Process Notes

Some Ideas About Ideas

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process , , , ,

So I’ve been thinking about where ideas come from lately, because I keep seeing this idea floating around that explaining where they come from is somehow secretive and difficult to do. I didn’t get that, the hesitation thing, because I’d always thought the ideas were kind of simple to explain even if no-one was asking me to do so. Then I got interviewed for the first time and realised how hard it is to come up simple, easy answers off the cuff, and there’s petty good odds that if I had been asked the idea question (which, thankfully, I wasn’t) I would have resorted to some kind of “writers hate that question” rhetoric on the basis that it’d stall for time while I thought up a decent answer.

So, as an in-case-of-emergency measure, I figured I’d work out an answer before I needed it. And my explanation goes a little like this:

Imagine an equilateral triangle. Put “confluence” at one point, “other people’s ideas” at the second point, and “knowing how stories work” at the third. The ideas happen in the middle of the triangle,  because ideas are basically a combination of those three things. Sometimes I’ll lean towards one point more than than the other two, but all three are usually at work in some way.

I think it’s probably the “knowing how stories work” work part that makes the entire idea process so mysterious to non-writers. Ideas are actually pretty cheap and easy. Everyone has them, all the time. Hell, I’ve had three in the last five minutes [i]. You can take pretty much anything and use it as the hook for a story once you know the structure and techniques of telling one, so finding a good story idea is largely a matter of knowing the right processes to develop a small concept (say, I’m going to write a story about a guy with a clockwork arm) into a full-blown narrative.

The trick here is realising that the initial idea is almost never a full story – it’s just a hook to hang other things on while the story develops around it. Once you’ve stepped over that hurdle the ideas themselves are largely secondary. Or perhaps its in realising that stories are really lots of ideas, come up with over time. Either way, I think the whole story thing is important – an average idea can be turned into a competent story, but the absence of storytelling chops will kill even the coolest concept.

“Confluence” is borrowed from a short story by Neil Gaiman in his collection Smoke and Mirrors. Partially I use it because it’s a good explanation, partially because I like the word (and it’ll give me an excuse to use the word conflate later in this post, and conflates just one of those words, you know?). In Gaiman’s story the logic goes something like this: “Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra.” And sure, it may have been put forward by a fictional writer talking about the creation of the fictional story he’s written inside the story we’re reading, but if you can remember that one aspect of the pyramid then the other two tend to take care of themselves.

Basically we’re talking about two ore more seemingly random elements coming together, fusing in your minds eye and becoming the basis of a story. It doesn’t matter what those things are – experiences you’ve had, stories you’ve been told by friends, short descriptions of a place, stuff you’ve heard on the telly – once you find the right connection between them you’ve got the beginnings of a story. Sometimes this happens by coincidence, sometimes its’ an active process. Either way, it’s not terribly difficult – a lot of beginner writing exercises are based on this principle. Two examples, off the top of my head: pick a character, put them in a setting they obviously don’t belong in and write about how they got there; or pick three different places (say, a cemetery, a shopping mall, and a water-slide park) and figure out a story that uses one each as the setting for the opening scene, middle scene, and final scene.

There’s a great essay on imagination by Sean Williams where he posits that the imagination is like any other muscle, and it works better the more you get used to using it. Thus the easiest way to have ideas is to pay attention when you have them. It’s not like they’re things that happen uniquely to writers an artists – most people spend much of their everyday life making connections between things that are going on around them and other stuff floating through their head, so it’s just a matter of paying attention. It’s all about asking the right questions to get you started. For me, questions are less interesting than that moment of confluence. The way I write is all about finding the right combination of concepts, finding the tension when two things come together in an expected way. I like putting things at right angles and what develops, then asking the questions that’ll flesh it out into a story. The stories that start with big flashes of energy are almost always the result of two things that create a lot of awkward tension (say, unicorns and autopsies) that immediately link to one of my big narrative kinks (aka, the stuff I really exploring as a writer). This isn’t necessarily inspiration energy that comes from the muse – the combination above led to Horn, and they came out of some fairly dogged and conscious pursuit of a concept to pair up with “virgins and unicorns” that’d lead the story away from familiar territory.

As for the importance of other people’s ideas, well, you know how science is basically a process of one person coming up with a new theory based on a variation in someone else’s ideas? Writing works much the same way – people building new work on top of other people’s ideas, finding new twists and permeations that suit their own narrative kinks. Over time the continued repetition of certain ideas gave us the basics of narrative structure, which gradually led to the accretion of genre traits, which lead to movements within genres, and so forth. Things clump together sometimes, and those clumps become the basis of new ideas (after unicorns and autopsies, the real energy in Horn came when I conflated the big clump of tropes known as Noir into the mix. Ask people who were there when I wrote it what I was like, and I’m fairly sure the phrase giggling like a schoolgirl may come up).

Other people’s work is probably the only place that I really see inspiration at work in the writing process, because while I don’t buy into the mythology of the muse I do believe in responding to other people’s awesomeness. If someone does something utterly cool – and I mean utterly, enviously cool – then my natural inclination is to try and achieve something similar. Not necessarily replicate it, because imitation isn’t that much fun, but finding the new angle on the same technique, or idea, or setting. A new twist, a new tension. Interestingly, I also find a lot of inspiration in ideas that haven’t worked out – not just the merely bad stuff, but the stuff that starts with a good concept and fritters it away. These moments tend to come in more of a “oh god, that should’ve been so much cooler” kind of vibe. Because cool is relative (again, see my note on Narrative Kinks above) and the way I’d like to see an idea play out isn’t necessarily universal.

And that’s me and the idea process. I’m not sure how universal this is, but I’d be interested in hearing how it fits into other people’s processes. It certainly works as an explanation for my approach though – pick any story I’ve written and I’m pretty sure I can unpack the origin of it’s various components using these three vectors as a guide (and they probably would have been easier to explain with a specific story in mind, but it would have taken three or four blog-posts instead of one).

[i] if you’re really interested, they’re I should write a series of speculative fiction love stories set in a Laundromat, I should start a website called readings from a couch that features authors giving youtube readings of their work from a big red couch, and a story that starts with wet footsteps across the floor, leading towards the toilet and the family pet drowned within. Pretty ordinary ideas, and unlikely to get used for anything, but I could probably do something with them if I really wanted too. And before you ask, I know exactly where all of them come from.

Two Things Worth Reading

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , , , , ,

1) A Hundredth Name, Chris Green (Abyss and Apex; Subscription Required to Access Archives)

Click the link, you know you want too. No? Okay, let me convince you then. You should go read Chris Green’s story at Abyss and Apex because the man is freakin’ talented and understands things like brevity and leaving empty spaces for the story to breathe. I’ve critted Chris a bunch of times and it’s a bloody hard thing to do, because he crams more story into two thousand words than there should actually be allowed and he fits the damn things together so tight that pulling one segment out causes the whole damn thing to unravel in your hands.

You should read his story because he’s one of the few people I know who manages to give the impression of being genuinely, fearlessly interested in everything and somehow manages to filter that down into his fiction, even though his bailiwick seems to be horror rather than any of the forms of SF where being fearlessly interested in everything would be a useful trait in an author (not a slight on horror authors, but you guys need to understand fear and I’m not sure Chris does). You should read it because he can usually nail one image that makes you cringe, or cry, or wince with pain, and yet there’s still something beautiful in the stories he writes. You should read him because he’s one of my favourite-writers-who-doesn’t-get-published-enough (a distinction he shares with Ben Francisco), primarily because he seems to spend too much time at his day job and not enough time producing fiction. And despite this, he seems to believe that every time he gets published it’s a fluke, despite the fact that it isn’t.

You should also read it because Chris owns cooler footwear than you ever will. Yes, you included, even though I’m sure your shoes are fairly damn cool. I’ve seen Chris step out in boots that’d make a gothic shoe fetishist cry with envy. Come to think of it, his beard is cooler than yours too. And he owns a t-shirt featuring my favourite Buffy quote ever.

2) The City and the City, China MievilleOur spokebear approves The City & The City

While I’d certainly recommend reading this as a blood good read, this isn’t meant to be a review (for that I’d send you over to MacLaren North’s fine write-up over on ASIF) and I’m not going to avoid spoilers. I’m not going to intentionally spoil the book either, but I’m primarily going to talk about the book based on the decisions that interested me as a writer and that’ll probably slip over into spoiler territory pretty quickly.

China Mieville’s always had a knack of creating interesting settings, but if you’re a writer then The City and The City is one of those books that’s worth pulling apart and figuring out because it takes that extra half-step beyond “interesting setting” and into the realm of “fuck, how’d he do that.” In fact, lets call it a case study is awesomeness on the setting front for its ability to make a theoretically impossible setting seem possible and logical.

The central conceit of novel’s setting is that there are two European cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, that overlap one another while remaining entirely separate in the minds of their inhabitants. Tensions between the two cities are strained, at best, and crossing from one to the other is handled via heavily patrolled borders. There’s nothing particularly mind-breaking in that set-up, at least when you start the book, but as the narrative progresses we realise that parts of the city occupy the physical space. Characters sitting in Beszel simply choose not to see residents of Ul Qoma, a fire taking place down the street is ignored because it belongs in the “wrong” city, and an upmarket Ul Qoma suburbs occupy the same physical locations as Beszel slums. In short, the separation is cultural rather than physical, ingrained by years of practice by the citizens of both cities, and various terms that are dropped early in the book –  crosshatched streets, or breaching – take on different shades of meaning as the setting comes into focus.

This is the kind of setting that fantasy fans probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid at if it was being explained away using magic (and would probably see me and Karen Miller on a panel having a brisk discussion about whether it’s fantasy, slipstream, or magic realism). This isn’t. There’s no hint of magic in The City and The City, because with the exception of the setting it plays it like a straight police procedural and the separation between the two cities is largely a matter of cultural conditioning and clever writing on Mieville’s part.

Which is why this book fascinates me as a reader – what starts as a patently absurd concept ends up slipping into the story as a natural, plausible setting. And because I’m a writer and a genre geek, my natural inclination when faced with a setting like this is to start pulling the novel apart and trying to figure out why it works (excluding, of course, the obvious explanation of “Mieville’s freakin’ smart and a very good writer”). At the moment I’ve got a rough bundle of thoughts floating around, so I figured I’d throw a few of them out there and see if anyone whose read the novel agrees

My first thought is that a lot of the effect has to do with with setting the book in an Eastern European city, irrespective of whether it’s made up or not. The opening chapter reads like a straight police procedural and has plenty of slang terms thrown around that aren’t related to the split-city conceit, so seeding concepts that are important later in the book slides in naturally alongside explanations of Fuluna (think Jane Doe) and Feld (a local drug). Combine the learning-curve expected when coming up to speed on the ‘exitic’ setting with the split-city conceit means we’re constantly giving Mieville narrative space, and by the time we realise what’s going on we’re too caught-up in the book to give a damn. In the earliest moments when our protagonist is caught in the interstitial space between the two cities, noticing a woman he shouldn’t have, it’s a slippage that’s treated like an embarrassing faux-pass that gets even less explanation than the drug of choice of the local teens.

What flummoxes me about the book is the way it borrows a trait from fantasy – moving between ‘worlds’ as a demarcation of important plot-points – and yet manages to avoid coming off like a fantastic setting or book. While you could probably make an argumentfor Slipstream in association with The City and The City it does a remarkably good job of playing it straight as a police procedural despite the quirks in its backdrop. While there are plenty of non-SF narratives that have used this kind of narrative relocation as a means of dividing up a story at similar points, it seems like an obvious tip-over given Mieville’s past novels (all fantasy) and the improbability of his setting. Especially since the solution to the novel’s murder revolves more and more around the split between the cities and what may lie between them.

Another possibility may come form Mieville’s decision to shine of light on its absurdities before they come important, bringing in the American parents of the murdered girl at the centre of the novel’s mystery to interact with the protagonist and comment on the conceit before the genre boundaries are stretched to breaking point. This choice, cleverly, allows for the reinforcement of the cultural aspect of the separation given the tendency towards parts of the English speaking world to be somewhat…clueless and insensitive…when it comes to other cultures. We are, in essence, shamed into accepting the conceit of the setting before we can reject it…

And I might leave it there, for the moment, because this is already getting out of control, but it’s probably the starting point I’ll use when I go back and re-read the book with an eye towards identifying how it bloody-well works.  I suspect there will be another post on this, sooner or later.

Doin’ Stuff

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , ,

Yesterday I shaved off the scraggly neck-beard I’ve been sporting since Conjecture, cracked my knuckles, and proceeded to write like a furious writerly-thing until I hit the 30k mark on the Black Candy draft. Then I discovered – joy of joys – that I’d written myself up to the point where the narrative reconnected with the middle of the novella-length draft/outline I’d written last year, allowing me to cut/paste/edit the next 10,000 words without too much difficulty. Net result:

‘Tis a horrid, splotchy, unreadable mess, this draft of mine, but it is halfway done and actually feels halfway done in terms of narrative. Which is something of an evolution for me, because the last time I hit this point in a novel draft I was still trying to figure out exactly where the story was going. Maybe I will get the hang of this novel-writing thing one of these days.

Of course, being a horrid over-achiever, I then wandered off and spent two hours revising Claw in which I resolved my issues with the structure of the novella’s first chapter.

I can have more days like that one, I think. It’s kinda nice to be doing stuff again.