The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Influence

  • The Exotic Mundane

    “An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.” – George Santayana

    The writer’s mind is like a sponge, absorbing all moisture from around it, only to spill everything when squeezed. Your life is going to creep in to your writing, even if you don’t subscribe to the “write what you know” belief. Instinct drives the expression of the human mind through art. Writers are artists.

    What’s more, you shouldn’t fight it. Artists are illusionists of reality. We take the real and twist it, deforming fact into fiction. We get our readers to believe our stories by weaving the truth and fantasy into a tight, indistinguishable mesh.

    You absolutely should take aspects of those around you, their quirks, habits, vices, and hobbies. You should use those aspects to create three-dimensional characters. But you should also remember that fiction is fiction, and you must change enough about those people that they can’t sue you for libel or defamation of character. Change their names, appearances, speech patterns, everything.

    Writing is like a puzzle that can be put together many different ways. Unless you are writing non-fiction, you must make sure it is actually a fictional character, no matter how real it seems. Or you can take the advice of Anne Lamott if it is a man. Write that the character has a small penis.  No one will ever claim you were writing about him.

    In recent years, I’ve seen a lot of real life creep in to writing, mostly because I realized it was pointless to write about people living in cities. I’ve never been to a large city, much less lived in one. How could I possibly know what it is like to live in New York City or Los Angeles? Besides, there are more than enough writers writing about those settings. I am familiar with the rural, the suburban, and the dynamics of living in a place where everyone knows about you.

    Very few writers can duplicate that knowledge. I know what it is like to be known by everyone in your area. I know what is like to live in a place where secrets are hard to keep and the difference between friends and enemies is defined by days, rather than names. I know what it is like to have to worry about reputation, not in the media or your career, with your neighbors.

    As such, I dove into reading Flannery O’Conner, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and others who wrote about similar places. These environments are a part of my life, their people a part of my history, and my fiction is richer for using them.

    Don’t be afraid to use the parts of your life that seem mundane. What is mundane for one may be exotic for another. Spice your writing with the ingredients of your life, and make it a truly special concoction.

  • Real Life and Writing (Week of 16 April 2012)

    It’s rare that a writer’s only job is to write stories for our entertainment. Certainly the big names do, and several mid-list authors are able to make that leap into being a full-time writer. We baristas here at the Cafe are writers, but we have other occupations, too. One of the benefits to working out in the ‘real’ world is being able to populate our stories with things that we observe out there.

    That can scare our friends. No one wants their foibles put on display for strangers to see. Unless of course they’re on a cell phone and telling their BFF all about what they did last night. You wouldn’t believe some of the conversations we overhear when the customers think no one’s listening. Or maybe you would.

    This week, our bloggers are answering the question “How has your ‘real’ life crept into your writing? Is there anyone you know in them there words?” No really, that’s how the question was asked. Anyway, tune in every day to see what we have to say about it. Maybe you’ll come to understand that not everyone we meet is a good character though bits of you might get in there. We promise it’ll be enlightening and you could possibly see some of yourself in there.

    If you look hard enough.

    Have a cup of coffee, or tea. Read up on how we writers change things to suit ourselves.

  • Inspiration Given Form

    There is something truly inspirational about a hardware store.

    Wander down the aisles of any good hardware store and marvel at the vast array of objects, each specifically designed to solve a particular problem and yet infinitely repurposable. What makes this particular 7 mm bolt different than that one? What problem was the designer trying to solve? Which grease-infused wrench monkey decided that what the world needed was a screw with a five-sided slot, and why? What can be built with a 60-degree angle bracket? A 45-degree one? A 120-degree one [0]? Hardware is inspiration given form.

    In a really good hardware store, you’re allowed to wander freely, unmolested by salesguys [1], muttering to yourself, picking up objects, stuffing your basket full, and making it halfway to the checkout before turning around, putting everything back where you found it, and starting all over again. They understand the process of creative problem solving, and set up their stores accordingly [2].

    Any time I’m stuck, a trip to a hardware store goes a long way towards unstuck.

    [0] Trick question, of course. The correct answer is “flux capacitor.”
    [1] Really good hardware store managers understand that not all who wander are lost.
    [2] Really good office supply stores do the same thing.

  • The Creativity Hopper

    The first time I was ever moved to tell a story was after watching the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was five years old and visiting my

    grandmother in Alexandria, Virginia. Immediately after seeing the film I had an idea for a sequel. I tried writing down my story as it formed in my imagination… but I found the words coming faster than I could write. I gave a pencil and paper to my father and asked him to take dictation. The thing I was writing, I explained to him, was a sequel to the Indiana Jones movie. It would star a girl, of course. I don’t remember exactly how my story went but it was definitely not anything like Temple of Doom.

    From that first creative impulse as a child until now, movies have been a huge source of inspiration for me. My creativity hopper (in my mind, I picture this as one of those kid’s popcorn popper toys) is full of kernels of ideas.


    Some of these come from memories or dreams, some from current events that I read about in the news, and many come from movies I’ve watched. These kernels of ideas are images and emotions that get jostled around in the hopper, bumping into each other and bringing about a feeling of mystery and excitement that ultimately fuels my own projects. Allowing these unrelated ideas to bump into each other leads to questions like ‘What if?’ and ‘Wouldn’t it be weird…?’ which are the type of questions that spur on my creative process. As an artist I have to be receptive all the time as well as productive. This is why it’s important to me to be sympathetic and open minded. Hopefully by keeping an open and non-judgmental mind I can be open to receiving the ideas that power my creative output.

    The less mystical explanation for why watching movies helps me write is simply that it helps me gain familiarity with storytelling techniques. If I find a movie that resonates with me I watch it several times in order to appreciate every detail and study how the narrative was structured. When watching a movie for storytelling insight, I ask myself a few questions such as: ‘In what order are the facts revealed? What does each character know and when? What does each character want?’ and ‘How does the action of each scene cause the next scene to take place?’ These types of questions help me understand why a story works. I
    believe that those storytelling truths are equally applicable to movies or the written word.

  • Commercial Breaks and Soundtracks

    It’s all music and television for me. Though not together. That’s just silly.

    I’m really into television as a medium. I will marathon a television show just so I can watch a whole story unfold at once; it’s the closest we get to novels in a visual format, if novels had filler episodes. (It’s not a perfect metaphor.) And while I have no interest in ever writing for television, I certainly I think that episodic format influences how I craft and manage scenes within a story.

    First there’s the matter of formatting. I will structure a story in scenes, sometimes on the short side, to set up for one relatively long climactic scene. I will set scenes that end in abrupt points, and jump into another scene as necessary to make sure the story is told as I want to reader to experience it — I can’t imagine telling a story without the best characters on the keyboard: ***. This scene’s over? Eff it — put in a commercial break and get on to the next one. I assume that’s normal, but honestly? I’ve never really paid attention to the way scenes are structured while reading. If I did, something is probably going wrong within the story.

    (more…)

  • All That Surrounds Me

    All sorts of things have triggered something in my head and gotten the idea rolling, then the idea takes hold and I go along and start working it out as I mentioned here. But what kinds of things trigger that moment of inspiration? I’m glad you asked because I was going to if you didn’t. Wait a second…

    Tune in next week for more X! Minus! One!

    Anyway, I’m a huge fan of Old Time Radio. Especially the fantasy/horror shows like The Shadow, Lights Out, Suspense, Inner Sanctum and the list goes on and on. Science fiction shows like X-Minus One are in regular rotation on the iPod. You can find tons of these shows on the Internet Archive site. But the reason these things affect me so much is that they’re so earnest, so in the moment and flying by the seat of their pants and on a tight schedule. In the case of X-Minus One the stories were direct adaptations of now-classic SF from the pulps that were on the newsstand that month.

    While I’m on the subject, I’m also a big fan of The Bob Edwards Show on satellite radio. I’ve got more ideas written down from listening to that show on a daily basis than almost any other interview-type program I’ve heard or watched. I keep a spiral bound notebook with me during the day and that’s what snatches of ideas and phrases go into. There are probably six or seven novels worth of ideas in there.

    Depeche Mode made an exceptional music video for the single Wrong. It’s a couple of years old now, but it’s a beautiful short story told inside a three and a half-minute song. Go watch it, I’ll wait.

    Now tell me you don’t wonder how that guy ended up in the car. Who did he piss off that badly that he ended up like that? I like to think that the video was a nod to the 2008 film The Dark Knight because this seems like the kind of thing the Joker might do. The other music video that really affected me was Mike + the Mechanics’ Silent Running. Remember it was the 80s and videos were being used rather heavily to promote films. Among my friends we kept wondering what the movie was that the song had come from. It wasn’t any kind of promo, though, it was just taking the art form of the storytelling video in a new direction that would culminate in the DM video 20+ years later.

    Gatewood's Olan Sun

    Visual art has a real effect on me, too. I’m a huge fan of anything that combines words and pictures like comics, even Facebook memes and some abstract paintings from artists like William Gatewood. But then the fantasy paintings of Roger Dean and Frank Frazetta have inspired me to write stories to include the settings or scenes these fine commercial artists had in their heads and translated to canvas in vivid color. Even Russian propaganda posters (here’s a great gallery you can buy from if you like) can bring to mind a story possibility.

    I’ve been to local productions of stage plays that have caused me to start thinking. One in particular, Picasso at the Lapin Agile featuring Einstein (him again!) and Picasso on the very edge of possibly their greatest achievements. How could one not come out of that play inspired to explore the thoughts and ideas that are planted there? Same with Angels in America and so many other plays that are packed with capital ‘I’ Ideas.

    A writer is open to all forms of input, to everything that can spark an idea that will rub up against a thought and become Something Else. The only thing that holds one back from being a capital ‘W’ Writer is not being open to the things that will take him to the stories inside.

  • Food, glorious food

    In looking over my Confabulator entries from the past few weeks, I realize that food and cooking are controlling metaphors for how I write and think about writing. Food is, naturally, delicious, and preparing delectable food is a natural metaphor for all types of production,including literary.  I find food to be at the center of human existence, and if there is anything more inspirational than good  coffee, with cheesecake, I have no idea what it might be!

    But this week we are focusing more on how other media influences our writing.  You know, I love movies, and we watch the Simpsons on an infinite loop in our house, but I don’t feel like moving pictures have a major effect on my writing.  The two genres that do influence me are advice columns and liturgy.

    A proliferation of advice columns (many published weekly, with years of archives available for mid-week fixes) is one of the many blessings of the Internet age. I do love the folks that people trust to make narrowly useful ethical decisions for them! Dan Savage and Dear Prudie are my favorites, to be sure, but many lesser luminaries light the way as well.  Once, I thought about writing a NaNo novel from the POV of an advice columnist, but thought better of it when trying to plot character development entirely through one-off letters. But often, I use the format to shape my stories.  Now, what would Prudie say about this situation? How about Dan? How about an advice columnist working in this particular culture…

    I am also influenced by the liturgical settings of my religious tradition.  Long have I planned to write a novel whose structure is based off a church service (start with a greeting, confession, etc, and have hymns sprinkled throughout). Although I have not done this directly yet, I do come up with something else to work on every time I start contemplating it. I like to invent liturgies for the various new religions in my stories, and someday my service-inspired novel will emerge full formed from the oven and be amazing.

    Geez.  Another food metaphor spiced it up this time.  At least I am consistent!

     

  • Writers aren’t what they eat

    Unlike the clever mantra told to children to get them to eat their fruits and veggies, writers are not a product of their nutritional intake. Instead, we are an amalgamation of visual and aural stimuli. We collect these inputs like hoarders, stuffing our minds to the rafters with scenes, characters, stories, dialogues, and anything else we can find. Then we mix everything together into a slurry of deliciousness and spew the whole mess onto the page for our readers to…enjoy? Somewhere this analogy went terribly awry. Oh well. Onwards!

    Visual Influences
    Movies and television shows definitely impact my writing style. I often think very hard about the scenes in my stories and specifically try to address how they would translate to television or the big screen. Usually, though not always, I try to rewrite passages that would prove difficult to film. My reasoning is that anything that won’t translate to a visual medium means I’m doing too much telling, and not enough showing in my writing.

    That said, I still like leaving a lot of room for my reader’s imagination, so I tend to focus on television shows and movies where the actors and directors apply a subtle approach. I pay attention to conversations with lots of unspoken dialogue that’s communicated instead through body language and subtle nuanced behavior.

    Some examples of media that has specifically impacted me would be movies like Ocean’s Eleven and Inception, as well as the television series Battlestar Galactica. In Ocean’s Eleven, many of the dialogue scenes are starkly brief and snappy. Characters speak to one another in clipped phrases, leaving the audience to figure out the undercurrent of the conversation. In Inception, each character displays a clear archetype in the story, and each set piece is incredibly distinct and necessary to the story. Again, conversations are kept short and to the point, and plenty of room is left for the viewer to interpret events as they see fit.

    My favorite aspect of Battlestar Galactica was the complicated yet believable romantic dilemmas many of the characters faced. In particular, the love triangle of Starbuck, Apollo, and Anders. Starbuck, who was once engaged to Apollo’s brother, has an on-again, off-again affair with her almost-brother-in-law. She’s torn between her love for Anders and her irresistible physical and emotional attraction to Apollo. Self-loathing and bitterness cause each of the three characters to constantly try to extinguish and then rekindle the bonds that bind them together, and the resulting emotional orbits are incredibly rewarding to watch. Again, I’m drawn by the subtle way some of these scenes played out. The things that weren’t said, or weren’t shown on screen, were just as interesting as the things we got to watch on-screen.

    When I’m watching a movie or show that I like while I’m writing, I pay particular attention to certain details. I try to pay attention to different conversation styles, and the dynamics that arise between characters. I like to think about why something works in the visual media, and how it would translate (or not translate) to written media.

    Aural influences

    Music also plays a vital role in my writing process, but it’s not quite as direct as the visual. I use music primarily as background noise to drown out the real world and let me submerge myself into my writing. When I’m working, the music I listen to is almost always instrumental and low-key. That said, I will choose certain musical styles to inform certain scenes. Sometimes I want light, classical music to influence my tone, while other times I need dark, complex melodies to color my writing. Recently, I’ve listened to modern music from Hans Zimmer, Jonny Greenwood, Christopher O’Riley, and Philip Glass, as well as the classics like Bach, Beethoven, Bartok, and Grieg.

    When I’m not writing, but I’m in the midst of the writing process, I tend to listen to music with lots of interesting, poetic lyrics, or weird, mind-bending melodies. Bjork, Radiohead, Cocorosie, The Cure, and Peter Gabriel come to mind, but there are plenty of others. What I’m seeking is music that captures simplistic themes using sparse, beautiful phrases in both tone and vocabulary. My hope is that when I return to writing, the poetry of the music will act like a mild seasoning for my own writing, giving it a slightly higher level of artistic writing without drowning the reader in flowery prose.

    Sundry Influences

    What else influences me during writing? Let’s see: lots of sugar, lots of caffeine, and lots of not-sleep. I’m a sprinter, so my writing efforts are always bursts of creativity spurred by the frantic pace of NaNoWriMo or some other artificial deadline drawn in the sand. I envy folks that write methodically and regularly, but I don’t see that in my future.

    Last, but far from least, is the writing of my fellow writers. During November, nothing gets me more excited to write than seeing the most recent passages being crafted by my fellow authors. Every year I feel humbled, and challenged, and inspired by the incredible creativity of the small group of writers I’ve come to know and love in my local community and on the internet. They play an absolutely critical role in motivating me and inspiring my writing.

  • Seriously, Try This at Home

    Sometimes external influences are awesome for writing. Sometimes they’re really not. Sometimes only in moderation.

    There are three things that do wonders for my writing ability when consumed in moderation:  caffeine, sugar, and alcohol. Of those three, caffeine has the most positive effect on me… it is also what I can have the most of before my story mutinies against me and my fingers vomit letters on the page—sometimes they even form words, even more rarely they form complete thoughts. That’s all provided that the shaking doesn’t do me in first and I don’t end up in the fetal position twitching. (more…)

  • You Influence Me, You Really Influence Me

    Everything I see, everything I do, eat, touch, and hear influences my writing in some way.

    Television gives me an idea of what works and what doesn’t in character reactions and motivations. Sometimes If I can figure out within the first five minutes of a show who the murderer is, maybe something went wrong in the telling. Sometimes it’s more about recognizing patterns in a particular show. The same writers, the same characters, the same circumstances—in some shows that pattern gives away the murderer to someone who’s spent several seasons analyzing each episode. It doesn’t mean it’s a mistake, necessarily. But it is something for a writer to take away to either use or avoid in her own work.

    Movies, like TV, are for learning what works and doesn’t work. In this longer form, I can learn about the effective (and ineffective) use of tension and how it rises and falls to carry the story forward. I believe you can learn as much, if not more, from a bad movie as you can a good one.

    Food has to come into play, too. In my series, I have a closet monster who’s a gourmet chef. I am not a gourmet chef. This means I have to pay attention when we go out for a really good meal. A special New Year’s Eve menu we had at a local restaurant two years ago made its way into book two. The scene required a very fancy menu, and I still had the menu from New Year’s. I ate that meal myself. It was phenomenal. So I reused it on a dinner-cruise scene.

    Music is not so much about learning for me as it is about mood.

    I don’t think there’s a quicker way to influence a person’s mood than with music. Songs tend to be short, maybe three minutes long, and yet in the space of that time I can have all my worries lifted off my shoulders or be reduced to tears. It’s a kind of magic all on its own. When I write, I only play music without lyrics, since I need my own words to go on the page. But mood is everything. When I’m writing about Zoey, I often to listen to the Final Fantasy station on iTunes radio. When I write my djinn stories, I listen to music that sounds more like it’s for belly dancing.

    Art is for inspiration more than any other medium. I can stand in front of a painting of a woman in a chair for a half hour, wondering about her life, whether she was happy, if she had any pets or children or bad habits. After a day spent at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, my fingers itch. My eyes are unfocused and my thoughts are far away. All those paintings and sculptures swirl around in my head and form characters and scenes in faraway places.

    For a writer, everything is influential. It’s all or nothing. If we closed ourselves off from our surroundings, we wouldn’t have anything to write about.