The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: story ideas

  • Dreams: The Free-loading Bitches Who Won’t Help Me Write

    For whatever reason, my dreams refuse to be helpful.

    I know there are some authors who claim they get brilliant ideas from dreams. I don’t necessarily hate those people, but I haven’t met them in person either, so I’m not prepared to say we’d be friends.

    I’ve also read at least one article that recommended sleeping as a way to work through your plotting problems. The idea was that you should think about your story, specifically focusing on those areas that were causing you trouble, as you were lying in bed at night. Presumably, you’d eventually fall asleep (after you finally got over the agony of being stuck on a scene that clearly just wanted to be an asshole), and your brain would continue to search for solutions while your body got the rest it needed.

    Then, at some point, either by dream or some early morning/late night revelation, you’d experience a breakthrough. You would have the answers you so desperately needed, and you and your story would live happily ever after, or at least experience some mild feelings of contentment until the next time it decided to dig in its heels and act like a fuckhead.

    That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? To be able to lay your head down on the pillow and then wake up in the morning with fresh ideas and a clear outline of your plot. It would be like some awesome version of the tooth fairy. One whose visit didn’t require a painful, bloody sacrifice followed by the inevitable letdown when you realize her cheap ass is on a one-quarter-per-tooth kind of budget.

    I’d love to be wired that way. But I’m not. My dreams are lazy, free-loading bitches who contribute almost nothing to my fiction.

    (more…)

  • It’s Easier to Dream

    So, one morning I turned on PBS for the child, sat on the couch, and fell asleep. I’d love to give you a time of year or a month or anything, but this is happens so often that I could probably start every day of my life with the same line.

    When I startle awake, I remember one scene in particular: two heavy aircraft (air limo sort of nonsense, really) on a tight curve, racing around a building. As on pilot rams and cripples the other aircraft in an attempt to pull ahead of his bitter rival, he finds out there’s a baby in the crashing aircraft. He rushes to land, desperate to get the baby out, but the cops are already there when he gets down.

    If this sounds familiar, is should — it was the story seed that would become my NaNoWriMo 2012 novel.

    (more…)

  • Leather-Bound Beauties (I’m Talking About Journals, You Pervs)

    I recently watched a video of Stephen King talking to a group of university students. It was a question and answer type of thing, and at one point, the subject of keeping a notebook of ideas came up.

    If I’m remembering this correctly (and in the spirit of full disclosure, it’s completely possible I’m not), King said he didn’t have one. He took a survival-of-the-fittest approach when it came to his ideas. If something occurred to him that sounded like a decent story idea, he’d let it rattle around in his head for a while, along with whatever else was in there at the time.

    If the idea was persistent enough and kept presenting itself, he’d eventually get around to writing it. It was his way of letting the cream rise to the top.

    At this point, I’m going to state the obvious: I am not Stephen King . . . yet. (But I’m comin’ for you, old man. You best be keepin’ a lookout.)

    (more…)

  • The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

    National Novel Writing Month is my favorite time of the year. I see it as a month long holiday designed specifically for writers. A whole 30 days where we can justify putting our writing before pretty much anything else in our lives. A time when new friendships are formed, new worlds are created, and writers everywhere discover their limits – or lack thereof. A month of not enough sleep, way too much caffeine, and thousands of words (around 50,000 of them).

    This will be my eighth year participating, my fourth year as Municipal Liaison for the Lawrence Region, and hopefully my seventh win. It’s kind of fun to think about: winning National Novel Writing Month seven times will mean I’ll have written at least 350,000 words during my writing  career.

    So this November, as Municipal Liaison, I will be writing pep talks, hosting write-ins, spoiling my Wrimos with treats, cheering on those who are ahead and encouraging those who are behind, drinking way too much coffee, trying to fit in the homework assignments for my online class, and also probably finding new ways to procrastinate. (more…)

  • The Creativity Well

    Creativity WellThis has been a good year for writing. Thanks, in part, to the Cafe, I’ve written — and completed — more short stories this year than the past five years combined. And one of my new stories has been accepted for an upcoming anthology.

    Yet, even with all this writing, I still have more stories to write. (There’s always another deadline.) Right now, I’m working on a short story for an anthology about djinn.

    It’s a cliche that readers ask writers where they get their ideas. The question frustrates some writers and enrages others. (Personally, I don’t think anyone has ever asked me. Maybe they don’t think much about my ideas.) (more…)

  • What’s the Big Idea? (Week Ending September 22)

    When people imagine writers working on their craft, some may have an outdated image of the writer hunched over a typewriter, staring longingly out the office window, waiting for inspiration. That just doesn’t happen anymore.

    Some writers may take a languid approach to the craft, but they are few and far between. Most of our writers at the Confabulator Cafe are working hard to get some writing done between the other constraints of their lives: a job, family, exercise, and mundane chores like laundry and grocery shopping.

    So, it probably comes as no surprise that our writers are always trying to find time to write. When they do have time, they don’t have time to stare out a window. They write. Sometimes on three or four things at a time. That’s a lot of creative energy.

    Thankfully, creativity appears to be a renewable resource that — despite what comes out of Hollywood — doesn’t seem to run out. At least, that’s what we hope.

    This week, we’ve asked the writers at the Cafe to discuss what they are currently working on and give their advice on how to refill the gas tank of creativity. We’ve asked them if they ever worry about running out of ideas, and what they do to keep that from happening.

    We hope you enjoy their comments. Please feel free to leave your own each day, and come back all week to read more writing advice from our contributors.

    Until Next Week,

    The Cafe Management

  • Tell Me Your Secrets

    The older I get, the more a particular piece of advice begins to resonate with me. It’s that well-worn writing chestnut: “Write what you know.”

    I honestly have no idea who first said this, and I don’t have a clue as to the context in which it’s meant to be taken. All I can tell you is what it means to me, or what it has come to mean to me, which is maybe the same thing but still feels a little different in my mind.

    Whenever I hear “write what you know,” I immediately think open your diary. Not that I have such a book. Nor is its cover adorned with winged unicorns. And no, it doesn’t feature a gold-filigreed lock that responds to a single key which I wear around my neck night and day. That would be ridiculous, and I am a serious sort of man. Seriously!

    Getting back to the point, opening your diary means putting yourself in your stories. It doesn’t matter what genre you write or when and where your story is set, you’re going to be dealing with characters and situations about which you have an opinion. What better place to tell people what you think.

    (more…)

  • The Care and Feeding of Obsessions

    I don’t have a lot of hobbies any more. I think as you get older and life gets busier, it becomes difficult to make time for the things you aren’t required to do.  Maybe that’s a bad thing. Most likely it is. But it’s a fact of life, and from what I understand, I’m not in this boat alone.

    That being said, not always having time for your hobbies doesn’t mean you let your curiosity go to waste. If there’s a subject that piques your interest even a little, you need to get yourself online or to the library or buried in a reference book, whatever it takes to scratch that intellectual itch.

    It’s easy as a writer to categorize these fishing expeditions as going in search of story ideas, but I think that’s selling the process short. What you’re really doing is satisfying a need to know. You’re curious, so you’ve gone exploring. Even if it’s just along some nameless digital highway, you’re covering ground that’s new to you, and that’s never a bad thing.

    In your search for knowledge, you may or may not find the answers you’re looking for, but in my experience, you always come away with more questions. And more areas that need investigation.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)