“Ooh, shiny!” That’s my magpie reaction when I see anything particularly interesting that I can maybe steal.
Steal for what? Well, it used to be to drop into a conversation, or to trade as a bit of knowledge, or (mostly) just to admire as something I hadn’t known or even noticed before. I studied math, and then dead languages, and dead literatures, and music, and all sorts of things academically and casually on that very basis. “That’s cool! Isn’t that neat! That’s where that comes from!” Education-for-fun has always been my motto — anything to escape boredom.
I turned to writing fiction quite late in life, after all sorts of other things (and a career in tech), but I’ve been reading in vast quantity and dabbling in all sorts of stuff forever. It used to be that I would come across, oh, say, a favorite movie (“I Know Where I’m Going”), and watch a related movie (“The Edge of the World”) set in St. Kilda, and then re-discover the Soay sheep, isolated originally to those islands, and zoom back into the differences in early domesticated breeds that predate flocking and manageability by dogs. (Then I’d take that all the way back to prehistory and the birth of agriculture, like as not.)
Now that I’m writing, I suddenly have a new use for this omnivorous browsing. I can steal things I come across and make them reappear somewhere in my books. What sorts of things? The way someone describes a reaction (“He turned him round swiftly, as the Gordons do all” [Glenlogie] ). The way a pregnancy might change the way a woman smells, to a man with a good enough nose. The way early-modern urban sanitation would require some knowledge of disease vectors and economics and public works and reservoirs and sewers and pipes and water pressure and navvies to do the digging, with their own subculture. All of these shiny fragments are gifts to my bowerbird self, gifts that go into the worlds I build.
I use these things to create a world and a story to present to the next person. Maybe some of it can be a shiny object for the reader. It’s akin to weaving or knitting — the most incongruous or unlikely threads can bring unexpected life, either through some sort of verisimilitude, or through a true echo of the unlikeliness of reality, or just through a new apercu of how things are interrelated.
Before I started writing fiction, I was primarily a magpie, since there weren’t that many people I could share my shiny finds with. Now that I’ve created a place for them, I treasure them even more, as if I’ve tucked a favorite “Ooh, cool!” into its own shareable niche. They’re not the point of the stories, but the stories give them a place of their own in my worlds.
How do you fill and refill the well you draw upon for world and character building? What brings you delight, that you want to share with someone else, where fiction gives you the means?
Mad Genius Club 
11 responses to “Magpies and Bowerbirds”
I read a lot.
Then, before I burst, I post entries to my blog like this:
https://marycatelli.dreamwidth.org/tag/historical+tidbits
Just got a new follower…. Cool!
Or, alternatively… “ooh! shiny!”
You would like this guy: https://acoup.blog/ (Classical Military History)
Glad you enjoy them!
These are very neat!
Thank you!
Favorite books and films certainly serve as a launch points for my accumulations of trivia, but sometimes the most valuable tidbits for fleshing out a world are the things I learn when I’m just looking around out of idle curiosity: the exterior wall-murals of Styria, Icelandic geothermal power, the complicated marriage customs of the Nairs, the famous Rani of Jhansi, the Nanavati murder case, Tolkien’s discarded concept of an industrialized late Numenor, General Moshe Dayan’s interest in archaeology, a particular reinterpretation of a narrator/supporting character in an H. Rider Haggard novel…they’ve all found their way into my books at different times. Okay, the Icelandic geothermal power and industrialized Numenor are still barely referenced pieces of backstory in one setting.
I gleefully steal battles, diplomatic problems, technology of lack thereof, the idea that once trade in something durable begins (lapis lazuli and carnelian), even if the trade route is cut for centuries, people still want the beautiful stuff and will buy it again if trade ever resumes [Mesopotamia and the Oxus-Indus watersheds], ballad plots, lots and lots of archaeology. Oh, and ideas in a song that shifted a character’s plot arc and development {“Raven Child” by Avantasia}.
I love my magpie mind. I pick up all kinds of bits and pieces from everywhere and then they show up, sometimes decades later, in my fiction.
Doesn’t everyone write this way? It makes it more interesting!
I read a lot.
I watch far too many YouTube videos.
I look on Amazon for interesting books of all sorts.
And I keep being way too curious about things that it’s very hard to explain to other people.