The Confabulator Cafe

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  • A Monk of the Order of Bradbury

    “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury

    I am a collector of worthless books.  For some unknown, deep-seated, pathological reason, I have the need to hoard large number of books.  Most were purchased for a buck or two from used bookstores and will never have a financial value worthy of their shelf space.

    Yet, I love them.  I read them.  I gaze at the spectrum of colors and shapes they produce on my bookshelves.  I shamefully smell their crisp, yellowing pages.  But, I rarely re-read them.

    Certainly, I have books I enjoy, even books I love, but with the sort of memory I have, the idea of wasting time reading a book I have already read seems inefficient and clumsy.  The exception has come with two or three particular books.  I enjoy them immensely, but my favorite book of all-time is Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury.

    As a reader, I go through spurts of reading a particular writer.  One of my Bradbury spurts happened along at the same time I was really learning to write fiction.  I’ve read countless tomes on grammar, mechanics, plot and structure.  Most were individually forgettable, although I did get some nugget of information from each that will hopefully someday bear fruit.

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  • What’s your favorite book? (Week of 09 January 2012)

    Welcome back to the Cafe. Part of being a writer is being a reader. Every writer’s got one book they go back to for various reasons. (Or maybe not. Several of us couldn’t pick just one book.) Anyway, we’re telling you this week what our favorites are. Maybe some of them are among your own favorites, maybe you’ll discover some new titles you’ll want to read. Hopefully you’ll be entertained by the answers and enlightened when you get to read some of the work our writers are producing.

    We’re glad you’re here for Week 2 of the Cafe. Get something to drink, pull up a chair and feel free to join the conversation in the comments.

  • What Inspires You to Write?

    Every week we’ll ask the Confabulators a question that may further illuminate the blog question or give you some further insight into our working minds. This week’s question is akin to the one that our bloggers pondered: Where Do You Get Your Ideas? People who are learning to be creative, or who want to know what makes creative people tick, ask these two questions most often. Believe it or not, Inspiration doesn’t necessarily come from Ideas. They’re separate things. Ask anyone. Or read on.

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  • What If?

    A few years ago, I stood barefoot in the middle of my back yard on an early June afternoon, curling the freshly cut grass between my toes. And I thought to myself while I cleaned up my lawn mower, “What if my entire property was just grass? No landscaping, no driveway or sidewalk, no house. Just pristine, green grass.”

    Then I asked The “What If” Question: “What if I lived on a property like that?”

    Six months later I wrote The Emancipation of Bartholomew Benson, the story of a possibly delusional, possible savior-of-humanity farmer, who is torn between raising dairy cattle and annihilating quantum artificial intelligences that threaten to take over the world right beneath our noses. Oh, and he lives in an underground bunker, covered by beautiful, luscious green grass. Of course.

    As writers, we all know that crafting fiction is hard. I think it comes down to the saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction.”  When writing a novel, the logic in our stories has to make perfect sense during every single moment and every single scene. The logic has to be even more believable than the real world. People around you act irrationally all the time in the real world,  but if a character in a story acts irrationally the reader often loses the story thread because they fail to comprehend or empathize with the actions of the character. Your characters can perform extreme acts (i.e. hunt AIs masquerading as utility boxes in people’s basements), but their actions have to follow a logical pattern that the reader can comprehend and accept.

    My solution to the uber-logical storyline constraint has been to keep my stories very simple, at least at conception. The simpler the premise, the simpler the maintenance of that thread of logic that the audience requires while reading my story. Reflecting back on my inspiration for my manuscripts, I see that the start of every story I’ve written has begun with one or two basic questions which I attempt to answer throughout the novel. These “What If” questions have typically fallen into three major categories.

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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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  • Over-rated Origins

    Big ideas and plotting have always been a struggle in my writing. I envision worlds and characters and interactions with ease; sentences and paragraphs come naturally from my fingertips. But climax and plot and sequence? These emerge slowly if at all.

    For years, alas, I thought that I was condemned to writing only of my own limited experiences, using my quotidian existence as source material.  But rarely are happy lives the stuff of good novels (see:  Tolstoy), and I am blessed with a happy life.

    Eventually I figured out that if source materials are good enough for Shakespeare, they’re good enough for me!  So now I mine ideas from the wealth of the texts around me.  I love newspapers, especially the tiny columns of human interest stories that run down the margins, giving two or three sentences of a story–a kernel big enough to build around, but small enough to prevent imprisoning the story in reality.  A few years ago, I read about a young man taking the bibles out of a church before burning it to the ground, as a form of protest against who knows what.  Despite numerous google searches, that story has never resurfaced, but it lives on at the core of two of my three NaNoWriMo novels.

    I also find ideas in the biblical, Old Testament book of Judges.  Now, my dad is a pastor and my origins are deeply religious, even fundamentalist.  In response to this, I strive to embrace the good parts of my heritage of piety and reverence for holy texts, and bring that into my writing.  And the book of Judges is as good as it gets for source tales–sex, lies, and videotape (metaphorical, anyway).  It portrays an anarchic society, or very nearly anarchic, a society making up the rules as it goes along. A society dependent on deeply flawed leaders with limited authority to help them discern justice from injustice.  The most interesting society possible, in other words.  I find ideas in those lives of sinning saints and saintly sinners.  Eventually, once the stories of the judges are exhausted, perhaps I’ll find another holy text to mine–but for now, I draw storied guidance from their faith and follies.

  • There is always a Story.

    Sometimes it’s not a very interesting story. Sometimes it hides itself from you, and sometimes it’s so buried in the weeds of poorly conceived presupposition that you have to get out a metaphorical brush hog to make any sense of it all. But you can take it on faith that there is always a Story.

    I’m a technical writer by trade. You would think the craft of technical writing is all about— well— technique. Marching one word in front of the other from the start to the finish, and making sure they all line up in the correct order. Choosing vocabulary and policing acronyms. Herding commas, nurturing semicolons, recapturing run-on sentences. Describing things. Mundane, boring, everyday things that require procedures and user manuals and progress reports. It’s not literature, or even journalism. I have built a career out of writing the kinds of books that nobody in their right mind will ever want to read [0].

    But there is always a Story.

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  • I Got 99 Ideas but My Hair Ain’t One

    Not what I had in mind

    I always thought the idea thing was a silly question. Worse, I thought it was a cliché, and that nobody ever really asked it. Then a hair stylist (not my regular lady, mind you, somebody new who, apparently, wasn’t sure what to talk about with me while she screwed up my hair) came right out and asked me where I get my ideas.

    I have to admit, I was surprised. In all the dream scenarios where I imagined I was a successful writer, this never came up. I was unprepared. I stammered for a second, then I spit out the first thing that came to my mind.

    “Well, you know,” I said in a conspiratorial whisper, “we’re all insane.”

    It wasn’t at all surprising this answer didn’t satisfy her a bit.

    “I’m just so fascinated with you creative types,” she said. “I guess I don’t have that much imagination.”

    This was made clear once I saw her finished product in the mirror. Somehow my telling her that my hair should look “like I just had sex” translated in her mind to “like I’m on my way to an ‘80s reunion and want to look like a French poodle.”

    I think my problem is I didn’t quite understand the question. I always assumed everyone was picking out pieces of conversation at the next table in a restaurant. I thought everybody was making up a story in their head about the guy walking his dog in the middle of a downpour. I figured everyone remembered snippets of their dreams in the morning and used the pieces to create other worlds.

    Apparently, not everyone is. And that’s okay. If everybody’s brain functioned the same way, it would be a boring world. So, to all the people genuinely curious about where a weirdo like me gets her ideas, I will answer as honestly as I can.

    Ideas come from everywhere.  They come from childhood fears nurtured far into adulthood. They come from broken bits of dialogue overheard in the grocery store. They come from dreams, television shows, movies, games, and books.

    But most of all, they come from you. When you talk to me, there’s always at least a tiny part of my brain listening to how you breathe, watching how your fingers twitch when you talk, and examining that splotch of gravy on your collar.

    Collecting ideas is easy. The tricky part is figuring out which one out of 1000 is worth closer examination.

  • Positively Steaming with Ideas

    If I ever get stumped in a story, or need to come with an idea, I head straight for the shower. It’s about the only place I can go in my apartment where I won’t be interrupted by my adorable cat demanding to be petted and cuddled. It’s a retreat.  But that isn’t the only thing that makes it so ideal for writing. Something about the hot steam and water beating down on my scalp helps clear my head and chase away all the stress of the real world, giving me time to figure out where I need to go in my story from there. Maybe it’s because showering is such a necessary part of the real world that I don’t feel guilty for sitting around and doing nothing. Maybe steam is magical. I’m tempted to believe it is a mixture of the two.

    Once I’ve stepped into the shower, there are usually two ways I gather ideas. In the first way, I draw from situations that happened in my life and left such an impact on me that I still remember them with startling clarity years later. These usually have a tendency to be moments of grief or embarrassment. These ideas tend to come to me unplanned and then float around in my head for months until I finally come up with a way to manipulate them into something interesting and find characters who want to tell that story and make it their own. This is how my latest NaNo novel got started back in May.

    Sometimes as writers, we don’t have the luxury of thinking about an idea for months on end, nor any sudden bursts of inspiration at precisely the right moment. As a Creative Writing major with writing classes every semester, I developed a second way of gathering ideas. I learned how to force myself to come up with stories. Once again, I returned to what I knew. Rather than taking from personal experiences, I turned to my other classes for inspiration. When I took a course on Cleopatra, I wrote poetry about her life. When I was completely uninspired in one of my fiction writing classes, I turned to a play I had written years earlier and found a way to convert it into another format. The story took on new dimensions and allowed me to explore the characters in ways the play formatting had not allowed me to do. (more…)

  • A Strange Mash-up

    To quote the Zen Master Lucas in the 1995 movie Empire Records: “Who knows where thoughts come from? They just appear.”

    Ok, so he wasn’t really a Zen Master, but he makes a valid point. It’s hard for writers to answer the “where do your ideas come from” question because they are like any ideas. We get them from everywhere.

    Some of my ideas come from life experiences, in attempt to follow that old adage to write what you know. Most of what I know is boring, so I have to add monsters to all of my stories, but I make my characters as real as I can by infusing them with organic feelings. Any sorrow, any joy, any outrage can be magnified to create a vivid character.

    What I read and watch and see and hear influences my writing a great deal. While I sleep, or even while I daydream, my brain will come up with strange mash-ups from different sources which result in some of my best story ideas. My subconscious mind will work overtime to take a news story combined with a fantasy novel then weave in something I overheard at work, and the finished product will surface in that surreal place between sleep and awake where you have control over your dreams.

    Sometimes instead of a plot unfolding, a character will bubble up from the depths of my mind and demand I tell his or her story, or a setting will beg for a story to be told within it.

    For writers, anything can become a story. I probably announce on a daily basis that something I’ve seen or heard would make a good story. Just the other day I was walking through a crowded mall full of Christmas shoppers and a horror story emerged from my social phobia-induced panic.

    Nothing is safe from writers. If you know any, be very careful not to do or say anything interesting around them, because it will inevitably find its way into one of their stories. We very rarely credit our sources and tend to over-exaggerate every detail. You never know where our ideas are going to come from, and we steal whatever we can.

    And sometimes they just appear.