Over the River and Through the Woods

By Claire Booth

We came back from Grandma’s (and Grandpa’s) house yesterday. It’s a drive that takes a little less than two hours, which is just about perfect. Not so long that you go crazy from being stuck in the car forever. Not so short that you barely get settled in before you’ve gotten where you’re going. It’s just the right amount of time for some serious brainstorming.

My mind wanders more on car rides than it does almost anywhere else. And for a writer, there’s nothing better. One random thought leads to another and another, and before you know it, you have an idea.  

And that, after all, is our bread and butter, isn’t it? Ideas. Some amount to nothing, some start out as brilliant and then fizzle, and some – those rare gems – become actual stories.

As we whizzed along on the interstate yesterday, I had an idea for a stand-alone thriller, pondered a different take on a short story I’ve been mulling for a while, and came up with more character development for my next Hank Worth book.

That’s a pretty good start to the holiday travel season.

Backseat boogie

By: Joelle Charbonneau

Today at DSD, I require audience participation.  So keep reading to the end and play the game with me.  You might win something cool.

Writers have different processes.  Some listen to music.  (Not me!)  Some require absolute quiet.  Others have to write in a specific place.  Everyone does things at different speeds or in different ways.  The one constant for writers is the moment in which we say, “Why would someone do that?”  “What if that happened when…”  What if the dunk tank was a murder weapon?  What if someone drown in a toilet?  What would happen if the penalty for failing a test was death?

You never know what is going to spark that brainstorming moment.  It could be dinner conversation, a moment on Sesame Street (can you tell I can a small person in my house?) or an article from the newspaper. 

Today, I read an interesting article.  It seems that thieves have taken to breaking into cars in order to steal the backseats from them.  Really!  Here’s the article.   Apparently, skilled thieves can break into a car, steal the backseat and be ready to hightail it out of there in under a minute.  Impressive, right?

My question is – why?  Why would someone steal the backseat of a car?  Sure, they can take it to a chop shop and sell it, but then I am forced to ask – what does the person buying these seats do with them? 

This is where you come in.  I challenge you to brainstorm with me.  Write one line of motivation, the blurb for a story or even a scene and post it here by Nov. 1st.  Silly ideas, series ideas and everything in between are welcome.  The winner will get a cool prize.  It might be a book or two, or three.  It could be an ARC.  You have to play to learn what you’ll win!

Ready….set…..brainstorm.

The Idea

By Russel D McLean

One of the most common questions writers are asked when they attend events is “where do you get your ideas from?” Oh, sure, some people try and dress the question up, but more often than not it’s the same question with fancier words.

And most writers I know hate answering it.

It’s one of those questions that you wind up not thinking about when you’re in the process of writing or of searching for the next novel. It’s like asking how someone knows when to breathe. It’s a combination of circumstances that leads to something else. In retrospect, perhaps, a writer can claim to “have had idea x at moment y” but in truth, that realisation comes too long after the fact for it to matter and they rarely can say why those two moments intersected in the way they did.
When people ask the question, of course, it is not to deliberately flummox writers. It is a genuine inquiry, an attempt to understand the unique alchemy of the creative mind.

The problem is that the creative mind often does not know why it is creative. Which is why there remains a gap between the creative and the critical. In a recent interview with the author Iain McEwan, Mr McEwan pointed out that, for his A-Levels, his son had to study the novel Enduring Love, one of McEwan Sr’s more famous novels. The son, of course, got low marks because his father gave him a few pointers. "I think quite wrongly. His tutor thought the stalker carried the authorial moral centre. Whereas I thought he was a complete madman.” Which plainly shows the gap that occurs between author and reader, between intent and actuality.

Of course, I’m drifting here from my intent, which was to talk about the moment of The Idea, not the gap between author and reader/critic, which is a whole other post for a whole other philosophically inclined day. But be warned that I can’t tell you how to find The Idea, I can only describe the moments in which it happens, the idea that a confluence of events spark something in my brain.

Often its just a moment of conversation; an overheard nugget or a moment that passes in front of my eyes. It sticks in my brain, starts to twist. If you want to write, I think you have to be the kind of who used to play “consequences” and could see the connection between the unconnected things that people would write on that folded piece of paper.

Pedro Paul – one of my favourite of the early short stories, and published in the great anthology EXPLETIVE DELETED – came about because of an overheard conversation; two old women concerned about “aw they pedrophiles on the news”. The phrase wouldn’t leave me alone, and I started to wonder about how they saw these “pedrophiles”, if they really understood what they were and, if they didn’t, then what that might mean. The story that emerged – one of horrific misunderstanding – is one of the darkest of the shorts to be published, and one that I remain hugely proud of to this day.

I’ve talked enough about the ideas for both of the published novels, but its strange how one thing can change the direction a narrative takes. THE LOST SISTER was struggling, trying to find its way as a narrative, and I realised it was because we were missing a truly unnerving protagonist. Then someone said to me, “You should write a character who’s a psychopathic version of Actor X”. Oddly, it was precisely the push I needed. The first push of the character parodied Actor X’s known traits, but on subsequent drafts became more and more of its own thing before finally becoming one of the most unsettling characters I’ve had to write. Again, it was a confluence of circumstance that allowed me to create this character. It was not just “psychopathic verion of Actor X”, but that couple with so many other moments and the needs of the story that resulted in a fresh creation.

You cannot just look at writing and dissect it coldly. A novel or a short story or any piece of writing is the result of a countless number of tiny processes coming together in exactly the right way. In retrospect, perhaps, we can look back and say where idea Y came from, but we cannot coldly and calmly recreate that process time and time again. Which is part of the excitement of writing. If the creative process were merely a formula – and I know so many people wish it was – then everyone would be able to do it and do it well. Which is clearly – and thankfully – not the case. Put simply, every author gets their ideas from different places, all of which are unique to that individual. If you want to get “good ideas”, you need to get to know yourself and the way your mind works. Which is not an answer you want to hear maybe but its as close to the truth as I think I can get.

Or, you know, maybe I should just be like a few other writers I’ve heard, and gently joke that I pick up all my ideas from “Ideas R Us”.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?

A lot of authors hate this question.

I don't. I kind of love it. Well, maybe not THAT specific question, but I love when fans ask where an idea for a certain book came from.

Listen, I can't write without an idea of what I'm going to write about. It's really hard for me to sit and type descriptive paragraphs until I figure out what a scene is going to be about. I need to know where I'm going so I can figure out how to get there.

Which is why ideas are so important to me.

Now my ideas don't come from one place, and they usually don't come in one tightly wrapped package. They come from several places.

The idea for THE EVIL THAT MEN DO came from my mother's stories about visiting my grandmother--who had Alzheimer's. It also grew out of listening to some of the kids at my school talk. And viewing GODFATHER II.

WHEN ONE MAN DIES came from picking and choosing bits from some of my short stories. And an incident that happened to me in a bar once. But all of those ideas get smoothed into one neat tagline, eventually.

The thought process is so interesting to me, however. I love looking back and figuring out where a story came form. Why was this story so important to me? A lot of times, it takes so long to write a book, that an idea that was important when I started the book became unimportant by the end of it.

But I love dissecting that. Much more that I like writing perfect grammar (sorry, couldn't resist). :-)

So what about you, authors? Do you like the idea question? Readers, do you like knowing where ideas come from? Or does it take some of the suspense away?

Fresh from the Ideas Factory...

By Russel D McLean

One of the most frequent question writers are asked is this:

Where do you get your ideas?

It’s become a common gag that it’s the impossible to answer question. Because it is over-asked, because when we start to think about these things, writers often lose track of the exact process.

Ideas are fuzzy, you see. Indistinct. Not clearly defined. They have no clear beginning and most decidedly no clear lineage.

But I can talk a little about the inspiration behind ideas. The things that spark the creative process. I think that all writers should be continuously open. For little things.

Snippets.

Moments.

Incidents.

Today, I was idly flicking through a copy of the free paper, THE METRO, when I saw a small article that talked about how a lottery winner from South Lanarkshire never claimed their ticket and now the time has run out. My brain started ticking over, wondering why they hadn’t collected the ticket. The idea that they simply lost it was pretty far down the list. What if they’d died? What if they were in hospital? What if… what if… what if…

It’s become cliché now to say that all storytelling starts with what if. But one of the clichés of clichés is that they’re true. And this one’s no exception.

I don’t know that I’ll write a story about a lottery winner who loses everything. I probably won’t. My brain will stew over the idea and other connections will be made and somewhere down the line a credible and interesting story will emerge that will, on the surface, seem far removed from the initial spark. But there will be something left. A great loss. A bad judgement. A supreme moment of bad luck.

My favourite tale I like to tell when asked about ideas, is the one about a snippet of conversation I once overheard. Two old women were talking about how scary the world had become. I was near them in the store and couldn’t help looking up, they were talking so loud.

“Oh,” one of them said, “The world’s a terrible place these days. D’you watch the news? All them pedrophiles everywhere.”

I had to stop myself from laughing at that point. Not in mockery, but because I loved the word she’d just plucked out of the air. “Pedrophile”. Perhaps she really did someone who inappropriately loves Spanish men. But I doubt it.

The word clicked round in my brain. It became a one line gag in a Sam Bryson mystery I wrote for AHMM. And then, suddenly, it became the germ for an entire story. When the most awesome Jennifer Jordan asked me to contribute to the anthology EXPLETIVE DELETED – a collection of tales dedicated to the word “fuck” – she told me that she was looking for tales of the terrible, stories that would resonate, unsettle and even amuse (darkly). I wrote a story called,

“Pedro Paul”. The story evolved from that overheard conversation. The one about “Pedrophiles”. Publisher’s Weekly, bless ‘em, called Pedro Paul “awesomely dark”.

I wish I could find those ladies. And thank them. Though, given the story that came from that one snippet of overheard conversation, I doubt they’d thank me…

The Magical Kingdom of Ideas

By Steve Weddle

Where do your ideas come from? Why, from Walt Disney World, of course.

We were on line at Pecos Bill Tall Tale Inn & Café waiting for, well, let's call it "food." We had the dining plan and had eaten some good food in the park. We'd eat more good food later in the trip. Just not at Pecos Bill Tall Tale Inn & Café. I ate before I visited the toilet, so it wasn't the site of a couple of short curlies on the urinal lip that turned my stomach. Heck, it wasn't even the two boogers and what I assume was half a scab down there in the pee drain. No, the food was just kinda lousy. Which was a rarity in the park. But the vile bathroom wasn't where a decent noir idea began burbling. No. That was on line waiting for the food.

We were in front of a few teenage boys. I'm guessing two were brothers and one was a friend. The older brother on my right was saying to the younger brother: "You know nothing about how to inflict pain on the human body." I slid my daughter to my left. The younger brother allowed as to how he might just punch the older brother in the throat. They had short, curly hair. If I'd seen them after my visit to the toilet, I'd have thought of them as "dickheads" and grinned. I hadn't, so I'm grinning about it now, as I write it and think of it. Because that's how these here fancy ideas work.

So the older brother shows that he's not impressed. By his younger brother? You kidding me? Pshaw and all that. No, the younger brother can't cause the older brother any pain, which the older brother explains. "A chop to my throat?" He laughed. A big "ha" laugh, as if he were in some high school play reading his lines. "Ha. My neck is all muscle, kid. You know nothing about pain." Neither of them did, really. Not the kind that you wake up with. The kind you limp along with for a few days before you go to the doctor. The kind you look up on the internet during lunch. The kind you worry about until it's too late. The kind you don't want to tell your wife about because you don't want her to worry. What if it's nothing? What if it's something? No, neither of them knew anything about pain.

Our Disney food was ready, so I left Tweedledee and Tweedledumb talking about inflicting pain on the human body.

Of course, I thought about putting a quick elbow into the older boy's nose, pushing off with my leg, turning my hip, shoving cartilage back into his skull cavity, watching him raise his hands to his face to try to hold the blood in. Because that's what people do when they're punched in the faces. They grab their faces and try to hold on. When you feel pain, when you're punched right in the nose, you try to keep it together. That's the lesson you learn when you're hit. Keep it together. There's another round of violence coming.

But I didn't punch the kid. They have rules about that. Laws, I think they're called. And I had my family with me at the happiest place on Earth.

But those boys could have gone out after lunch and tried something. They were stupid like I was at that age. A different kind of stupid than I am now. They could have tried sneaking in somewhere and gotten into trouble. Some silly little thing that grew into a violent stain that spread among more and more people. No, there wasn't any chance at all that I was going to "inflict pain" on a teenager, but I was going to think about it. I was going to take that one little thing and move it somewhere else. A series of "what ifs" running through my head.

Stopping at a Valero for gas, I met a woman at the counter who must have been remarkably good looking before the meth. What happens if these boys run into her? A couple of weeks ago on a "World's Mostest Dumbest Criminals" show, some old guy used a pocket knife to try to rob a convenience store. The cash register woman chased him out with a broom handle. Put those kids in that situation. The older kid trying to impress the younger ones with his talk of "inflicting pain" and then having them doubt him. Egg him on. Peer pressure. Pretty quickly they're trying to rob the store and the woman chases them out with a broom handle. Fight. Struggle. Someone dies. By the end, whoever is left now understands how to inflict pain, how pain moves. How pain isn't just a broken nose. How pain is a thing, a wicked, evil thing always just in reach, a darkness outside your bedroom window. All you have to do is open the window a crack.

You can get noir ideas from the weirdest places these days.

No, those kids at Disney World probably didn't know anything about how to inflict pain on the human body.

But the day was young.

They'd learn.

"I'll show you the life of the mind..."

By Russel D McLean

Its 2002 (I think), and we’re trudging through a Graveyard. The Necropolis. The West End of Dundee, overlooking the newer Balgay cemetery.

My flatmate is looking for old graves. For Ancestors. For stories from history. I’m there for the ride, as is another friend. If I’m honest, I find graveyards oddly peaceful during the day, especially ones as isolated as this.

Up here, on a hillside, with trees overgrowing, and a sense of isolation, I start to look not at the inscriptions or the stories already told by history, but at the way the graves are laid out, the way the trees bend over some stones protectively as though through the decades they have come to care deeply for those buried on the hillside.

I see shadows move.

I tilt my head.

Connections are made.

Neurons fire.

My other friend – her name is Becca – says, “You look funny.”

And I do.

Only when I snap out of it does she realise what’s happening. “You’re thinking about a story,” she says.

I smile.

Because I am.

At long last, I think, I have a setpiece ending for the novel I’m working on*.

#

The thing about most writers, I suspect, is that we view the world in very different ways from other people. In the past, I’ve talked about going out for walks with my parents and seeing things among the trees that leads into later projects.

Sometimes its hearing something, even, a random line of dialogue. The story, “Pedro Paul” in the Expletive Deleted Anthology was inspired by overhearing two old women talk about the horror of the “Pedrophiles” in modern society.

But whatever it is, I think it’s a tic in the brain that makes us write, that forces us to create new worlds and seem alternatives in every situation. It is, perhaps, something that can be learned, but as far as I’m aware, it’s the way I’ve always viewed the world, as though I’m not content with reality the way it is, I have to recfocus and reinterpret it in my own way.

Which makes me sound more than a little nuts.

But then maybe I am. At a recent event, I bumped into my primary teacher – one of the many people who encouraged me when I was younger – who said that I was always away in another world, my “head in a book”. Now, that’s a cliché, but its true. I have always been happier using fictional world to make sense of the real one (its what fiction is best at, even on an unconscious level) so it was a natural extension to use my own fictional worlds to try and make sense of what was happening around me.

This does not make a writer, however, just a very odd person. Not that there’s anything that wrong with being odd. Its harnessing that point of view and turning it into a skill that can communicate with other people that’s been the hard part.

But I think – I believe – that the writer’s mind – the storyteller’s mind – has to be different in some way from normal people’s. I think that a writer has to be able to see not just the world around them, but the way in which the world could be. They have to see the alternatives, the out of view events, the probable and the possible. And above all, in some form, they have to be able to believe in these things they see, to make them concrete and real and communicable.

At least, that’s how it works for me.

*for anyone who cares, the setpiece – and the cemetery, in fictionally modified form – made its way into the finale for The Good Son. In fact very few of the beats changed from my initial conception of what would happen except where characters, story and plain physics dictated.

Inspirational Therapy

by Dave White

I've heard people talk about psychologists and therapy for years. Most people I know who've gone love them.

You have a problem to deal with? They recommend therapy. You need to talk to someone about something? Anything? Go to therapy.

Excuse me if I'm a little more Tony Soprano about it. "Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?" he says, as he sits in the therapist's office.

I have my own kind of therapy.

It's writing. You can often tell what's bothering me by reading the first drafts of what I've written. THE EVIL THAT MEN DO is about my grandmother suffering from Alzheimer's. "Righteous Son" was written when I wasn't feeling too confident with myself.

I've dealt with 9/11, church, car accidents, break-ups, and a whole mess of other hang-ups through my writing. That's how I get it out. I get it down on paper, and then I twist it. I twist it until it makes story sense. I twist it until the characters become their own people and now just shadows of myself.

And then I try to deal with the problems. How can I make them better? How would this character make them better? And if that character tries to fix a problem, but makes the wrong choice, what happens next?

By the time I've finished writing a book or short story, I usually written the hang-up out of my system.

And then it's time to focus on the next problem in my life.

Wonder if my next book'll be about turning 30...?

****

Speaking of, it's my birthday... Happy Birthday me? If you want to get me something, but don't know what... you can easily make me happy by supporting the authors in the sidecolumn over there-------->

Pick up some of our books, if you haven't already. We'd really appreciate it.

That's a Good Idea...

by Dave White

"Where do your ideas come from?"

Every author gets this question. Most authors I talk to hate it.

I love it.

Why? Well first of all, I get to talk about myself... Let's be honest here. That's one of my favorite things.

But the main reason I love to talk about this is because I love thinking about how ideas grow. I talk about this a lot with my students. We talk about generating ideas, but at the same time letting those ideas mature and evolve.

Where do my ideas come from?

Not one place. Usually most of my novels start with an idea, and I keep adding to that idea picking things out from different areas of life or research.

Let's take my second novel THE EVIL THAT MEN DO. The basic plot of the novel is this: Jackson Donne is asked by his estranged sister to talk to his Alzheimer's ridden mother. The mother had been talking about the past and a murder that occurred there, and Donne's sister wants to know what went on. Meanwhile, someone has started to attack Donne's family with car bombs and hired assassins.

The seed for this novel took place somewhere in 2005. My grandmother had the disease and the more she declined, the more she would lapse into the past. As my grandma spoke to my mother, my mother start learn things about her own grandfather she'd never known. Basically, my mother's grandfather used to work on the docks of the Hackensack River during the Great Depression. During that time he'd get on a boat and drag the river for dead bodies. His work nickname was "Tugger."

Yeah.

I couldn't resist.

So there's my seed for the novel.

The Great Depression idea was great because I wanted to test new writing muscles by setting some of the book in the past.

Next step, the characters... I had Tugger, but needed Donne to have a family. I started to think about writing EVIL around the last draft of my first novel WHEN ONE MAN DIES, so I went back and added a passage about Donne's mother and sister. I also wanted to use some of my friends' names in the book, so I created Bryan Hackett, the villain.

At the same time, I was dating a girl who owned a restaurant. And then she dumped me, right when I started to write the book. So, I decided to blow up a restaurant in the book. (Not her restaurant, mind you. A, um, different, fictional restaurant that happened to be ... okay I'll move on.) Another seed I planted to use later on.

Now I have a bunch of threads to work with.

So I started to write and move the characters around. Finally, when I needed some motivation, I was out with a friend looking at tuxes for his wedding. We ended up in Bayonne, his home town, and he started telling me some cool Bayonne facts about the harbor area. I used those facts for motivation later.

The rest was simple plotting and building on what I already had planted.

I think thinking about where ideas come from is interesting. It shows you how a novel grows and it can help you with the next novel. You think about your own ideas and you realize that inspiration will come. And it will come when you're least looking for it.

I think talking about the seeds of ideas with other authors can give you insight into their writing process. You can learn from how they work and incorporate it into your own. I love hearing where ideas come from. I love talking about it. Often the stories behind the books become just as interesting as the books.

You learn to keep your eyes and ears open. Listen to what people are saying. Listen to the jokes you make... because you never know... a joke might turn into a great pitch for a book.

(That's how the idea for my third novel began. I made a joke to a friend of mine... An hour later I was thinking about if that joke could become a serious and believable novel... I hope it works out.)

So...

Where do you get your ideas?