*As I’m sure you remember, Pam is one of our rotating Friday writers — round and round they go, where they stop, you’ll never know. She’s supposed to have her own posting account, but of course technology is baffling us — or at least me. So for today I’m posting for her.*
It Came From The Abyss -Pam Uphoff
What do you do when you’ve miscalculated how soon that star is going to reach the critical limit and go supernova? You jump through the unexplored wormhole and discover an alien civilization, of course.
The world—or at least the vast majority of people—was destroyed in a nuclear war. One survivor had a time machine, and changed the past. Only to return to his own time and find that the world had found a new way to destroy itself . . . Rinse and repeat while he collects an interesting assortment of minions, realizes someone else is repeatedly triggering Armageddon, and . . .
Hokey predictable plot centered on Big Tough Bad Guy, and his daughter and her assorted swains, at least half of whom are hunting for her dad. Dead or alive.
Hmm, how does a morphological change into a dragon work? I mean, werewolves are pretty straight forward, it’s just a matter of bone length and sharpness of teeth. But a dragon has these wings . . .
What if the “Real World” really is just a big game? Why are we so totally immersed in it? Just for the fun? Or maybe it’s a deep psychological need so we don’t go insane while in hibernation for the interstellar voyage. Pity there’s been a problem with the ship . . .
Conservation of mass. If the universe splits with every decision, where does the mass come from? Dark matter? But surely small decisions just affect the local space, a small blister that heals over as soon as the decision is unimportant to the present. So . . . What happens when you get a huge population making all sorts of decisions, and use up all the local dark matter? Do blisters pop? Do worlds merge whether or not it matters? Does that explain UFOs, bigfoot and chupacabras?
Genetic engineering: Homo Sapiens Nova or artificial plagues? Or, of course, both.
Artificial Intelligence, artificial replacement bodies, cloning . . .
Terraforming vs Preserving the ecology of other planets?
This, over here, is a normal brain. Above you have the brain of a writer.
If I don’t get attacked by at least one new idea a week, I start worrying. I go low carb. Go to bed early, take more vitamins . . . I _like_ a hyperactive imagination.
Every once in a while one of those idea will insist on more than just being written down in a quick note. They insist on at least 20K words and a bullet point page of high lights needed to get to the end of the story. The most recent idea that attacked, yesterday, I got off light. Only a couple thousand words before the voices shut down. One from last month is twenty-three thousand and has paused while I try to untangle my time travel paradoxes. By the time this gets posted, I may well have another.
These constant interruptions of the ongoing writing process are usually refreshing, even when they set back my time table for the works already in progress. They’re a quick mental break that gets me away from the story I ought to be immersed in. This can give me a bit of needed emotional distance from which to notice the holes. Or give me an excuse to avoid something that isn’t coming along easily. New ideas are not always a good thing.
But where do these ideas come from?
Yeah, the subconscious often as not, but that’s not really helpful. Dreaming—free association ping ponging around the memories. Yeah? So how come they make any sense at all? But every once in awhile I can at least track down where something starts.
“Daddy’s Girl” was clearly triggered by watching Lock Out, an amazingly poor quality SF “adventure.” It was chock full of poor science, appallingly bad orbital mechanics, stupid stunts, lots of dead bodies but not very much gore. I hope it was hacked and slashed to clean up for the Netflix market, because otherwise the editors did a hideous job of it, right from the start. Worn out predictable plot, trite dialog, clumsy “plot twists” . . . the kind of show that has me screaming “I can do better than that!”
So my subconscious did. Or at least I think it did. My logical brain says the tendency toward trite dialog, stupid stunts and ridiculous premises appear to have been contagious. It’s going to go into the “Story Ideas” file for a good long marinade, to see it if can be rendered edible. It’s got plenty of company.
How many times have you read a book and said “How could he end it like that! or “How could she kill that character?” or “I could destroy the world much better than that!” I do it all the time, and then I think about how I would have ended it, or not killed that cool character. But then it would have to play out differently, start differently, maybe the world should be a bit more or less like today, or a bit like medieval Europe or . . . And pretty soon you’re writing away. And it’s all new.
We all have our heads stuffed with everything we’ve read, everything we’ve watched, everything we’ve done. Most of it gets pretty faded. But some things, some ideas, really stick, and pop out suddenly when triggered. When they mesh with that infuriating book you just read. Or when you realize that a really hot scene sort of like that would work between the characters in the sketchy idea you jotted down . . . what was the name? Where did you file it . . . And suddenly that idea that didn’t go anywhere has come to life. And while you’ve got the file open, there was that funny scene . . .
In order to get new ideas, and write something unique, you need the raw materials. You need kindling for your fire. You need to see things, do things, experience things. You have to have your head stuffed with other people’s ideas. And your opinions of their ideas. And your internal replotting of those stories. So you have to read. And not just the stuff you know you’ll like. You have to watch movies. Yes, even the ones your spouse drags you kicking and screaming out to see. Sometimes the worst things are the most inspirational.
Because you can do better than that.
***
Mad Genius Club 
35 responses to “It Came From The Abyss – by Pam Uphoff”
Which is the story behind my first novel… or at least, the short story I wrote first, for my daughter. She made me read one of her books, and I said “I can do better!”
Oops! Forgot the part where I unashamedly plug my own stuff!
Genetic engineering and dimensional portals. Super soldiers and terrorists with a nuke. Can’t be all bad . . .
The first book of the series is free for the next few days:
And Sarah, this won’t be the first time my email has decided there are things better left unknown to me. Maybe it understands my lack of techiness.
Pam, it wasn’t attached. I MUST add it, then.
I liked this book. Two thumbs up.
So… I went and grabbed it. I’ve never read anything in the Kindle Cloud before (I have a Nook… with a broken charger…)
I got just a wee peek at the first page so far and it grabbed me… Does the Mom know about the magic powers? What happens next? And I loved the boy’s name.
Either C. S. Lewis or Tolkien had the idea of “The Cauldron of Stories” (not sure if that’s his phrase). Writers would dip into the Cauldron for ideas to be used to create new stories which in turn go into the Cauldron for other writers to use. Of course, this idea works even if the “Cauldron” is in our own minds. [Smile]
I woke up just the other day with the phrase “There’s a Sword for That” as the title for an anthology of (unwritten) SciFi and/or Fantasy stories that featured sword-ish weapons both traditional and futuristic and a framing weapons-shop. I thought I better write down a couple of notes about the kinds of stories I meant before putting it away, and in 5 minutes I had a list of a dozen story ideas. No idea where they came from, but I sure like most of them. (There’s the one about a found artifact that kills the monsters in the closet for a small child, and the alien conqueror who finds a discarded demon-possessed kris (keris) in the rubble of an Indonesian-civilized planet, and…)
Guess I know what I’ll be chewing away on, one after another, over the course of the year when I need a break.
Yep, sometimes stories just pop out of nowhere, and off you go. My YA series started with the weirdest dream . . . and once I started writing it down, it got even weirder.
Ideas are what happen when you’ve got other things you should be thinking about. Seriously. You know how it goes. You’re sitting at your desk at that pesky day-job and doing the same work you always do and it’s like “Oh wouldn’t it be awesome if someone wrote a story about a guy who had a boring job and at night he read SF and watched SF movies and then one day, he fell through a temporal vortex and ended up on a ship full of would be soldiers fighting for their lives against invading aliens…”
And it’s not till later that you realize that you just crossed The Last Starfighter, Buck Rogers and Starship Troopers, and some Rip Van Winkle.
And dammit, now I’ve got a new project I don’t have time for.
I’ve always encouraged that, to some extent – like other body parts, the mind grows when used; I like to have a well-expanded mind available when the work needs creativity.
I get hit while I’m reading outside the field. So I’m studying the history of Hungary and Slovakia, say, and notice two things. 1) Certain historical individuals really need longer stories and what would happen if someone like [name] got plunked into a place where . . . and a story goes careening off. And 2) some cultures and peoples, for various reasons, seem to have “kick me” written on them. Why? What within society makes one a doormat and another, same root stock, close geographic location with a similar lack of natural defenses, fights back hard enough to be left alone? Can you have an agricultural people that are warriors?
Greek hoplites (agricultural warriors).
Good point.
“I can do better than that!”
Spider Robinson tells the story of how he got into writing (paraphrased from memory). He was reading a particularly poor example of Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap) one day and said “Even I could write something better than this!” And the rest was history …
Hmm, how does a morphological change into a dragon work?
Other than the “I believe button” method, I can see three options– transform into a drake, rather than a dragon (arms become wings), some ribs get shifted into wings (major change, but still some kind of a source) and “wings grow out of shoulders” type form, rather than transforming from existing bone. (Like a swan maiden’s gizzard.)
I think it’s got to be the human legs and buttocks that transform, splitting into small spindly legs and long strong wings. Human arms are too small, and untransformed legs heavy and useless. We can probably detect dragons by the odd heavy vertibra of their ribcage, practically a second pelvis, with these tendons reaching down to pull the transformed wings into position. Long prominent breast bone as well.
:: thumps head on wall :: I’m supposed to be writing a genetically engineered magic and parallel worlds short story. NO! There are no people transforming into dragons in this particular story. Grrr. Writer’s brain on caffienne.
I actually did this one… finished it, too! It was a demon summoning (the demon was a human from our world) and once she arrived she got transformed to a Wurm by magic, essentially spreading out every cell of her to fit the new shape and exposing every nerve to the air. She was in constant writhing pain until she tried to kill herself by plunging into the ground… discovered she could fly though the ground and that the pressure stopped the pain.
Unfortunately it hasn’t got all that many complete sentences and instead of finding it poetic, most reader reactions I’ve gotten have been sort of… “erm… not my thing.”
I don’t have a lot of ideas, but I have enough. I’ve got about four ideas ahead of me at all times. Fortunately, for both my novels, I realized the ideas for the sequels when I was about two thirds through the first drafts.
I must point out, however, after reading about what happens to other people, that there appears to be a distinct correlation between writing your ideas down and then getting more of them. Just saying.
Oh yes. It’s like we train our brains to access the subconscious through the written word.
Yes
For some reason I missed this post Pam– If I don’t bleed the hyperactive imagination into some form of writing, I get the dreams.
ME TOO.
🙂 mostly night terrors
Well, depending on hormonal time, (You know what I mean) I can get some INCREDIBLY SICK plots. I mean, oh, Sarah Hoyt, NO! level sick. I don’t write most of them.
I wish that more of my dreams were the erotic kind lol– but sadly I am a dark fantasy girl.
Well, my last one, was a full novel series that was BOTH
You win– I give– You are the MASTER of dreams (or Mistress)
Eh. I don’t want to win. I need to write more to keep this crap away.
Yea– I should be writing now instead of surfing and reading comments–
You know that those would probably be hot sellers…
Vade Retro Satanas.
I usually have to seriously edit out those parts of the first draft. Sometimes, looking at my sales, I wonder if that was a good idea.
Might not be.
Yes. If the stories can’t get through in the daylight, they attack after dark. And they aren’t very nice if they have to stay up late.
Yes