Where Do I Get My Story Ideas?

I like to answer questions about my writing. I much prefer that to the actual readings. I just realized that as I typed it, but it's true. I don't know if it's the interactivity of it or that I'm not confident that I do a good job of reading, but I do know that I like to talk about the process I go through in my writing. And that's true despite the fact that, no matter how many times I do events, I get the same few questions every time. Once in awhile, someone will surprise me, but mostly it's some combination of the same three or four questions. So I thought I would do a short series of posts in which I answer those queries. 

One thing that is almost always asked, especially at events that aren't with other authors, is where I get my story ideas. The first time I was asked that, I have to admit that I was taken aback to realize I didn't have any idea. And the reason for that is that when I first started writing Harsh Prey, my first book, it was more about the characters than the story itself. I had two people who loved each other deeply, but one of them wasn't sure if she could deal with the violent job of the other. It was almost like I had a snapshot and I built the whole story out from that still frame. It's not almost like that, actually. It's exactly like that. I had no idea where the story was going. At the beginning, I asked myself, what if she's been gone to decide if she can deal with his being a detective and she calls, only to have the violence of his job intervene? And that seemed to work, so I had to ask why the violence happened. The answer was what propelled the story. But regardless of what happened in the detective half of the books, they were, and always will be, more than half about that relationship between Harry and Dee, and now Jenn and Emma Grace too. The Shalan Adventures are, for good or bad, stories about a loving family and the things they go through together. It's almost incidental that he's a gumshoe. 

The second Shalan story, Kisses and Lies, was loosely inspired by an event in the life of the young lady upon whom I based the leggy blonde at the beginning of the book. She had gotten married--in fact, I had performed the wedding--and found that her new husband changed immediately afterward. It was nowhere near as violent as it was in my fictionalized version, but it was, as usual, this series of what-ifs. What if he had been hiding something darker? What if it got violent? What if there were a family dynamic that added a level of depth? And the story grew from there.

The next two, In the Shadow and Dawn of Grace, are really one giant story arc broken into two books. The arc actually begins at the end of Kisse and Lies when Harry finds out that Dee is pregnant. That story was always going to be primarily about them losing that baby and then getting it back. I made the story of Jenn to parallel that. The Jenn part was again inspired loosely by real life events, though no one incident in particular. I'm just exposed to and touched by stories of abuse against young people because of my job as a high school teacher. And when I started writing In the Shadow, I just chose a young lady who was my student and made her the face I saw when I imagined the story in my mind. This young lady wasn't just my student. She was one of my adopted kids, the gang who eat lunch in my room and stay after school to watch movies while I make pancakes and come see me after they graduate when they come home from college. So when I pictured someone doing terrible things to her, it helped me tap into the rage that drove Harry to do what he did at the end of the book. 

As for my current work in progress, it grew out of a scene from a classic book. I read it as part of the AP reading last summer. It was about a young lady taken in by someone purporting to be her father, but he turns out to be a very bad man. Over the course of the week of the reading, I started building a story on that concept that had nothing to do with the original book at all, but that evolved from that situation. What if a teenager had no family and suddenly someone came along saying he was her long-lost father and he wanted to take her in? So that made me ask the next question, which was how did she come to have no one? Was she always an orphan or did she have a family that she lost somehow? And what if, like in the original book, he wasn't really her father? Why would he be interested in taking her in? I knew he had to have some ulterior motive, but I really didn't want it to be anything sexual. I'd had enough of that dark realm and wanted his motivations to be evil in a completely different way. So the story built from there. 

So I guess the answer to the question of where I get my story ideas is that I start with a character or a group of characters and a beginning point--a snapshot in time--and I start asking what if. What if this happened? What if he or she reacted in that way? And once I've asked and answered enough of those what-ifs, I have a book. Piece of cake. Mmm, cake. I better wrap this up and have some breakfast. 

Next week: Where Do My Characters Come From?

My Writing Process--Writing With Abandon

Lola doing what she does best: being
a bit odd.

This week, to be honest, I haven't gotten much writing done. For those of you who don't know me personally, my mother had a stroke a few weeks back. I live with my parents and so, in addition to my regular work chores, which were pretty crazy until Wednesday when grades were finally finished, I'm kind of in charge of our house now. I do all the cooking and what cleaning gets done while I'm at home. I'm also the main caretaker of my folks' dog, Lola. In between all that, I spend as much time as I can at the rehabilitation facility where my mom is working toward recovery. When I'm not doing all that, I spend some time thinking about silly things like mortality and the reality of someday having to live in a world without my parents, the two most important human beings in my life. So, frankly, writing hasn't been high on my list of priorities.

That being said, I am finding at least a little bit of time to add to EJ's life story. And I find that I'm telling the whole darn thing, in surprising detail. Knowing full well that, just like movie directors shoot hours of footage that will ultimately end up on the cutting room floor, I will probably end up cutting out several of the pages I'm writing right now. And that's okay. Many of those pages are more for me than the reading audience, or at least they're for me more directly. What I mean is that I'm creating an entire world and life for this young lady that will be more meaningful to my readers if I am telling a story I know in great detail, even if I don't end up sharing all those details with the public. By writing with abandon, without worrying about whether this particular anecdote will end up in the finished product, I'm getting to know these characters so well that every detail I do share will be more real, more important, more impactful. 

For instance, right now I'm telling about the time when EJ and her mother are stuck on the side of the road, having just bought what they thought was a reliable used car. Out of cell range, they are hoping someone they know will stop so they don't have to hike several miles home. Someone does stop, but it's not who they're hoping for. It's a man with whom they had a run-in just a couple of days after they moved to Bramblewood and pretty much the last person they would want to see. I don't know if the whole scene will make it into the final cut of the book, but their conversation as he gives them a ride is filling in more details about EJ's mother's life. And that's important because EJ is coming into a town that her mother Charlene grew up in but that she, EJ, knows little of. 

The trick with editing is what to leave in and what to take out. It's a balancing act between giving the reader too much detail, which can make for a ponderous, boring read, and too little, which can leave the readers feeling like they missed something. But the beauty of where I am in the writing process is that I don't need to worry about that right now. I can just tell the story in all the minute detail I want and leave that other stuff for the editor to worry about. I know I'm the editor, but I'm not the editor right now. I'm the writer and I don't care that in a few months when I start the editing process I'll be calling down the wrath of God on that crazy writer who just couldn't keep his mouth shut. That editor guy is a merciless hack who wants to kill my babies, so he deserves the angst I'm causing him. 

Excerpt From My Work-In-Progress

I thought it might be fun for you to get an early glimpse at my work-in-progress. It's about a young woman named EJ. I don't want to reveal too much about the plot, but I can tell you the book starts in the middle with our heroine as a teenager, goes back to the beginning, when EJ is just 5 years old and living on a shoestring with her loving single mother Charlene,  and works its way to and past the starting point, ending with EJ as an woman.

This scene is the very opening of the book. EJ is preparing to go to a funeral:

She stood in front of her dresser, staring into the top drawer. She had looked in all the others and her black tights were just nowhere to be found. She started to yell for Mama, like she’d done she didn’t know how many times in the past two weeks. At least this time she stopped herself. And at least this time she didn’t cry. She wondered if she had any tears left in her.

It was almost time to leave for the service, so she was about to give up and just go barelegged. Her dress was almost long enough to cover her legs anyway. But something prompted her to look one last time through the dresser. There they were, right on top of the jumbled mess of socks and hosiery in the second-to-bottom drawer.

She looked up toward the ceiling, surprising herself by laughing. “You’d have made fun of me for that one.”

No one replied because she was alone. It occurred to her for the first time, really, that she truly was alone. There were neighbors they’d known since she could remember. And the customers at The Hive. But with Mama gone—she still hadn’t been able to bring herself to use the D word—she was now completely without family. At least family close enough to mean anything. The bitter anger and self-loathing was slowly being replaced by a dull hollow ache deep inside. Where my soul used to be, she thought.

She slid into her tights, put on her black ballet flats—they were kind of tight and didn’t really look good with the dress, but they were the last pair of shoes Mama had ever bought her—got up, straightened herself in the mirror, and started to go. But something made her look again. Her eyes. She had Mama’s eyes. Everyone had told her that, but she’d seen it. Until just that moment. It was like Mama was staring at her through those eyes. Before she lost it, she hurried out of her room and down the steps to the living room, where Aunt Bill, her ride to the funeral, was waiting.

As time goes on, I'll share other scenes from time to time. I'll also be discussing the experience of telling EJ's story. It's relatively early on in the process, but I'm really starting to like this smart, plucky young woman. I'm also finding it fascinating to depart, albeit temporarily from my normal voice, that of my alter ego, Harry Shalan, and genre. This book does have some elements of mystery, but it's by no means a detective story.