresh air again is enough.

    Because, frankly, sometimes I feel like the real world’s not going to be so lucky.

    As for whether or not any particular people I know make it into my stories, the short answer is: sure. Not exact copies, but caricatures of friends, family, and coworkers sneak into my stories all the time. More telling is that my protagonists are almost always some shade of myself. Given that my main characters are often trying to save the world from imminent destruction, who wouldn’t want to be cast in that role, at least in some small part? I’m guessing that’s true of most authors, and authors that deny it aren’t being completely truthful.

    So, returning to a common writing mantra: I write what I know. What I know is what worries me, how I feel about it, and what I wish I could do about it. That’s what (and why) I write.

  • Freudian slip

    As far as I know, there is no one from my real life making appearances in my fiction. I do not deliberately make characters out of people I have known. I have sometimes made characters who have similar demographic information to me, or similar age-related issues. But these characters have been no easier to write than the characters who have nothing in common with me.

    For example, one of my screenplays is about a post-college female job seeker. I myself have been a post-college female job seeker, but that character was just as difficult to write convincingly as the retired military man, child prodigy, or engineer centaur. I have written about people looking for jobs or finding happiness in making art. These are experiences I have had. But I also write about things that are not possible in the real world like man-eating shrubbery, which is definitely not based on anything I have experienced in my own life.

    Having ruled out that I am deliberately putting myself or people from my real life into the characters in my writing, I still have to examine the possibility that it is happening unconsciously. I have certainly had the experience of reading a novel and thinking to myself “Gee Bob, your Freudian slip is showing.”  What if I am revealing more of myself through my characters than I intended to?

     

    Like I explained in my post “The Creativity Hopper,” writing for me involves taking in everything around me, letting it bounce around inside my mind, then spitting it back out. This means that the filter that I look at the world through colors my perception of things. It also means that my own personal feelings about issues influence how ideas bounce around and stick to one another. What I think about those topics will also affect how I present them in my writing. That’s a lot of bias. I consider myself a postmodern writer and try to be honest about my bias. That doesn’t mean I’m in the business of writing autobiographical stuff. So the idea that my work would be transparent enough that others could glean information about me by reading my fiction is, in a word, terrifying.

    I need to have faith that I am not subconsciously basing characters on real life people in order to preserve my calm and continue creating without being hampered by self-consciousness.

    The truth is characters aren’t the most important part of my writing anyway. I don’t get too attached to them, and I don’t try to mold them into anything specific because my philosophy is to just make characters do whatever needs to happen next in the story. In that way I gravitate toward plot-based stories as opposed to what I’ve heard people describe as “character-driven” stories. When I’m reading a book I am more likely to ask “Then what happened?” rather than “What’s she like?” If the story I’ve written is good, characters won’t need to be described because they will show what they are like through the decisions they make. In that way, I hope to be more like the characters in my stories rather than making the characters more like me.

  • Writers Are Thieves

    I'm in yur lifes, stealin' yur wurdz.

    Nothing anyone says is safe in my house. Not only do we have two writers, we also have a teenage daughter who will take the most offhand remark, laugh maniacally, then immediately post it without explanation or context on her Facebook page. (The Boy is pretty safe. He’s a musician and deals more with musical notes and philosophical truths. He rarely updates his FB status.) The Girl, however, has a flair for sharing the ridiculous.

    She gets that from me, unfortunately.

    I like a good challenge. Some are self-inflicted, and some come directly from others. Sometimes a piece of real-life dialogue is so silly, it begs for a new context. In Monster in My Closet, there were two separate lines I had to find a use for: “My bread fell asleep in the toaster” and “The problem is, you’ve got to have movie-time attitude.” They made little sense in real-life when they were spoken, but inserting them into a story? Challenge accepted.

    I also like to drop inside jokes into the manuscript, just to make my husband laugh. I never expect them to make it through edits, but so far, I’ve managed a Ghostbusters and a Raiders of the Lost Ark reference that made it all the way to the galley stage, so they’re permanent.

    In Pooka in My Pantry, in honor of my best friend from childhood (who’s also my hardest critiquer), and also in honor of our fourth-grade teacher, I dropped in a little scene about a mess in a girls bathroom—one which I recreated from something she and another girl actually did. It was epic and included yogurt and a peanut butter sandwich. I felt it needed to be immortalized, even if it was only a few sentences in a short conversation in the book.

    As someone who’s known me longer than any other non-family member, she also picked out my dislike of goats from a zoo scene. Zoey’s flashback was a real childhood event wherein a goat in a petting zoo tried to eat my dress and scared the hell out of me.

    And while we’re talking about it, Zoey herself is more like me than I’d like to admit. Everybody who reads the books tells me she’s me. Well, no, she’s not. Not intentionally. But when people at a checkout counter stop her and tell her their life stories with no prompting whatsoever—yeah. That’s me. It happens every time I leave the damn house. Hell, it happens when I don’t leave the house. My son laughed when the pizza guy (with no prompting from me, I swear) started rambling on about his problems. Hand to God, I even had a shrink do it once while I was sitting in his office.

    So, yeah. Real life goes into what I write.

    I guess that’s what they mean by “Write what you know.”

  • Saravision

    One of my dearest writing friends, Jack Campbell, Jr., told me once that there is nothing fictional about fiction. “Fiction is just a distortion of our dreams and nightmares.” Every plot, every character, every snippet of dialog contains a part of me. If you were to dissect everything I had ever written and put it all together, you would know me better than my closest friends and family who haven’t ever read any of my work. Especially if you were a writer.

    Writers understand what goes into writing. We understand each other on a level our normal friends and family never could. They see us in our day to day lives, in a real life setting, making the most out of the lives we are given, while other writers can see the world how we envision it by looking at what we’ve created. They can interpret what is hidden deep within our subconscious mind. Zero drafts in particular are the most telling – they are almost flow of consciousness style writing, seen before the author has a chance to edit or censor their thoughts.

    There really aren’t new ideas as far as stories. Everything has been done. The difference is every single one of us has a different view of the world. Our backgrounds shape who we are which in turn shapes how we write or even what we write about. Only I can tell a story a certain way. It is my point of view that makes it unique. A cliché might be cliché, but my particular spin on it makes it somewhat new and different.

    Everything in my life has crept into my writing. My hopes and dreams, as Jack said. My bitterness, my pain, my happiness, my sense of humor. The people I know, the conversations I’ve had. My writing is an amalgamation of everything I’ve read or watched or listened to chewed up and spat back out. It’s the world seen through my particular rose-colored glasses. When you read something I’ve written, you put on my glasses and see the world in the particular tint that I see it.

    Saravision.

    It may not always be obvious, but what I write is me. Distorted, translucent, inverted or twisted, substituted or hyperbolic. Everything I write is a seed taken from something of myself and cultivated into something somewhat recognizable, if you know what to look for.

  • You wouldn’t know me from my writing

    Palm trees and an ocean view
    I prefer to write about places I know well. Someday, all of my stories will be set here.

    For years, I heard my writing teachers telling me to put more of my own experiences into my writing. I’ll be honest with you, though. My life was pretty boring. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to read about me.

    I don’t like writing about real life. I prefer the odd, the strange, and the fantastic. I’m more at home talking about people with superpowers than work, relationships, or my efforts to catalog my DVD library.

    But here and there, my real life has started slipping into my writing. A woman in my short story reminds me of my wife. And the banter she shares with the protagonist is reminiscent of the way my wife and I finish one another’s thoughts.

    Other characters, too, reflect certain aspects of people I know: an old friend, a mentor, or an obnoxious guy at work. Of course, I have to do something to make them interesting. So sometimes that guy in my office turns out to be a tasty snack for a demon or an early casualty in an alien invasion.

    Mostly, though, it’s settings that I steal from real life.

    I’m no good at imagining cities I have never lived in. I couldn’t write a hard-boiled detective noir set in 1950s L.A. I can’t write about New York City. I’ve tried writing about Florida, but it’s been 20 years since I lived there. I’m sure it’s changed a bit.

    The only reason I set my current novel in Chicago is because I’ve actually visited there recently. Well, that and the fact that I destroyed half the city before the story began. The streets of “New Chicago” don’t have to bear a strong resemblance to what exists there now. I have kept a few of the neighborhood names, and some landmarks. But I had to spend hours pouring over Google Maps and  Wikipedia pages to make sure I managed to get those details right.

    For now, I’ll stick with people and places I know, even if I have to change them up a bit to make them more interesting.

    As Jimmy Buffett once sang:

    “Don’t try to describe the ocean if you’ve never seen it.
    Don’t ever forget that you just may wind up being wrong.”

  • The Upside to Hearing Voices

    I had a plan once.  It was all about writing hard-boiled detective fiction with gritty characters and heart-rending drama.  I was an acolyte of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and I wanted to communicate to people that the life we lived was a gritty and brutal existence.

    Here’s the problem with that scenario: I didn’t know what the hell I was talking/writing about.  I grew up in rural Oklahoma, and the threat of crime was not a significant part of my life.  I also went to small, public schools where being a smart-ass know-it-all translated to very few significant ass kickings, if any.  I was by no means a kid of privilege, but I didn’t fear going out after dark either, unless I’d watched a little too much creature feature the night before.

    As much as I loved the works of Hammett and Chandler and would later come to respect some of the novels by Dennis Lehane, particularly Gone, Baby, Gone, when it came to writing my own stories, I had very little to add to this particular vein of fiction.  I had no common experience, or even knowledge of someone who did, so my work lacked authenticity.

    A kind and honest professor in grad school once told me, “Maybe you’re too nice of a guy to write this kind of stuff.”  I completely ignored him at the time because what did he know.  He was only a kick-ass writer who’d been published many times over (I mean, seriously, the balls on that guy!) and I was nearly finished writing yet another novel of the type for which he felt I was ill-suited.  This guy’s truth and I did not see eye to eye.

    Fast forward several years later, and I finally wised up a little.  I stopped ignoring the voices in my head.  They talked like the people I’d grown up with, and the ridiculous things they wanted to do made me laugh.  The characters still take themselves seriously, but the reader doesn’t have to.  I don’t think you can help but put yourself in your stories, either through events you’ve experienced or attitudes you’ve held.  But when you flip through one of my stories, I want you to have a little fun, enjoy a little escape.

    Life has enough serious drama of its own.  I see no reason to add to it.  I’d get schooled if I even tried to step onto that court.  I just want to make you chuckle.  (It’s honestly more of a need at this point).