Sudden Realizations and Other Misnomers

by Matt Sinclair

I recently attended a wake for a high school classmate who passed suddenly and way too young. As often happens, the wake became a bit of a reunion with other old friends and dredged up memories good, bad, and potentially litigious.

Later, I thought I could probably write up a short story inspired by the experience. So many scenes could be played: conversations with old classmates in the receiving line; meeting the widower and his sons; waiting for old friends outside the funeral home; drinks and storytelling afterward. Presumably, almost any adult could relate to the situation.

Of course, the universality of the situation has its appeal, but it also is a trap. It's too easy to retell the same story that everyone knows, to scrape the dirt off the same old bones, so to speak. Then again, perhaps you use the death of a friend as part of a novel in which the protagonist is propelled further to some epiphany. It might even be believable if written well.

But doesn't it all seem a bit too convenient? Not the death of my friend, of course. That's a family in the midst of real pain and sorrow. I imagine being the child whose parent died during the summer and starting high school without that rock you took for granted to keep you stable. What if the child's parents had been living apart and now the school year starts in a place with no established friends. What was the relationship between the parent and the child during the separation, and how has it changed?

As writers, we wade through story ideas most every day. Sometimes we pick a shiny one up right away, but more often they wash over us without our ever realizing it. Only later, usually when we're writing, do we net a few of their larvae in the shoals of our subconscious mind and help them germinate into a flash of inspiration. And we often never know who to thank for those ideas, those "sudden" glimpses of what is possible.

What inspires you? Do you memorialize your past, present, and future "yous" and those who've walked with you along the way?

Matt Sinclair, a New York City-based journalist and fiction writer, is also president and chief elephant officer of Elephant's Bookshelf Press, which recently published Battery Brothers, a YA novel by Steven Carman about a pair of brothers playing high school baseball and about overcoming crippling adversity. In December, EBP will publish Billy Bobble Makes a Magic Wand by R.S. Mellette. Matt also blogs at the Elephant's Bookshelf and is on Twitter @elephantguy68.

Writing: Do It Because You Love It

Sounds easy, right? Of course you write because you love it. Or at least, that’s how you started.

Do you still?

Are you writing the book of your heart every time? Or are you chasing trends because you’re in love with the idea of selling a book – any book – to the highest bidder?

It’s surprisingly easy to slip into the latter situation, usually without even realizing it. And more often than not, it doesn’t result in our best work nor pan out as we hope.

So how do you know if you love that book? I don’t mean do you love drafting or revising or the many stages of building a book – I mean, do you love the story? Does it resonate with you? Do you have to write it?

There was point when I was deep in the seemingly endless query trenches that I stopped and started several possible books over the course of a few months. At first, I thought they were great ideas. Why wouldn’t they be? I’d recently read books just like them! Of course they’d get snapped up. But I couldn’t finish them.

They didn’t feel right. They didn’t feel like mine.

It took me a while, but I finally figured out (for me) which ideas are worth pursuing. It’s the ones that grab hold of me and shake until words come out my ears. It’s the ones with characters who wake me up in the middle of the night demanding I listen to them.  Or whose voices are so persistent I can’t follow a real conversation and end up so startled a human is speaking to me, I spit water out on the floor of a fancy restaurant (fun fact: this actually happened the night the idea for MONSTROUS landed in my head. Yes, I am the smoothest person you know.)

For me, it's the ones that I can't not write that I keep forging ahead on, even when drafting feels like pulling taffy from my brain, and revision like hacking my way through a jaguar-infested jungle. If I didn't love them, I'd never get through with all my gray matter and limbs intact.

How about you? Do you love the book you're writing now? How do you know?

MarcyKate Connolly writes middle grade and young adult fiction and becomes a superhero when sufficiently caffeinated. When earthbound, she blogs at her website and spends far too much time babbling on Twitter. Her debut upper MG fantasy novel, MONSTROUS, will be out from HarperCollins Children's Books in Winter 2015.

Spring Cleaning

by Matt Sinclair

Call me crazy, but I’m thinking about tossing away story ideas.

Sure, I’ve been asked the same questions you probably have heard: Where do you get your ideas? What made you think of that? Did that really happen to you?

Those are not exactly the ideas I’m talking about. Most of those are the snippets of life that spill from your muse while you’re writing. They’re subconsciously woven into your nervous system and accessed by the magic of creativity, when a word or smell or that je ne sais quoi causes them to be transformed from brain zit to written word.

I’m talking about story ideas. I keep a folder of story and book ideas—fiction and nonfiction—and every once in a while when I’m unable to think of something, I look into it. But when I rap my knuckles against them, they usually sound hollow. So why hold onto them? Not that they take up a lot of space in my hard drive, but maybe it’s time for a little spring cleaning.

To tell you the truth, it’s the ideas I don’t even need to look for, the ones that are always within easy reach, that cause my synapses to fire up with energy. My brain starts to say, “Is it finally time? Can we get moving on that one? Cool!”

You might ask why I’d put those perfectly good ideas aside. Lord knows I’ve asked myself that question often enough. But sometimes I can just tell that I’m not the writer I need to be yet to pursue them. There’s one, for example, that’s an end-of-life, final-act story. And while I learned a lot when my father passed away a few years ago, I don’t see myself being able to write that particular novel yet. There could be any number of legitimate reasons (and probably three times as many illegitimate reasons) to not start a project yet. If you're honest about it, you'll know.

What I’m getting at is that it’s ok to let some of those glittery ideas you once liked go away. The ones that keep coming back, those are the real keepers.

What do you think? Do you try to write all your ideas down? Do you fear losing good ideas?

Matt Sinclair, a New York City-based journalist and fiction writer, is also president and chief elephant officer of Elephant's Bookshelf Press, which recently published its latest anthology, The Fall: Tales from the Apocalypse, which is available via Amazon and Smashwords. Earlier in 2012, EBP published its initial anthology, Spring Fevers, which also is available through Smashwords, and Amazon. Both anthologies include stories by fellow FTWA writers, including Cat Woods, J. Lea Lopez, Mindy McGinnis, and R.S. Mellette; R.C. Lewis and Jean Oram also have stories in The Fall. EBP is still accepting submissions for its next anthology, which will be published in the summer of 2013. Matt blogs at the Elephant's Bookshelf and is on Twitter @elephantguy68

Perspective on Our Times

by R.S. Mellette

My neighbor will turn 100 years old this month. She was as old as I am now when I was born. When she was one year old, the first drive-in gas station was built, bringing the total number of gasoline-purposed buildings up to 3 in the whole country.

I think of her every time I see commercials on TV for natural gas drilling in America, where they say that—using fracking—we have 100 years of gas reserves. By the time I'm my neighbor's age, the country will be halfway out of gas. By the time someone born today is her age, we will have no gas reserves at all, so I wonder what the gas lobby is bragging about.

Why do I bring this enviro-political hot potato up in a writing blog? Because of something a Turkish acting teacher told our class at North Carolina School of the Arts 30 years ago. "Know the politics of your character," she said, and followed up with, "the politics of most American characters is none at all, which is just as telling."

And I think of Steinbeck, who was 10 years old when my neighbor was born. He told stories of families and working class individuals against the backdrop of the only economic times worse than those we are living in today.

I think of Mark Twain, who died just two years before my neighbor was born. He recorded the voices of America from his youth, when this was not a free country for many of the people who built it.

And I wonder what young Twain might live in Arizona? What Steinbeck might now be on the road to a North Dakota oil boomtown? For the first time in world history, we have to change our economy from a high-density fuel source (fossil fuels) to a lower one (hydrogen, solar, wind). Will we have a writer to take us through this change the way Charles Dickens (died 42 years before my neighbor was born) took us from wood to coal, or Upton Sinclair (34 when my neighbor was born) from coal to oil?

Sure, you might not write about these world changing events, but if your stories are contemporary, they should be included. They play in the background. They are the undertow to the waves your characters face. And we, as authors, owe it to our society to record their effects.

We writers are all Tom Joad. He promised to "be there" and so should we.

R.S. Mellette is an experienced screenwriter, actor, director, and novelist. You can find him at the Dances With Films festival blog, and on Twitter, or read him in the Spring Fevers anthology.

Have I Got an Idea for You

by Matt Sinclair

Somewhere between rinse and repeat it happened: The idea! What idea? Wait, was it the one for the blog post, for that troubling scene in my manuscript, or that money-maker that just needs a little tweaking. Damn! What idea just went down the drain?

Ideas will come and go, and no matter how many pads of paper you have lying around or digital audio recorders that seem to pick up more ghostly electronic voice phenomena than cogent story ideas, you just don't seem to catch all of them.

You're a writer. Don't sweat it.

Don't sweat it, he says? Easy for him to say!

Yes, it is. My first editor had a bumper sticker on her wall: Deadlines amuse me. Of course, deadlines need to be met, and they are, but they may not always be met with the excellence you expect when the date is assigned. The best way to alleviate that problem, in my opinion, is to keep writing.

When you write every day, your mind seems to change. I don't know exactly why, but I liken it to the way bodies undergo natural transformations when they exercise regularly. When you write every day, whether it's on your fiction or on a newspaper article or on a blog post, or as you zip through Facebook to share what's up with some of your friends, your brain makes associations. These are the stuff that dreams are made. And ideas.

Remember the scene from the movie Ghost when Whoopi Goldberg's character realized she actually could hear the voices of spirits? After that, every spook in Manhattan came to her shop to talk to the living. It was driving her batty. So too with writing. You'll have so many ideas you don't know what to do with them all. Try as you might, you can't possibly write everything down. Do what you can.

More importantly, find time to think about them. What are these ideas? Is this one just a scene? Is it just a clever wordplay that might fit with a character you first wrote about in high school? Is it something that actually holds the power of a novel? I remember the first time I realized I had just imagined a novel. I literally stopped on the sidewalk. (And just now, as soon as I wrote the word 'sidewalk,' I realized I had to tell my wife something that one of my daughters did the other day. ... see how this happens?)

So I say again: Don't sweat coming up with ideas. Don't worry about what you're going to write. Just write. (Ok, now I have that image from The Shining ... All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.... These word association things can get really annoying!)

Matt Sinclair, a New York City-based journalist and fiction writer, recently published a short story anthology called Spring Fevers, which is available through Smashwords and soon to be available for Kindle. It includes stories by fellow FTWA writers, including Cat Woods, J. Lea Lopez, Mindy McGinnis, and R.S. Mellette. He also blogs at the Elephant's Bookshelf and is on Twitter @elephantguy68.

Leftovers

By Matt Sinclair

So, was it good for you, too? No! I meant Thanksgiving. You know, the annual day in which family members believe it's fine and dandy to tell other family that they're making terrible mistakes in their life and that if they had only listened to them, their problems would have all been sorted out by now. Oh, and this wine is terrible!

What? That doesn't happen to you? No, me neither. Really.

Anyway, one thing most people love about Thanksgiving is the leftovers. Personally, I'm happy there's usually a couple beers left that I can have for the long holiday weekend, but I can't say no to a turkey sandwich on Friday. Of course, for writers, every day can be a day to give thanks, and every day is a day to behold the value of leftovers.

What I'm talking are those tasty story morsels you trimmed off your 150,000 word YA novel, or the chapter that showed how your main character met his first girl friend in third grade, or the offbeat character you loved but who didn't move the story at all. Is last year's NaNo novel still eating away at your mind even though you swore you'd never look at it again after you saw all the typos, plot flops, and gross misappropriations of Twilight story lines? Take another look. There probably was something worth revising. What have you got to lose? Bring a beer with you.

Sometimes reheating an old story line is better than the whole turkey enchilada you were gnawing on the day before. What do you do with them? I like making short stories out of mine, and I've had tossed-aside characters re-emerge in other story lines that were more appropriate for them. I know of a writer who took an ancillary character from one failed plot and started a new novel with her.

The possibilities are truly endless, unlike the shelf life of what you shoved into the the fridge last night. I'll keep this post short today, because it's also Black Friday and you're either shopping or taking advantage of the long weekend to try to make up the 15,000 word shortage you have on your current NaNo. Good luck!

But one more thing: avoid the stuffing. It really won't help your story.

Exploring the Idea Store

by Matt Sinclair

"Where do you get your ideas?"

If you've not heard the question yourself, you've probably asked it of your favorite authors even as you keep turning the pages that you spent good money to buy. It's an understandable question—one I've asked in my head a thousand times even though I know where that question leads.

You see, there is no magic "idea store" where the concepts of great novels waiting to happen sit in a box marked "Just add Writer." You're more likely to get an idea by walking to a real store than expecting something to spring up in your mind from seeming nothingness. Despite what I sometimes heard in college English classes, I refuse to believe that only well-schooled, well-read thinkers can create a viable literary idea. In fact, I'm not even sure I believe ideas are "created" per se.

An old friend of mine is a Grammy-nominated music producer. (Nominees get cool medals like kids who finish first in track meets!) Years ago, we were chatting about songwriting and he reflected on how music evolves by grafting things together. It's like a Mendelian experiment: Let's see, if we take these folk lyrics and mix them with a bassa nova beat, what happens?... Hmmm, how about a ska sound instead?...

We grow—physically, intellectually, creatively—by taking what we've done in the past and tweaking it somehow. Sometimes it's by consciously going in a totally different direction; of course, that implies you knew which way you were heading. Other times, it happens by being deflected ever so slightly from where you thought you were going. I've known people who came up with entirely new novels because of a typo!

In my opinion, creativity is about being able and willing to ask questions—my favorite is "What if?"—and then being courageous enough to explore the answers.

You see, the scary truth is ideas are common, everyday things we trip over or avoid like toys in a toddler's playroom. (Where did the idea for that image come from? My daughters' room, which gets rearranged at least a half dozen times a day—not always by them.) Case in point: I'm working on a novel that takes place largely in Antarctica. I have never been there, nor do I have any friends who have. As a result of the research I've done, I have learned a lot, and in the process I've spoken to people who work there as field researchers. From there, the story has gotten better and fuller.

But where'd the idea for the story come from? A press release. I kid you not. In fact, it was a press release about microbes. Not a subject I typically cover in my work, and not exactly what you would expect for a novel about a woman whose parents die in a fiery car crash.

But when I read that random press release, characters appeared in my mind. In fact, they were so vivid and powerful I had to put aside my other work and write stream-of-consciousness pieces about who they were, what was going on in their lives, how they get along, who's married and who isn't and how that affects their relationships... I went on for a good half hour, at least. It could easily have been twice that.

Of course, once I really started writing that manuscript, lots of things changed. The basic idea was there, but as often happens when people are involved—fictional or not, it doesn't really matter—things went in unexpected directions. And that's a big part of the fun in writing: exploration.

So, back to the original question: Where do ideas come from? I recommend you go exploring and find out. I think you'll be amazed at what you find. And please share some of the locations of your favorite idea stores. Perhaps we can find something you left on the shelves.

Mythos and the Muse

by Calista Taylor

I've heard it said that there are no new stories, only new ways to tell them, and I think this is very true. Although the possibilities seem endless, I'm afraid writers often jump on the bandwagon when a particular story becomes popular. Wizards, vampires, werewolves, zombies anyone? Unfortunately, trying to follow a trend can be a difficult thing to do, because unless your timing is perfect or you have a truly amazing twist, it becomes difficult to make your story stand out amongst all the others that are similar.

So instead of traveling down a road thronged with people, why not pick a path less traveled? I would suggest embracing the old and making it new again.

I've often found myself paging through an encyclopedia of mythology as my imagination races through the possibilities. There are so many mythological creatures to pick from, and so many amazing stories waiting to be retold in a new and fresh way that's relevant to our time.

Here are a few sites on mythology and mythological creatures to help guide your muse down a path less traveled.

• Wikipedia's list of Mythological Creatures—This is an amazing list and the best part is there's a brief description for each creature so you don't have to keep clicking.
• Wikipedia's list of Creatures by Type—The above list is divided up into type of creature.
• Wikipedia's list of Folklore
• Wikipedia's list of Mythologies—Impressive and thorough.
• Wikipedia's list of Deities
• Wikipedia's list of Mythological Objects
• Wikipedia's list of Women Warriors
• Theoi Greek Mythology—A fantastic site about the Greek gods and Greek mythology.
• God Checker—A great resource with many different cultures listed.
• Luminarium—A page for all things Irish.
• Encyclopedia Mythica—Another amazing site—very thorough with an extensive list of cultures.
• A World History of Art—So many great works of art have been inspired from mythology. This is a great site if you prefer something more visual for your research.

If there are any other links you find useful but that we haven't posted, please let us know by leaving a comment.

Do you often use mythology for inspiration? Where do your new story ideas come from?