There are two types of writers.
No, listen to me and indulge me. It’s late at night, and I’m tired, and–
There are many types of writers, but in fiction, at the bottom of it all, is the division: Where does it all come from for you?
It took me a long time, after I’d become a writer, to realize I was a seriously odd duck.
Most other writers get books from movies or other books.
But Sarah, you’ll say, you admit you got No Man’s Land, currently devouring your brain (in edits now) from reading The Left Hand of Darkness and getting very upset about it.
Which… is true, but at the same time, except for the fact that in the first book we spend a lot of time in ice and snow, the books don’t have a lot in common. The touch/feel is different the set challenge is different, and there are no structural similarities.
I mean, sure, this sent me into play and I tried to figure out a human hermaphrodite race, but– after that the whole d*mn thing just grew. In this case it grew like overyeasted bread.
Same with A Few Good Men, something I kind of vaguely waved at something else on. Actually more so, none of that novel was conscious. I got the narration in my head, and it told the story, and it just happened. But once it was done, I caught the “response” to TMIAHM of “let’s do an American revolution in the future.” My answer was different enough though that there’s very little resemblance. (Though I’ll note that TMIAHM also doesn’t have the main character go into war. I think the cover of AFGM (and possibly the title which was a stupid pun on my part. It should have been Uprising, really) set people up to expect mil sf.
Anyway, it took me years to find out I was weird, and that other people, while inventive and capable lean more on the structure or the plot or sometimes the characters or such. But after a while even books I really love, I can recognize the structure of a movie or another book.
I just don’t do this. I was going to say my books come from Narnia or something, but I obviously don’t use Narnia as a model either (I only read it this year. My kids read it, but I bounced off it consistently.)
But the experience of getting a novel “idea” which often amounts to an entire novel downloaded into my brain, is of having something beam it into my mind from somewhere else, a parallel world or my subconscious of something.
Some times years and years later, I get a feeling for what caused the idea to erupt, but not always. Most of the time the story is just there, it’s overpowering, and I have to share it. And if I don’t, it starts affecting me, and I can’t sleep or do anything else either.
Look, I’m not going to say my way is better. It’s not. Sometimes what my brain really wants to do is super bizarre and I don’t know if there’s a market. (Cries in No Man’s Land.)
It’s just when it’s properly “tuned” and coming out the way it’s supposed to be, not from the universe next door? it’s like my brain fizzes and I’m full of joy, and it’s the best thing in the world.
It’s just the way it is.
Some of my favorite writers, though deliberately start from a premise and use the structure a movie or another book that applies. And it doesn’t detract from the book. (For one, most of the time I haven’t seen the movie yet, and when I see it years later I just go “well… Okay. Doesn’t matter.”)
Which one are you? And can you switch? (I can. I’ve done write for hire where I get told what to write, and I can do it. It’s just not how I work, absent need.)
Mad Genius Club 
19 responses to “Where Does It All Come From”
I start with an idea, often from history, or because I got irked with something and decided to do it a different way, or perhaps write it better (probably not that one). Very rarely have things just leaped out at me from the aether.
*Shakes paw in a Sarahward direction* And the picture you posted at your place led to s fantasy short story. Darn you! Darn you to socks!
to socks?????
It’s funny… sometimes I can identify an initial seed (while I was car-following and photographing fox hunts in Virginia, it occurred to me to wonder “what if a huntsman went thru a portal of some sort into a parallel existence where he was put in charge of the hounds of hell?”).
But mostly no: some scene or other creeps randomly into my brain and starts throwing out tendrils of possibilities, and I have to start construction from the pre-blueprint stage.
Same here. I read the scene in the bible where they were about to stone the woman taken in adultery (in the very act!) and before he told them “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” he wrote in the dirt. And I wondered…What did he write or draw in the sand? Did she see her life? Did the onlookers with stones in their hand see -their- sins, their lives in images in the sand? This sparked a science fiction series having to do with colonizing a planet where the sands of a desert responded to human thoughts. “Monsters of the ID” from the movie FORBIDDEN PLANET figures into what happens, but it’s like neither the bible or that movie.
From books and movies I usually get a “He’s doing it all wrong!” “Oh, why did he do THAT! It was the perfect opportunity to . . .”
But I rarely keep the plot (I think) just, I see the fork in the road the writer either didn’t see or totally dismissed.
Might as well just link this older post of mine whenever the subject comes up, to explain myself:
https://jaglionpress.com/2022/05/11/where-did-that-come-from-why-such-a-jumble-of-influences/
Sarah, I had the impression that Heyer’s Penhallow, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (which is not my thing but also not necessarily the celebration of dysfunctional lovers that the adaptations tend to make it out to be), and maybe some other well-known novels were written in the way you describe.
A thought, a twist, a phrase, a title, that is usually how it starts. Sort of like a mouse peeping out of a hole to see if the coast is clear. Then it washes out in ripples and then in waves if nothing is blocking it.
I don’t get the whole story, I get a part of the story, maybe a character or two, and then like exploring one of the old dungeon maps where everything is dark except for the parts that you’ve already explored (Doom), the rest gets lit, a bit by bit.
The closest thing I’ve found is currently named “Writing Into The Dark” (WITD). Kinda Discovery writing, Sorta Pantsing, but both of those have a different feel than WITD.
I’ve tried the whole plotting thing…and that makes it more like writing an essay…boring. In fact, once I plot the end/outline it…my brain says, “Okay, story done, Nothing more to see here. Move along.” And it is pretty much impossible for me to finish the story. I have many such skeletons in my (hard drive) closet. So, I learned not to do that…but then was left with…now what?
And after switching to doing art for a while and letting words languish, I finally came across someone who explained what they did, and the lightbulb came on that, it was what I USED to do before all the rules were laid on my shoulders like an oxen yolk. So, I have tentatively started doing that again (WITD), and like the mouse peeking out of the hole…the story bits have started peeking back out, and some are even getting written, bit, by bit.
So, I tip my hat to Harvey Stanbrough, who I guess got it from DWS, but put his own spin on it, that resonated with me. Now, I just need a bigger flashlight, so that I can illuminate more of the dungeon, faster.
I don’t do discovery writing. The story is THERE. I sometimes have to beat the wall down to see it.
First, I’m not a writer because while I have plenty of ideas, I have failed to create many (if any) of stories using those ideas and none of the stories have reached the point of publishing them.
However, I “created” a fictional exploration fleet based on “what I believe Star Trek did wrong”.
One element of “what Star Trek did wrong” was the idea that the big exploration ship sends down a small team without supplies, without transportation “home”, without communication “home”, etc.
IE If something happens to the big ship, the team is in Big Trouble.
And of course, why should that big ship wait for the small team to do its job?
I could go on, but I won’t. [Wink]
Hmm. I think this might be a bit off – that any writer, sometimes consciously, but mostly unconsciously, is heavily influenced by what they have read.
Now, some people have likened writing to slapping a new coat of paint onto a tale that originated around that new-fangled invention called “fire.” All too frequently, that is what happens.
But what I think a good writer does is more akin to genetic engineering. Make a few tweaks to the genes in an existing germline, let the result grow and develop to maturity, and you have a critter with similarities to its “parents” – but also something entirely new, never seen before.
(Sigh… Like any genetic engineer, we also all too often wind up with something that miscarries before it is even born, or doesn’t live long after that.)
I’m a songwriter, not a prose writer, for the most part. And I find that ideas come from *everywhere*. Some times, it’s a phrase that occurs to me while driving and I take it home to play with. Other times, I will be playing a chord progression on the guitar and go “What is *that* about?” Yet other times, I will be lying in bed and start working out a bit which I then had better grab my phone and take notes of, because I will not remember it when I wake up in the morning…
I started by trying to write murder mysteries and discovering that my brain/mind won’t do them. I would have agreed that my ideas came from books I had read IF I could have written that way. It turns out that I start with settings and after a while someone walks in and does something expert and I want to explain their expertise. Or something like that…
I start with characters…. They want to tell their story. Everything else comes from that.
My current WIP originally began with what I thought of as a slightly different way to commit murder and then have it be discovered but it also included a sobbing heroine. She was a drip. I had to totally reconstruct her before I could see how to make the rest of the story even potentially interesting.
This is a short treatment of what I start with.
Oh, they come from all over the place. Even when a story has sources in another story, a lot of it can come from other places.
Oddly enough, I was just putting the final touches on this when your article came along. It seems to be in the air.
Meanwhile, I will blame the title of this for my posting this:
The Answers
“When did the world begin and how?”
I asked a lamb, a goat, a cow:
“What’s it all about and why?”
I asked a hog as he went by:
“Where will the whole thing end, and when?”
I asked a duck, a goose and a hen:
And I copied all the answers too,
A quack, a honk, an oink, a moo.
— Robert Clairmont
“Where does it all come from?”
I don’t know how Normies are, but I have a story engine in my brain that NEVER ENDINGLY supplies scenarios and narratives and conversations and blather and…
…and my whole life I’ve wanted it to shut up for five minutes. Seriously, I fondly recall the few times that the damn thing has stopped war-gaming and left me in peace. The ineffable silence, so nice.
In self defense I began writing the stories down ~2010-2012. It was getting stupid, the story engine comes up with some really dark sh1t left on its own. If I write it down I get to point it a little, away from the swamp and more toward the shining city on the hill sort of thing. I can chose to follow characters who are better people than I am.
Hilariously, in my 4th book I was writing along and discovered that in the Boss Fight Scene I’d recreated the story of the Temptation. Completely by accident. Not something I was thinking about, not something I would choose to write about. It naturally arose from the characters and the situation. I only realized what I’d done after re-reading it the third time, combing out the typos.
This business of narratives that naturally arise out of Life, capital L, is getting a lot of play on the Conservative Think-O-Sphere lately. Jordan Peterson wrote a whole book about it.
It seems to me that the “mainstream” SFF themes we all complain about, #EverybodyDoesIt, #LonerWithAGun, #EverythingIsAboutMeAndMyIssues, these are the sorts of themes that justify a fallen morality. If everybody is an @-h0le and the only motivation is money, then being one more @-h0le is… well, about what you’d expect.
Accidentally writing a parable because it all follows, because betraying Life isn’t really an option when you think about it, this feels more aspirational to me. We aspire to be good, even if, or maybe even because, #EverybodyDoesIt.
That’s the story that told itself on my keyboard. #EverybodyDoesIt except -this- guy, because he knows if he takes the money everything in his life will be so much worse, and he will deserve it. I take no credit, that’s just what happened.
Where does it all come from? It arises from nothing, by surprise, while you were busy doing something else.