The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: inspiration

  • 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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  • People from the future are waiting in the bathroom

    There’s a voice I hear whenever a door opens. It tells me that this time I won’t see what I expect.

    What's in my head
    Every door is another possibility

    Instead of seeing the second floor and the hallway leading to my office, I’ll see a park. Instead of shopping mall, I’ll be in a prison. Instead of a bathroom, I’ll find myself in a waiting room with people from the future.

    People ask writers where they get their ideas. And I wonder what people who aren’t writers think about all day.

    I’m constantly imagining other people and places. I think about names for stories, titles for novels. I pick up words the way a numismatist picks up coins, turning them over and examining them from every side.

    Everything is a potential story, a character, or a setting. The problem is not in finding ideas, but in wading through the overwhelming possibilities to find ideas that are worth exploring.

    But the best ideas come to me when I let my imagination cut loose. For me, this comes easiest when my editor is shut off — or shut out — so I can’t second guess myself. It shouldn’t be surprising that I get my best ideas when I’m dreaming.

    A few months ago, I awoke from a dream about a female superhero. She was new to the business and she didn’t  know her teammates very well. She kept referring to one of them as “the blue guy.” They worked together to save a large group of children from the evil rat king. It was all very odd.

    It became the foundation for the novel I’m currently writing. Most of the details have changed, but the dream was still the starting point. Without the dream, I might never have considered writing in the superhero genre.

    It doesn’t matter where you get your ideas from — whether you get inspired by long, hot showers or digging through trash. Inspiration comes to each person differently. The important thing is that you allow yourself a chance to be inspired.

    Robert Penn Warren once said, “You must cultivate leisure.”

    This is essential to being a writer. To be open to the story ideas around you, your mind must be ready to accept them. If you don’t allow your mind to relax, you’ll never be able to hear the still, small voice of your muse.