We know (or can guess) how authors create characters in fiction — but how do you create a character in a memoir? Which means that the character is a real person, and you have to represent them truthfully, but also in a way that serves the book and engages the reader. What’s the trick there? For Moses Gates, author of Hidden Cities, the answer is to take everything about that real world person — and subtract. 

MOSES GATES:

If writing a novel is like painting a picture – taking a blank canvas (or page) and creating a work of art from scratch, then writing a memoir is kind of like sculpting. A sculpture starts with a huge chunk of rock, has a vision of what he or she wants to create, and then goes about fulfilling that vision by removing the excess rock until he or she has the sculpture that he or she wants. The trick in sculpting – and memoir writing – is what you take out. You create a compelling story not through building plot, character and story from the ground up, like you would in a novel, but by leaving out all the pointless, boring, or unrelatable bits of your life and memory.

Memoir is taken from the French word for “Memory,” and unless you’ve got a case of amnesia (that would be an interesting memoir!), everybody already has enough memories to fill several books. I had starting writing Hidden Cities shortly after turning 35, which meant I had logged a bit over 300,000 hours of material. Even if I couldn’t remember 99% of my life, that’s still 3000 hours to work with. That’s a lot. After all, James Joyce once famously wrote 265,000 words (which is three times the length of my book), about a single day in the life of one character.

The first cut is easy. After all, while you might be able to start a memoir with “I’m four years old, running after a garbage truck on the streets on Knoxville, Tennessee with my friend Eric Watson” (which is my earliest memory), if the next 50 pages don’t progress past your wonderful relationship with Ms. Dolan your kindergarten  teacher, people are going to put the book down pretty quickly.

So I started with my base – crazy adventures, funny stories, poignant anecdotes. But that’s kind of like just seeing a random arm, toe, and left kneecap among the rock. An actual book has to have a story arc, theme, and/or sense of progression to it, otherwise it’s just a collection of essays. The stories were easy – creating this shape was a lot tougher.

First I started with the characters. Now, the reality is that we are, all of us, in real life, very complicated characters, far more complicated than are found on the pages of any book. We all have our moments of both whimsy and responsibility, triumph and failure, luck and misfortune. But we don’t have the luxury of showing all of these facets in all of our characters when writing – we have to distill. I went with a tried-and-true formula for writing memoirs, especially memoirs about subcultures, which is “average everyman follows brilliant but tragically flawed mentor into a strange new world,” (for anyone contemplating writing a subculture memoir, I cannot recommend following this format highly enough, but that’s another essay).

I chose to write myself as the average everyman, and the other characters more colorfully. But I could have just as easily wrote it the other way around. I devote an entire chapter in the middle of the book to a crazy night Steve (the brilliant but tragically flawed mentor) had, and me having to be responsible one who took care of him. I devote two lines in the epilogue to a very similar night where I was out-of-my-mind drunk, and Steve ended up having to be responsible for my inebriated idiocy. I shaped our characters by subtraction – by leaving out the second story, we weren’t simply two crazy guys doing crazy stuff, now there was some texture to our characters and their relationship.

The story arc was harder. I ended up writing it basically in three acts – the first one being “I wonder what’s out there to discover,” the second one being “holy moly, look at all this stuff out here to discover!” and the third being “well, this is great and all, but what’s the point of doing all of this?” Now, in actuality, I had all three feelings continually throughout the time this memoir took place. But by picking and choosing the types of memories and stories – funny, adventuresome, reflective – to leave in in the different sections, I was able to turn the book into more than just a collection of stories. I had found that connective tissue that molded the arm, toe, and left kneecap into something with a recognizable shape to it.

Finally, I decided I was going to have a theme – the theme of mental boundaries, how they limit us, and how they can be overcome. This was, basically, the decoration – a hat and some jewelry added to my sculpture, if you will, to give it some character and try to make it more than just another stone figure. Anytime I could remember – with traveling, with relationships, with ambitions – where I had encountered mental boundaries, I tried to work into the book. I wasn’t always able to do it (just like a jaunty fedora perched on the head of a sculpture of a Roman Centurion doesn’t really work), but the few times I was, I hope, served to tie the book together into a specific, easily recognizable work.

What all this did was serve to let me chip away at the bits of memory that didn’t serve any purpose.  Some of the stories were tough to let go (especially if they made me seem really cool), but once you get that vision of the sculpture in the rock, you don’t keep a chunk of marble sticking out of the back just because it’s a really pretty chunk of marble. Of course, you do keep it and save it for its own sculpture someday.

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Hidden Cities: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s travel blog. Follow him on Twitter.

In this edition of the Big Idea, author Chandler Klang Smith confronts reality, the imaginary, perception, and, of course, Bob Dylan, whilst discussing her novel Goldenland Past Dark. Good morning! Hope you’ve had your coffee.

CHANDLER KLANG SMITH:

When one sees reality through the mind’s eye, what is created?  And what is erased, distorted, lost?

The last song on the Bob Dylan album Highway 61 Revisited is “Desolation Row.” Like most of the other tracks, it’s populated with surreal and carnivalesque figures: a tightrope walker, a fortuneteller, the hunchback of Notre Dame, the Phantom of the Opera, mermaids.  After what seems like a final verse (in which the players board the doomed Titanic), the music goes into a lengthy harmonica solo – presumably, the end of the song, the end of the album.  But it isn’t.  Like the false bottom of a drawer, it’s just there to conceal the most important content. When Dylan’s lyrics return, the imagery is entirely different from what’s preceded it:

“Yes, I received your letter yesterday / About the time the doorknob broke / When you asked me how I was doing / Was that some kind of joke? / All these people that you mention / Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame / I had to rearrange their faces / And give them all another name…”

Like a dream, the song has taken characters and situations from the speaker’s life and translated them into symbols, disguised them in metaphor. Sometimes reality only becomes bearable when glimpsed in the funhouse mirror of the imagination.

If I had one guiding idea when I wrote Goldenland Past Dark, it was this. My novel is about a young circus performer, Webern Bell, damaged physically and psychologically by a childhood that left him motherless, hunchbacked, and stunted. In the present day, he deals with everything emotional in his life (memories, love, grief, anger, rejection), through bizarre clown routines that come to him in dreams. When even that becomes too painful, he finds comfort with an imaginary friend, Wags, who also serves as his double, scapegoat, and replacement.

As someone who prefers the alternate worlds of fiction to any reality I’ve experienced, I can certainly relate to the impulse to make sense of life through fantasy. Yet I see something sinister in it too, and this was the tension I wanted to explore. The urge to retreat, to escape, can be a creative one, but taken to an extreme, it can be a form of delusion, self-erasure – psychic suicide. It also can let the dreamer off too easy. In the kingdom of one’s own mind, other people aren’t real, so there’s no need to consider anyone else’s point of view.

Which brings us back to the Bob Dylan song. For me, that final verse is so powerful not just because he reveals the logic underlying the creation of the song that precedes it, but because, for the first time, he acknowledges the presence of the listener he’s addressing.  And more than that, he’s communicating with this person – not just transmitting a message into the void, but continuing a conversation, responding to the letter he received.  As much as he wants to be left alone (“Don’t send me no more letters, no…”), the hope of being understood by another has motivated and inspired him all along.

The point of making art isn’t just to create a space where you can go to sort out the nonsense of life; it’s to open up this space to others, too. By the end of Goldenland Past Dark, my protagonist makes himself vulnerable in this way, and consequently, grows up as a person and as a performer.

—-

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We all have ethical perspectives, but what happens when a writer tries to get inside the head of someone with a, shall we say, truly unique take on the ethical responsibilities of the human race? Deb Taber, author of Necessary Ill, may have an insight into this particular trick.

DEB TABER:

Survival is an instinct. Despite the complexity of the human brain, on a basic biological level our bodies, our genes, want to survive. Not just survival of the individual, but survival of the species as a whole. But what do you do about survival of the species if reproduction is out of the question? That’s the big idea—or rather, the big question—behind Necessary Ill.

The science fiction that has always fascinated me most is that which takes a scientific fact or premise and stretches it into a shape it was never meant to fit. For me the ideas  began with a book titled Cats are Not Peas by Laura Gould.

Ms. Gould found herself the owner of a male calico cat. Sounds benign on the surface, right? But if you know much about cat genetics, then you know that in the XX-or-XY-only world we’re taught in science classes, male calico cats cannot exist. This is (in very simplified language) because the genes for black fur and orange fur in cats are both on the X chromosome, so to get both black and orange on the same cat, you need two X chromosomes. What Ms. Gould found out in the search to understand her pet genetic anomaly was that genetics are far, far more fascinating and complex than Mr. Mendel’s peas.

Humans are far from exempt from such genetic possibilities, and with a few simple changes to our basic sex chromosomes you get things that shouldn’t be possible, like our friend the male calico cat. Add a liberal dose of science fiction and you get humans who have a whole different perspective on the survival of the species; one not centered on reproduction.

In Necessary Ill, the neuts (naturally genderless humans) have many pursuits to satisfy this basic urge of mammals to ensure survival of their own species. Some go into medicine, others teach, others research and develop methods for helping the human race overcome its need to overconsume and create long-lasting waste. But what if, with the drive to reproduce removed and the aptitude toward science in place, all that you learned, all that you could see, told you the primary threat to human survival, and the solution was clear and logical: cull the population to more manageable levels?

That’s where the spreaders come in: neuts who spread carefully engineered plagues with the end goal of survival of the species over survival of individuals. And they must do so without promoting one type of human over the other, bypassing racial, socioeconomic, and all other bias they can quantify. The challenge here was to create the story’s main protagonist, Jin, a spreader who firmly believes in the rightness of mass murder for mass survival, yet make that character an engaging, even sympathetic, character.

For me, the key to Jin was understanding the background of the thought process Jin comes from: Jin’s own quest to understand the reason why the answers it sees so clearly are considered so wrong.

—-

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If you don’t have one Big Idea, is enough to have several standard-sized ideas, and then let them build? It’s the question Deborah Coates asks and answers today, in reference to her latest novel Deep Down. Let’s find out what happens.

DEBORAH COATES:

I’m not sure I’m the sort of person who has Big Ideas.  Frankly, I’m more the sort who gets an idea, can’t figure out what to do with it, sits on it forever, gets another idea, and another, and maybe even another.  None of them big enough for a story on their own, but each a bit interesting–to me, if no one else.  Those ideas sit in my back brain, never quite gone, until someday it occurs to me–hey, I could put a bunch of these together!

Deep Down is my second published novel.  My first novel, Wide Open, introduced fictional Taylor county, South Dakota, and the characters Hallie Michaels and Boyd Davies.  One of the things I wanted to explore in the series as a whole was the idea of liminal spaces.

Hallie Michaels was dead for seven minutes in Afghanistan.  Since then, she’s occupied a liminal space between life and death.  She still walks and talks and does everything the living do, but ghosts follow her and she sees things and is able to do things that no one else sees or can do.

South Dakota occupies a liminal space, too.  It’s not the rolling green hills and rich farmland of Iowa or Illinois.  But it’s not quite the West, or at least not the West of American myth, of cowboys and cattle and mountain ranges.  South Dakota is just…South Dakota–a few interesting bits with lots of empty space between.

Afghanistan, where Hallie died and came back, has historically been a place people conquer on their way to someplace else, often more important for where it leads than where it is.

In addition, Deep Down, as the second book in a set of three, also occupies a liminal space, not the beginning, nor yet the conclusion, but the dreaded ‘middle book.’

So that was the first idea–liminal spaces.

For the second idea, it helps to know something about me: I grew up on a farm at the end of a dead-end gravel road ten miles out of town.  I liked growing up on a farm.  I liked showing cattle at the county fair.  I liked going to a small school in a small town.  I went to the Ag college at Cornell and majored in Animal Science and I got a Master’s degree from the University of New Hampshire in Plant Science (more specifically, in forages and nutrition).  But I don’t farm.  I don’t live on a farm.  Hardly anyone else in the US does either (Only about 2% of the US population live on farms and most of those farms are not the owners’ primary source of income).  I wanted to write about that, about living and working on farms and ranches and about what goes on in those parts of the US where the Interstates don’t run.  A friend of mine calls it ‘farm porn;’ so, yeah, that’s Deep Down too–farm porn.

Twenty-some years ago, I moved to Iowa.  I didn’t particularly want to move to Iowa or, in fact, any state that started with a vowel, but I wanted a job and that was where the job was.  What I knew about Iowa at that point in my life was that it was flat and ugly and full of tornados and blizzards.  The day I moved to Ames it was 102 degrees.

Ten years later, I drove through western Nebraska and found myself thinking, I don’t know why everyone says western Nebraska is boring, because, holy smokes, it’s beautiful!  You could see miles in every direction!  There were no trees in the way!  How could that not be awesome?

In Deep Down, Hallie doesn’t want to be in Taylor county and she doesn’t want to stay there, but it’s where she is and she has to figure out exactly what that means and, more important, what she really wants.

Finally, big things happen at the end of Wide Open.  And though I hadn’t initially planned on it, it didn’t make sense that those big things wouldn’t reverberate for the characters and for the world. In addition–and I realized this after I’d written and revised and handed the manuscript off to my agent–whatever was happening in Deep Down had to affect not just Hallie and Boyd, but the world.  I wanted it to be an intimate story–one that affected the characters at a personal level–but it couldn’t just be that story, not after they’d lived through the events of Wide Open.  The threat had to be bigger.  And the bigger threat, it turned out, related straight back to the past.

So, Deep Down has lots of ideas, which I hope work together and maybe add up to a Big Idea.  It’s about liminal spaces.  It’s about the consequences of what’s gone before.  It’s about empty places and the people who live there.  And it’s–or at least the series is–about making a home out of where you live because you live there.

Oh, and ghosts.  It’s got ghosts, too.

—-

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I like a good night’s sleep — but what do you do when your sleep lasts much longer than a night? What happens when you fall asleep in one world and wake up in another one entirely? Author Karen Healey dreams up just such a situation in When We Wake, and the choices she makes for her heroine take cues from other, very deep sleepers.

KAREN HEALEY:

I wanted to write about a Sleeping Beauty.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a character who sleeps for a hundred years, and then wakes. A hundred years is a long time. In that period, new technologies will be discovered, new diseases will arise, empires may fall, and the very environment may alter entirely. But to the sleeper, these changes aren’t a gradual occurrence, but a sudden, jarring shift – only yesterday, the world was what they knew. Now, it is alien.

How does a Sleeping Beauty cope with all that is lost, not to mention all that is strange to a past-timer’s eyes? How does she construct a new life, in a new world?

So I have a big problem with the Disney version of the Sleeping Beauty archetype, which has, in that charming Disney way, become the version of the story most people know.

Disney’s Sleeping Beauty doesn’t sleep for a hundred years. Disney’s Sleeping Beauty takes a lengthy evening nap.

BORING.

On top of that, Disney’s Sleeping Beauty isn’t the hero of her own story. She appears on screen for about eighteen minutes of the movie’s 85 minute running time. She’s barely a character at all – all we know about her is that she’s pretty, and she likes to sing and dance. She doesn’t do anything, she doesn’t take action.

Older versions of the Sleeping Beauty archetype got to take action, both before and after their lives were suspended. The righteously embittered Valkyrie Brynhildr leaves a trail of destruction after she is awakened by the duplicitous hero Siegfried. Zhang Yunrong, of the Chinese tale by Pei Xing, wins her husband herself – not exactly asleep, but temporarily dead (!), she plays dice with other ghostly maidens for the privilege of his hand in marriage.

In the more recent fairy tale versions by Giambattista Basile and Charles Perrault, the Sleeping Beauty is more done unto than doing. In both versions, when the first wife (!) or evil stepmother of the nobleman who awakens her discover the Sleeping Beauty’s existence, and that of her children (!!) they aren’t pleased. In fact, they try to have the children and mother served for dinner (!!!). Thwarted, the evil older lady suffers a terrible death, and the Sleeping Beauties live happily ever after, having overcome the challenges between them and bliss.

Survival is certainly an accomplishment when your mother-in-law is trying to eat you, but it lacks action. Where’s the verve?

Fortunately there’s verve-a-plenty in more modern Sleeping Beauties – such as Captain America.

Cap is one of my favorite Sleeping Beauties. Fallen in valiant battle, he sleeps beneath the ice for X number of decades, until revived into a world that needs him once more. A man out of time, he must negotiate the new cultural and social pressures of this new period, while honoring his past. He does it exceptionally well, and looks exceptionally pretty, even in a uniform with the little wing things on the hood.

And, which I find interesting, he allows himself to be used as a symbol of American exceptionalism – but only up to a point. When Cap discovers a high-ranking US politician secretly commands a terrorist organization, he abandons both uniform and name. He then takes on the identity of Nomad, a roving hero. More recently, Cap opposed new legislation requiring the registration of all superpowered citizens, recognizing the massive privacy breaches and human rights abuses to which such a system would lend itself.

Captain America is a hero’s hero and a nation’s dream; but he’s also his own man, making his own decisions about what that dream should represent.

Then there’s Aang, from the Nickelodeon cartoon series, Avatar: The Last Airbender. (We don’t talk about the movie. There is no movie.) The 12-year-old Avatar of his fantasy world, the one who balances the elements in harmony, he runs away from his duties – and into a blizzard which freezes him for a century.

When Aang wakes, he must deal with the results of abdicating his responsibility; the world has changed, and not for the better. Aang mans up and takes action, and he does it with a delightful cheerful optimism that the world can be changed. It can be made better.

These modern Sleeping Beauties became my Big Idea.

What if I wrote a Sleeping Beauty, scientifically suspended, and awaking to a world that had changed forever? What if she had been politically active before her death, and more so upon her revival? What if people wanted to make her a symbol, but she was determined to remain a person? What if she had the stubbornness of Captain America, and the optimism of Aang, and some of the physical skill of both?

And because I adore Brynhildr – what if she didn’t always make the best decisions?

Tegan Oglietti is my Sleeping Beauty.  A sixteen-year-old nascent political activist, she is shot dead on the happiest day of her first lifetime, and revived as the first successful cryonic revival subject, one hundred years on. Everybody wants to use her as a symbol – the government that woke her, the media that can’t decide whether to glamorize or despise her, the religious zealots who see her very existence as blasphemy.

But Tegan is her own woman, making her own decisions. And when she realises what the people in power really have planned for the revival project, she refuses to be done unto. She believes that the world can be made better.

When Tegan wakes, she acts.

And that’s my kind of Sleeping Beauty.

—

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Writers know that sometimes there is the writing you are supposed to be doing, and then there’s the writing you want to be doing. Prudence dictates doing the former over the latter. But sometimes, as Alaya Dawn Johnson found in writing The Summer Prince, there might be something to telling prudence to take a hike.

ALAYA DAWN JOHNSON:

I tend to write my novels the way other people quilt, in a somewhat-ordered patchwork of varied materials that have arrested my interest. Which means that whenever I discuss my inspiration for The Summer Prince I end up babbling about matriarchies and fame and what a non-heteronormative society might look like when projected into the future of African diaspora culture in Brazil, plus music and art and human sacrifice (I thought about including reincarnation, but that seemed like overkill).

But since this series is called “The Big Idea” and not “a dozen or so somewhat large ideas,” I’ve had a long, hard think about the one idea that really made this book work.

And I finally realized: it wasn’t any of those good ideas I babble about. The catalyzing ingredient was, in fact, a very bad idea.

Namely, writing it.

What The Summer Prince taught me is that some bad ideas are very, very good. Of course, most are very, very bad and figuring out the distinction is not for those with a surfeit of common sense (luckily I’m a writer). But The Summer Prince turned out to be the best bad idea that I’ve ever had. When I described this novel to friends, they would paper their shock with kindly smiles and tell me that they were sure I’d figure it out. My sister told me to write out the idea, then put it in a drawer and get back to it when I finished that pesky novel I had under contract. You know, the one that would give me money to pay my rent.

Rent? I said. Sure, just as soon as I buy this train ticket to Vancouver and spend three weeks running away from home with nothing but my extensive Brazilian music collection, my computer and some coffee money.

So I traveled and I wrote what sounded like my least commercial novel ever, just because the idea gripped me so ferociously I could not help but put it to paper. This, in hindsight, was actually a great idea. Because it meant that I wrote my science fiction novel about the transformative power of art in a matriarchal society. It meant that I wrote my YA novel with characters whose fluid sexuality is neither belabored nor obfuscated, and with a romance that does not, to put it mildly, end happily ever after.

I let myself go. I freed myself from what I perceived were the expectations of the market and the genre. Heck, I even freed myself from the expectations of my landlady. I wrote that book because there was nothing else for it, and despite some months of teeth-gnashing and self-despairing, writing The Summer Prince was one of the best experiences of my life.

What I didn’t expect was that publishing it would also turn out to be one. This novel got me my current agent, one of the best in the business. It put me on the radar of Arthur A. Levine (a.k.a. the editor of one J.K. Rowling) and the wonderful team at Scholastic. They gave me unicorns and sunshine–well, okay, but they did give me the best cover of my career and the sort of promotion that I had previously thought was a fantasy from a bygone era (like, the eighties).

Putting off the writing of a contracted novel for the deliberately anti-commercial novel of your heart probably isn’t fabulous writing advice. But since no one’s paying me for fabulous writing advice, here’s what I learned:

Write what you love. Whatever that is, even if it seems like an absolutely abysmal career move. Because if it doesn’t work out, at least you wrote something you’ve always wanted. If that carefully positioned market-friendly idea you only sort of like tanks, then you’ve spent years working on something that doesn’t excite you. If something you love tanks, then at least you spent that time creating art that you know, in your heart, is worthwhile.

And it turns out that agents and editors and publicists and readers can tell when your heart is in it. So my big idea was to do myself a favor, and put it there.

—-

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Superheroes are fun, but superheroes, defined as they often are by their powers more than personalities, can also be a little… bland. How to spice up their lives? Peter Clines has a couple of ideas on the matter, some more apocalyptic than others, which he explores in his latest novel, Ex-Heroes.

PETER CLINES:

When the chance to do this first floated past me, I jumped at it.  It was only later, when I sat down and had to come up with a Big Idea, that I realized I wasn’t sure what mine was.  I mean, I’d never really considered myself a writer of Big Ideas.

Of course, Ex-Heroes is about superheroes fighting zombies in post-apocalyptic Hollywood, and more than a few folks have told me that in and of itself “superheroes fighting zombies” is a big idea.  Except it isn’t.  Zombies have been showing up in comic books for decades.  And my zombies aren’t even anything special.  They’re the classic Romero shamblers.  I didn’t want to waste time making up new rules for no purpose except to have new rules (“It’s not like the movies– you have to shoot them in the spleen!”), and then waste more time explaining them.

So I suppose my Big Idea was the superheroes.  I’d been a big comic geek as a kid (back when that term wasn’t something to be proud of), and I’d created lots of heroes all through grade school.  Plus, as someone who still dabbled in comics now and then, I missed the classic superheroes I grew up with and wanted to write characters more like that.

Actually, on that note, I’d like to make a distinction.  Like I said, I wanted to tell a story about superheroes, not superpowers.  I think a lot of people confuse the two these days.  It’s like baseball and football, and you can hit a lot of problems if you run out on the field thinking you’re playing the wrong one.

Consider this—Stephen King’s Carrie, Firestarter, and The Shining are all about kids with psychic powers.  Steven Gould’s Jumper is about a young man with the ability to teleport, as is Alexander Key’s The Case of the Vanishing Boy.  In Arthurian legend, the Green Knight has healing abilities that let him survive a decapitation.  Robert Louis Stevenson and H. G. Wells both wrote about scientists whose formulas gave them superhuman powers.  David Cronenberg did an excellent remake of The Fly where Jeff Goldblum combines his DNA with an insect, giving himself great strength, speed, and endurance (along with some interesting digestive abilities).

Are any of these superhero stories?

No, of course not.  A character isn’t a superhero just because they have special powers or abilities.  Not even if they have a catchy code-name, a cool uniform, or two belts and a thigh-band with a hundred little pouches between them.  Tales of people with superhuman abilities go all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, but a superhero story is a very specific subset of that very large group.

I think that a superhero is a person who makes a conscious decision to publicly use their powers for the greater good—for something that doesn’t involve them.  They aren’t doing it just to save someone close to them or to show off or to get even.  Superheroes feel compelled to use their abilities to help others, no matter how crappy it might make aspects of their own lives.  Obvious as it may sound—superheroes act heroically.

And I wanted to write about superheroes.

I also wanted characters who weren’t weighed down with a ton of neuroses, hang-ups, emotional baggage, and all those other elements that some writers use to add “realism” to characters.  They didn’t need to be flawless, but I thought it should be possible to make believable superheroes who fought for good and tried to do the right thing without being… well, messed up on three or four levels.  After all, somebody doesn’t have to be screwed up to be a solider, a police officer, or a fireman.

Of course, it was easy to see where having “boy scout” (or girl scout) superheroes in the middle of a major crisis could be tough, story-wise.  It’d either be ridiculous as said characters stuck to their moral code without wavering, or it’d become stock melodrama as they abandoned their code to “do what needed to be done.”  Neither of these was a very interesting option to me.

Except it didn’t take long to realize they weren’t the only options.  Being a boy scout doesn’t mean a character always does the right thing with no questions asked.  It doesn’t mean they don’t have struggles or second thoughts.  If anything, when someone has to go through those mental gymnastics because of their strong moral code, gets beat up physically or emotionally over it, and then still does the right thing… that’s when they become an interesting character.

To me, anyway.

So I wanted to have superheroes who were classic, but still realistic.  And realistic without being flawed to the point of melodrama.  And still be decent characters that the average reader could relate to and enjoy following.

No problem, right?

In retrospect, it’s not that I wanted to write about superheroes.  I just wanted to write about heroes.  Characters that people could look up to and be inspired by.  And heroism is a pretty Big Idea.  The one that’s sitting in plain sight if I’m talking about superheroes.

So I think I’m done now.  That covers everything, yes?

Oh.  And they also have to fight zombies.   Because let’s face it…

Superheroes fighting zombies is a pretty cool idea.

—-

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Finally, someone — specifically, J.A. Kazimer — points out a fact about fairy tales that everyone knew but was too beguiled by Disney to say out loud. And used that fact to write a book — specifically, Froggy Style. Lean in and hear truth, my friends.

J.A. KAZIMER:

Envision a friend telling you a story about this guy he knows, a good guy; some might even call him a prince among men, a guy who is good-looking and rich to boot. Besides hating him instantly, you grudgingly listen, hoping like crazy it will end with the guy getting an STD.

Anyway, this prince among men is walking through a wooded area behind his house (a really nice, fancy house with too many rooms and a butler. What kind of douche has a butler, you wonder, but keep quiet for your friend is getting to the good stuff). In the middle of the woods, the prince stumbles on a dead woman, a beautiful dead woman with hair as black as sin and lips as red as blood, her breath smells of a heady mixture of apples, dwarfs, and decomposition.

Rather than do the right thing, and perhaps call a cop or summon medical help, this prince among men leans down to play a game of tonsils hockey with the decaying dead chick.

At this point you’re thinking, ‘That’s f***ed up’.

And there you have my Big Idea. Fairy tales are seriously f***ed up.

But why are they so f***ed up? What purpose do they serve, especially in our advanced society? I mean, it’s not like we need to worry about wolves dressing up in drag in order to eat girls in red anymore. Going to Las Vegas, drinking too much, and winding up in a bathtub full of ice with our kidneys missing, sure, but that’s completely different.

Or is it? Could it be urban legends are the fairy tales of our time?

Two hundred years ago when the brothers Grimm wrote their famous fairy tales were they actually warning kids not to get drunk on meade and wind up in an ice bath? Or suggesting chicks living with seven short guys shouldn’t take apples from strangers? Each a great bit of advice, but strangely enough, not always followed, especially by reality TV stars.

After reading a bunch of grim-ending tales, their equally sugary cartoon reenactments, and watching TV morons from sea-side shores, I asked, how hard could it be to write a fairy tale for today’s audience, something like Shrek, but for those old enough to worry about drunken-kidney-theft? It’s not like I could make fairy tales even grimmer. Not after those two twisted brothers, Disney remakes, and Easy-Bake Snookis.

But where to start? Maybe with a necrophilic prince?

No, been there. Snow White did just that.

A villain then.

After all, people may love a hero, but girls sleep with the bad boy villain every time. Think about it. The anti-hero has a long legacy in entertainment. Can you even picture Silence of the Lambs without Hannibal Lector? Or care to read Dr. Jekyll without Mr. Hyde? Why bother? It would be like watching reruns of Doctor Quinn, Medicine Women, after taking two Ambien.

From my way of thinking, people are far good or evil, black or white, and characters should be too. For too long two-dimensional characters ruled fairy tales, from the perfect Price Charming to a wealth of inter-changeable damsels-in-distress. Not anymore. My fingers flew across my keyboard; bring to life a villain cursed to be nice, a leather-clad ugly stepsister, and most recently, a jaded, former-fly eating prince with no choice but to marry a lazy princess he’s never met.

Why stop there, I asked? Why not shatter all of the fairy tale traditions, throw in a nursery rhyme or two, after, of course, I buckled my shoe? The end result, a series of irreverent F***ed Up Fairy Tales in which I’ve crushed Cinderella under a bus (you know she deserved it) nearly drowned Sleeping Beauty in a bowl of soup (Campbell’s Chunky works best for princessicide), and had the Old Woman in the Shoe arrested for breaking numerous child-labor laws.

Yet in the end, flattened princess aside, in true fairytale fashion, everyone must live happily ever after.

Until the princess-zombie-apocalypses.

—-

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Not every Big Idea works for a book — but just because a Big Idea fails in that way does mean it can’t inspire other big ideas, some of which might fare better. Francis Knight, author of Fade to Black, explains this concept further.

FRANCIS KNIGHT:

Fade to Black wasn’t born of one Big Idea, or rather it was, but that got shot down in flames fairly early on (and rightly so). But this book, which was one of the first I ever started, but which simmered on and off on a back burner for three years, is where I began to learn my writing process – that is, I write best with a cascade of small ideas that turn up organically as I go, born from what I’ve already got down.

The original Big Idea was fairly simple – I’d been reading a lot of Philip K Dick and other noiry SF, watching too much Bladerunner and The Crow, and thought, hey, I should give that a try. A futuristic dystopia, should be fun. With a cynical protagonist, yeah. SF, no problem. Ha blinking ha.

But I gave it a go, and wrote out my Shiny New Idea in the blaze of words that occurs at such times, and I gave it, with trepidations, to my writers’ group. Who quite fairly pointed out that my ‘future tech’ was…implausible. In a way that reduced at least one to stifled giggles.

Damn. So I put the MS on the back burner for a bit and wrote other things, but my mind kept coming back to it, turning it over whenever I was between projects. I mean, I had a setting, some basic tech I could use, and I had Rojan who’d turned up out of nowhere in a spew of bile and lechery and was actually quite fun to write.

And little ideas kept coming, a bit more each time I spent a week or so on it. What if…what if instead of the future, this was an alternate world? One where magic and tech had progressed simultaneously? How would that work?

What if the techies had grown tired of the mages lording it over everyone and in a sudden coup, egged on by the local church, executed most of them and banned the rest on pain of, well, pain?

What if the mages had been powering everything, so now the techies and their church friends had to find something else to power the city quick? What if the thing they came up with wasn’t quite as benign as they first thought and ended up poisoning everyone?

What if they tried to hide their mistake, or at least one of the results of that mistake?

What if the techies weren’t just techies now, but in charge and getting a bit power hungry? Not to mention twisted by the local theologists so that they could lord it over everyone.

What if some years later, Rojan, physical coward (he prefers to call it ‘Not Stupidly Masochistic’) and feckless womaniser, had a magic that he really didn’t want to use, because it would hurt, a lot? No to mention get him executed. But what if he then had to use it? Worse than that, what if it meant he had to be *gulp* responsible? Can a feckless womaniser, liar and cynic really be the guy to take the “hero” role when he’d rather be at home in bed with a warm woman and lots of booze?

And that’s when the whole story came together – when all those what ifs ganged up on me. Rojan the feckless met pain magic, and realised it screwed with his life in ways he’d didn’t realise he could be screwed.

Each time I wrote a bit more, a few more what ifs would turn up, and those what ifs would party and get drunk and do naughty things in the bedroom, or possibly in the Jacuzzi, and breed more what ifs. And with each one, the story and the world grew more alive. And lo, it came to pass that I realised, about half way through, that this is how I write best. Letting the writing carry me along and bubble up more ideas – that the act of writing begets ideas, and more writing.

It still took me a while to finish, between other projects, but those other projects went better and faster because I’d realised how to write the best way for me. Because, let’s face it, there’s as many ways to write a book as there are writers. Possibly more, because not every book works the same, but knowing your own basic process – I need to get words down to ferment ideas – helps tremendously.

So Fade to Black may have started with a Big Idea that died an early death, but it gave me a Big Idea that’s become invaluable to me. It taught me how I write.

—-

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It’s ironic that authors can write entire books — but sometimes stumble in a short explanation of what’s going on in those books. Emma Newman knows this, particularly in reference to her newest novel, Between Two Thorns. Does she find a way to persevere regardless? Let’s find out, shall we?

EMMA NEWMAN:

I have a confession to make; I’ve been struggling to write this post for over a week. I wrote and abandoned three drafts because they sounded like academic lectures on the subject of the Split Worlds. I experimented with having characters from the book describing Aquae Sulis, the secret magical reflection of modern day Bath, and whilst it was fun it didn’t feel right.

It’s always been difficult for me to talk about my own work – something I think many fellow authors experience. That awful moment in any project when I have to come up with the pithy one-sentence summary always sends me into a fit of hand flapping and a sudden inability to describe anything about my book. It’s always too big to fit into one sentence. I get there in the end, but it’s hard.

I looked over previous Big Idea posts and realised why I was finding my own so difficult: Between Two Thorns – and the entire Split Worlds series – did not spring from one spark of inspiration. There was no light bulb moment or conversation or thought that popped into my head that launched me into writing this book.

It sneaked up on me instead. At first it disguised itself as a short story about a shopkeeper and a woman returning one of his products; a faerie trapped in a bell jar. The woman thinks it’s a frivolous gadget sent by her husband abroad, with no idea that she’s in possession of a real faerie which could destroy her life. The shopkeeper, feeling merciful, sends her away with a fruit cake recipe after casting a memory loss charm on her.

The idea took root and before long it was a weekly flash-fiction serial. I wrote for several months until it dawned upon me that what I was really doing was building a world for a series of novels. I developed a role-playing game and chucked my husband into it so I could explore it with a GM’s brain. It enabled me to flesh out the world, figure out the metaphysics and get a feel for the characters and the social mechanics of Nether society.

Thinking about it, a particularly big idea did hit at that point, but if I told you, it would spoil the entire series. Brilliant. So I’m keeping quiet about that one.

When I look back on the three books I’ve written set in the Split Worlds – and the fifty short stories set there too – I can happily say there are several big ideas. There are the Split Worlds themselves and how people deal with strict social systems kept isolated from the usual forces of change. There’s the pressure to conform to family expectations and the dubious privilege of being favoured by immortal beings. There’s the Fae and faeries as frightening forces of nature rather than cute. There are beautiful prisons – constructed by others and those of our own making.

Saying that any one of those was the starting point would be a lie. These themes emerged from the characters and the worlds they live in. So even though there wasn’t one that kicked it all off, I’m happy to say there are a plenty of big ideas in Between Two Thorns. I hope you enjoy exploring them as much as I did.

—-

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Read stories set in the “split worlds” universe. Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

Sometimes you start writing with the idea of creating a small, intimate tale — and then the tale decides it has other plans. Such was the case when Miriam Forster started writing City of a Thousand Dolls. What happens when a story grows beyond your expectations? Let’s find out.

MIRIAM FORSTER:

The original idea for City of a Thousand Dolls arrived like a gift. I’d been reading a book about Guinevere (I believe it was The Child Queen by Nancy Mckenzie) and I came across the line “Who are you being groomed for?” That line dug into me and hung on, and suddenly, I had an entire setting in my head, an estate where girls would be groomed and trained for different roles.  It was lush and opulent, with different Houses that would raise everything from musicians and noblewomen to warriors and assassins.

But it was just a setting. I needed a plot, I needed characters, and most importantly I needed an idea of what the book was about.  In order for me to actually write a book, there has to be some sort of central human experience to orient the story around. It doesn’t have to be preachy, or obvious to anyone but me. But it needs to be there or my story wanders off into the weeds and gets lost.

I thought for sure that a story with such a setting as the City of a Thousand Dolls must be about expectations. How expectations shape people, what happens when you go against them, or worse, what happens when no one has any expectations of you at all. That was the story I set out to write. But when I finished the first draft, I discovered that wasn’t what I’d written at all.  Without meaning to, I’d written a story about different kinds of love: friendship, admiration, romance, and family. I’d made a character—Nisha Arvi—who had all of those kinds of relationships, a girl who was vulnerable and stubborn, impulsive and prone to make mistakes. Those mistakes had consequences, and the consequences affected her relationships.

That was the core of the story I’d written, a story about the way that different kinds of love and affection stand up under the pressure of human frailty.  It was a small, personal story at its heart.

But the setting was neither small nor personal. And it grew as time went on. The Empire had been cut off by magic. There was unrest, there was social injustice, there was a mystery surrounding Nisha herself. And that wasn’t even counting all the dead bodies. My little story was becoming epic.

That led to some problems. The stakes weren’t high enough. The world was underdeveloped and unsatisfying.  It took a lot of work to make the events of the story match the setting, without losing the idea of love and relationships that lay at its roots.

I could have abandoned the original core, but I didn’t want to. For me, fantasy, and especially high fantasy, is better when it’s grounded in the muck and mud of the human experience.  Fantasy is wonderful for exploring big themes of good and evil and writing vast, complicated stories about politics and prophecies and chosen ones. But the greatest fantasies, the most enduring ones, keep the human connection. The best example I can think of is Tolkien, who wrote a great, sweeping epic about the rise of a Dark Lord… and then hinged the fate of the world on two hobbits and a mad little cave-dweller.

So I hung onto the little story I’d created. All through the rewrites and the research and the development of the world and the stakes, I kept the personal heart of the book intact.  And even now, it weirds me out a bit to see City of a Thousand Dolls described as epic. “No, you don’t understand,” I want to say. “It’s really not that big, I swear.” No one believes me.

They don’t have to. After all, I’m not the only person writing the story; the reader has their part to play. Now that it’s out in the world, the book doesn’t belong to me,  anyway. It belongs to them, to make of it what they will. But to me, City of a Thousand Dolls will always be primarily about a girl who wants to do the right thing and sometimes fails, and the people who love her anyway.  And that’s the way I like it.

—-

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BWA HA HA HA HAH HA! I, the power-mad scientist Dr. Scalzi, have pinned puny mortal editor John Joseph Adams with my terrifying Big Idea Ray! I shall not release him until he explains why he, of all people, decided to take it upon himself to edit The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination! Your move, Mr. Adams!

JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS: 

I was listening to the Escape Pod podcast’s production of “Instead of a Loving Heart” by Jeremiah Tolbert, which I really enjoyed, and I thought, “Man, I really like mad scientists. Someone should do a mad sci–” and before I even completed the thought, of course I realized that since no one else had done a mad scientist anthology, I should be the one to do it.

But just doing a mad scientist anthology seemed too straightforward. Readers and viewers have long been fascinated by sinister scientific schemes and megalomaniacal plans for world domination (and the fiends who come up with them). Typically in fiction, we see mad scientists and evil geniuses through the eyes of superheroes (or other good guys) as they attempt to put an end to their “evil” ways. So, since mad geniuses are always so keen on telling captured heroes all their diabolical plans, that gave me a Big Idea: Isn’t it about time someone gave them a platform to reach the masses with their messages of death and destruction? Why not have the authors explore the world of the villains from their own point of view?

That was where the big idea started, anyway. As the stories started coming in, the anthology evolved to encompass other kinds of mad scientist/evil genius tales as well, which resulted in a book much more diverse than what I had originally envisioned–much to the anthology’s benefit. That said, mad science (or evil geniusery) and/or nefarious plots for world domination are at the heart of every story. The anthology contains twenty original stories, along with two reprints, sometimes from the point of view of the villains, and sometimes from those who know them best.

Having grown up reading comics voraciously, it kind of feels like now all that time I invested in them is finally paying off thanks to this anthology. This is where many folks would insert a “And you said reading comics would rot my brain. Take that, So-and-So!” But the truth is I was always encouraged to read whatever I wanted, and none of my geeky interests were ever minimized or discouraged at home. So instead of a “Take that!” I guess here’s where I should insert a “Thanks, Mom!” (And if I’m thanking people, I should probably also thank Joss Whedon, who, thanks to his Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog coming along when we were shopping the project to publishers, made the anthology a whole lot more viable.)

So that’s my Big Idea. I was hoping that doing this book would qualify me for membership in The Guild of Calamitous Intent or the Evil League of Evil, but they have pretty stringent qualification requirements, it turns out, and apparently attempting to take over the anthology world doesn’t count as a real bid for world domination.

—-

The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read story excerpts. Visit the editor’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

How to tell the truth in fiction? Author Karen Heuler considered the question for The Inner City, her collection of stories, and in the end drew inspiration from one of our greatest poets. Here she is to explain.

KAREN HEULER:

The stories in The Inner City are about the way the world works, about the way people work, about the dodges and twists and sneaky surprises of life as we know it—whether it looks like our life or not. One of Emily Dickinson’s poems goes, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” The slant is what I’m after.

People have confidence in what they see, what they believe, what they do; and confidence comes from a sense of normality. But what’s normal? And what happens when the “normal” is different for you and for the rest of them?

And it’s not so much the outsider/insider thing as it is how strange the Other can be. Occasionally strange and interesting, as in “The Large People,” where a retired office worker finds people growing out of the ground, and follows them into the city where they start doing things you wouldn’t think a retired office worker would approve of—but then again, why not? Why not take note of the newest order of things and consider what it all means? Or just watch it? Those poor people in “Landscape with Fish”—when nature starts throwing them curve balls, all they can do is keep their eyes open. Something new is coming.

No two people live in the same world, and that’s why we have cults—someone beguiling us with the belief that all can be shared emotionally and physically. It can’t. People may come together and try to predict their lives, as in “The Great Spin,” about the wrong people being gathered in the Rapture. Or they may find a new and frightening form of existence in “Thick Water,” but it’s not for everyone. It’s not for most. It involves losing some of the particularities that like it or not make you into you.

And to be honest, you don’t want to be too different; it might attract attention.  But my neighbor’s conspiracy theory is nowhere as credible as my own. Their reason for paranoia is not as good as my reason for paranoia. In fact, there is “The Inner City” sneaking around and doing things to mess me up. I know this to be a fact. I know that certain things are done just to annoy me—trains pulling out as I run for them; lost Metrocards that magically reappear after I’ve bought a new one; another missing sock.  You would think that, if I’ve lost 30 individual socks in my lifetime, I must have found someone else’s 30 individual missing socks, but I haven’t. I don’t know if there’s one person who ends up with all of them. Is this the reason for Sock Monkeys?

Who hasn’t felt at some point that change was getting out of control, that it was going on despite you? Some things you can opt out of; some things you can refuse; but you won’t always know if it was the right decision or not until it’s too late.

So why not get hooked, roped, nailed into a change because, after all, it’s different? We all evolve, going through life in distinct phases, even as our minds and bodies adjust from the clumsiness of toddlers to the grace of adults and then back again. Isn’t there a metaphor for that, for the process of radical change we go through? Like the children in “The Difficulties of Evolution,” who knows what our offspring will become? Or us? Are we ever done with it?

Who knows what we will become? We can fight against it, the modifications of life, until a brilliant mind somewhere crosses a girl with a dog for a new breed of servants. Is that wrong? As wrong as creating a cow out of meat, for instance, and finding it has gone bloodthirsty? What would you do with what you’ve created at that point?

And despite all our advances in science, have we forgotten that things aren’t necessarily right just because they can be done? If it’s possible to breed girls and dogs to get a special servant class—well, should we do it?

Of course we’ll do it.

And of course we have to accept it. But then again, why should we accept it?

There are tough choices here. One explorer on a distant planet finds her team has gone out and gone native in a  new and terrifying way; should she join them?  A worker finds that a new employee has not only stolen her hair, but is out for her job and much more.

It’s not always recognizable.

Sometimes you can see something coming—but when it gets near, it’s not exactly what you thought it would be. The Rapture approaches, but who will be blessed? Your wishes are granted, but are they what you wanted? That doubt, of course, is in the nature of wishes as well as of life—there’s a catch somewhere, a little bit of snickering, if not downright buffoonery.

We ask for something, and we get it slant.

—-

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Facing a horrifying dearth of available science fiction YA anthologies, Editors, Erin Underwood and Hannah Strom-Martin sought to rectify the problem. Crowd-funded through Kickstarter, Futuredaze: An Anthology of Young Adult Science Fiction aims to make a dent in the market, complete with 33 short stories and poems aimed toward the younger fans of the genre.  Here are Erin and Hannah to explain the genesis behind their Big Idea.

Erin Underwood & Hannah Strom-Martin:

Our big idea for Futuredaze: An Anthology of Young Adult Science Fiction was born out of a discussion about a lack of short SF for teens.  If you haven’t heard of The Hunger Games by now you’re probably living in District 13—but while we both enjoyed Suzanne Collins’ series and looked forward to a Harry Potter-esque revival of science fiction stories for teens, we ended up holding our breath a long time, at least as far as short stories were concerned.  (Erin nearly passed out at a Boston B&N when she realized the lack of SF anthologies. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.)

Since our Big Idea evolved as a dialogue it seems fitting for both of us to share the story here.

Erin: In early 2012, the Earth stood still. That was the day I entered a Boston Barnes & Noble’s YA section, really “looked” at what they had to offer.  I didn’t see a single SF anthology for teens. Standing there among the paranormal romance, urban fantasy and horror anthologies, I felt a bit betrayed. I’m a girl who grew up consuming a regular diet of geek fiction, and finding an absence of geek among the sleek, shiny anthologies told me that something had gone desperately, horribly wrong with the world. We were being invaded by werewolves, vampires, and witches, and there wasn’t a single space alien to blast them off the anthology shelves. That’s when I called Hannah and the Big Idea for Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Science Fiction began to germinate. From there, our Big Idea grew into a Kickstarter campaign that gave life to Futuredaze.

Hannah: I’d noticed that, despite the Susan Collins juggernaut, comments about SF or the classic tales from which The Hunger Games derives appeared limited to a few mentions of Battle Royale.  As someone who remembers hearing audio broadcasts of Ray Bradbury’s short stories on NPR I kept waiting for some snarky critic to point out the grand tradition of ersatz future fiction that The Hunger Games had drawn on for inspiration.  I also noticed that dystopian SF seemed like the only sub-genre to have really gripped the public imagination—and while I adore those kinds of tales, there is much more to the SF universe.  This is the genre of James Tiptree, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kurt Vonnegut, and Stephen King’s Bachman books (I can’t read The Hunger Games without thinking of “The Long Walk”).  When we started reading for this anthology, we wanted to explore the possibilities of SF written for young adults, but we also wanted stories that hearkened back to our own formative reading experiences and gave us that special thrill of discovering characters who reflect a bit of your own experience—even if they’re in a far different time and place.

Erin: I agree with Hannah. I looked for the stories that made me “feel” something while reading because those are inevitably the stories that stay with me long after the last word is gone. If a story from our submission pool didn’t have that effect on me, I couldn’t imagine it within the anthology. Eventually stories began rising to the top, and we saw several standout stories per subgenre.  This encouraged us to move toward a much more generalized anthology that could showcase the best of what science fiction can offer. Except…..

Hannah: Except then we were invaded by robots.  My favorite aspect of YA is that it doesn’t talk down to its audience.  Likewise, I feel it must be said that our early submission period saw a deluge of what I nicknamed “white-girl robot” stories.  Speculative fiction has been going through some self-analysis lately and this sudden influx proved why.  A good chunk of those early stories not only thought “inside the box” when it came to the possibilities of scientific advancement—they were also obsessed with the idea of white-girl robots.  Not just the obvious sex-bot variety (although those were there, some even well written).  The robot horde came from white suburbia and, relentingly, had white suburban concerns.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with that—but the sheer volume of such submissions proved why we need more projects like Futuredaze.

Erin: The robots were tough. We received so many we had an abundance of “mech” stories to choose from, but “The End of Callie V” was our favorite because it approached the idea of life and love in a unique way. For me, the biggest concern was the number of stories that, while well-written, didn’t fit the contemporary definition of young adult fiction. By this point, I’d been promoting and working with YA authors long enough to start wondering if there was a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes “YA fiction” within parts of the science fiction community. That realization was a bit of a shock for me.

Hannah: My one frustration with this anthology was that the overall submission pool wasn’t quite at the level I would have hoped for—either in terms of cultural awareness or an ability to think outside the box and get away from typical SF cliché’s like rocket ships.  However, the stories that were really thoughtful and original had a way of popping out so we quickly had more than enough entries for a highly entertaining, book length project.

Erin: My biggest challenge was to stop being nice. (If you know me, you’re laughing right now. I know it!) But seriously, once these gems floated to the top, it became a lot easier to cut the other pieces. Eventually, I learned an invaluable lesson: each anthology must have a story that sets the bar for every other story, if you want to avoid publishing an average anthology. For me, that story was “A Voice in the Night” by Jack McDevitt. I’d been a fan of his Alex Benedict series for years, and when Jack agreed to write a YA story for us featuring a young Alex (a teen with his very own “big idea”), I was thrilled. Once I read Jack’s piece, I saw what Futuredaze could be. The bar was set.

Hannah: While I would have liked to see a bigger representation of cultures from our submissions I really think this anthology will be a good jumping off place for kids who may have read The Hunger Games and are wondering what other sorts of characters and situations they can find.  We’ve got stories set in the near future, grand space opera type stuff and unique tales from emerging writers like Alex Dally MacFarlane whose “Unwritten in Green” was one of my favorite pieces.  This is a story that straddles the fantasy and SF genres in a really interesting way, ups the level of writerly craft, and points the way towards what this nascent rebirth of young adult SF can be.  We also decided to include poets in our line-up, which I feel provides yet another avenue for exploration.  Exposing our audience to new things—that was the idea all along.

Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Science Fiction: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powells

List of Contributing Authors. Visit Erin Underwood via her website.

The “whydunit”, is arguably the more intriguing of questions asked along a literary journey suggests Jamie Mason, author of Three Graves Full.  In today’s Big Idea, Jamie explains the method and mentality that went into polishing her debut novel.

Jamie Mason:

I’ve never written anything that went theme first, story second. Probably someone could do it. No doubt someone has – or likely many someones. Lord knows maybe even I could do it if I wanted to or was paid a million dollars to do it that way. It’s just that neither of those scenarios has presented itself yet.

So, I got a Big Idea: There is a man, a mild man, not a bad guy, but a guy prone to doing the wrong thing. Then he kills somebody. In a panic, he plants the problem a little too close to home, if you know what I mean. And because, in fine non-psychopathic form, he can’t stand doing any yard work after that, he hires a landscaper to keep the front of his house − just the front – nice and presentable. He’s concerned that that the neighbors will start looking at him funny if his grass grows up to the windows and the hedges jump their beds.

Wouldn’t you know it, those landscapers discover a buried body on his property – only it’s not the body this guy buried.

And then this guy has about 300 pages of problems after that.

Since the foundation of Three Graves Full is one hell of a coincidence, I realized as I went along that the characters were going to need to be latched onto this ridiculous ride with some thematically very sound bolts. I noticed that, within the bounds of this story, everything seemed to turn on how inclined each character was to take the bald truth full in the face. The more they lied – and there were little lies and great big whoppers in the spectrum from omission to full on fabrications – the more the breadcrumbs fell to lead me back to why they were the way they were, and why they did the things they did.

I became fascinated with the idea of what I called “The Liar’s Margin” which was, in fact, the original and working title of the book. Here’s a little of what I had to say on it:

“Every event is boxed in by a set of facts; the truth as it were. There’s the what and the when of a deed; there’s where it happened and how it was done. But it’s at the why that the liar’s margin begins. It’s from this border that we launch the justifications for everything we do, and for all that we allow to be done to us. Only our distance from the hard truth and the direction of our push—toward or away from it—is the measure of our virtue.”

What I’d set out to do, and hope I’ve managed, is to take one fictional character’s worst nightmare, and gild that nightshade flower with a caper at the intersection of a few more fictional character’s worst nightmares. Then, as we seem more readily able to do with someone else’s problems, I wanted to find the humor there − and most importantly, to find the why. For me whodunit is almost always less interesting than whydunit.

The Big Idea of the liar’s margin is that it is the perfect laboratory for distilling ‘why’. If we know that she won’t face her reasons for putting up with a cheater, or that he’s not entirely ashamed of the murder he committed, or that another person is unwilling to admit how very like his father he really is – well then, we’ve done more than solved a fictional crime. We’ve earned ourselves a Diploma of Advanced Amateur Anthropological Studies from The University of Armchair.

And that’s not too shabby for just the price of a book.

Three Graves Full: Amazon|IndieBound|Powell’s|Barnes&Noble|Simon & Shuster

Read an excerpt.  Jamie Mason can be found via:  Website|Blog|Facebook|Twitter

Sometimes, in the telling of the life of a character, it’s not just what the author reveals that’s important, but also the when — that is, when in the life of the character the author focuses her attention. So Laura Lam learned while considering the main character of her novel, Pantomime. She’s here now to give you the fuller picture.

LAURA LAM:

A caveat: I hmmed and haad for a time on the subject of the post, wondering whether or not to discuss the “twist” of the story or hedge around it. I could discuss my fascination with the many interests that fed Pantomime and its world—the circus, the Victorian era, a dying empire, the line between technology and magic—but the world was not the initial “Big Idea” that led to writing Pantomime. It was the character of Micah Grey and his story. So instead of skirting around it, I’m going in: HERE BE SPOILERS (of something found out 25% into the novel).

The character of Micah Grey appeared first, in around 2007, and the world of Ellada and the Archipelago grew around him. I was apprehensive and scared that I wouldn’t be able to do the character justice: I didn’t know much about the experience of being intersex.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, intersex encompasses a spectrum of sexual development conditions. Some call these Disorders of Sexual Development/Differentiation (DSDs). There are more than a dozen types of these “disorders,” and some say that it is about as common as red hair (source: The BBC documentary Me, My Sex, and I). People who are intersex should not be called hermaphrodites, as it is considered a politically incorrect and misleading term.

For quite a while, I didn’t write about Micah Grey. I wrote some other stories and some poems. But I kept thinking about him, niggling at his background, hopes, and dreams like a loose tooth. I researched a lot, from the history of intersex people in the Victorian era to the present. I watched documentaries and I read interviews. After a year, I knew he wasn’t going to go away and his was the story I needed to tell, so I tried.

But I didn’t start with Pantomime.

I started with Micah Grey as a 27-year-old, and I have about 80,000 words of a manuscript with a more mature, world-weary person that I will re-visit one day.  I was 19 at the time, and kept struggling to tap into his voice. In December 2009, when working in a very boring filing job after I’d graduated university (I’d studied creative writing after all; it was all I could get), I started thinking about Micah’s backstory as a teenager. I decided to write a short story about Micah Grey before he was Micah: when he was the daughter of a noble family named Iphigenia (Gene) Laurus, and how he would leave that life behind to become Micah Grey, the newest aerialist of the circus.

As you might have guessed, it didn’t stay a short story.  As soon as I started writing 16-year-old Gene/Micah, it all clicked into place. That’s not to say that the first draft of Pantomime was perfect—it was far from it—but I had found both sides of Micah Grey: both his and her voice. Micah was a teenager trying to find himself, walking the tightrope between childhood and adulthood and between genders.

Initially, I wrote the book chronologically, but during a rewrite I split the narrative. In spring, Gene’s life of afternoon tea parties and debutante balls is contrasted against  Micah Grey’s rougher life in summer as the newest member of the circus, where everyone is hiding a secret or three.

Pantomime is set in a fantasy world, with a pseudo-Victorian setting and advanced technology left behind by a long-vanished civilization, called the Alder. The Alder and the mythical beings they created called Chimaera are long gone, or are meant to be. Pantomime is set in a circus with aerialists, fire eaters, equestriennes, a ringmaster, and a freakshow with a four-legged woman and a strongman who reads philosophy.

While Pantomime is set in this world, the big idea is that every character in my book at some point feels like an outsider, or a freak, but they can also find a place they call home, if they can find the courage to take it.

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Pantomime: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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Sometimes, to get at the big idea in your story, you have to ask someone else about it. For Exile, author Betsy Dornbusch asked one very special person, with a… unique perspective on the events of the book.

BETSY DORNBUSCH:

I admit it. I struggled to nail down exactly what Exile’s Big Idea is.

I started with the Twitter pitch. A half-breed, ex-slave bastard falsely accused of murdering his wife is exiled to the arse-end of the world. And I came up with lots of ideas, but I kept getting distracted by the fun parts of the book. There’s prejudice. (Epic fantasy!) A crisis of faith. (Swords!)  Slavery. Crushing grief. (A quest!) Guilt. Suicidal tendencies. (Magic!) Revenge. Never belonging anywhere again. (Evil spirits!) Corruption, power, and civil war. (A ghostly Greek Chorus!) The role of the anti-hero…

Er, well…I needed to narrow my focus. Overwhelmed, I did what I do when I write stories. I asked the protagonist, Draken, what he considers his Big Idea.

He promptly discarded the notion of hero or anti-hero. He has no intention of saving the day. Prejudice he’s been dealing with his whole life; nobody likes a half-breed. He’s bitter, not grieving. Guilt he’s got in spades, but he was taught to buck up early on by slave whips. And never mind the suicidal tendencies, life isn’t worth living without his wife anyway.

Really, the only thing keeping Draken going once he drags himself onto the wild shores of Akrasia is thoughts of revenge against the man who killed her. He feels guilty as hell about failing to protect her and knows revenge will solve nothing. He knows he’s going dark-side after a life of overcoming significant odds. But morality, honor, and truth don’t put food in your belly when you’re banished to enemy territory.

Draken commits more crimes on his first day of exile than he’d ever been accused of: lies, robbery, murder. From there he moves on to making himself useful to the powers that be, except this time ethics be damned. Despite a deeply-ingrained religious prejudice against magic, he allies with an influential necromancer. Soon he’s navigating a dangerous foreign court by telling enough lies to start a war. While everyone from lowly slaves to the very gods conspire to sway him to nobler purposes—rescuing an abused young princess, solving an assassination attempt on the queen, negotiating peace—he uses all of Akrasia’s hostilities and bigotry to serve his own lust for vengeance. And if Akrasia is destroyed in the process, well, it’s a backwards, godsforsaken kingdom he never pretended to like anyway.

Except… other characters are loyal to Draken. His friends keep his secrets, acquaintances admire him, his enemies give him grudging respect. He is completely mystified by it. After all, his accent is awkward, his skin color is wrong, his attitude is bad. He’s always been a man who makes strangers loosen their swords in their scabbards when he walks into a tavern, but the Akrasians trust him. They ask him for help, and offer it. The gods gift him with magic and power. He collects so many unlikely friends his merry band feels like LOTR all over again.

So Draken’s question, his Big Idea, is pretty simple: why do they like me?

I think it’s because we’re fascinated when decent people who have every chance to do the right thing choose the wrong things for the wrong reasons. They’re curiosities of humankind, aren’t they? Driven, accomplished, wounded, sometimes narcissistic, always charismatic.

Draken keeps salving his wounds with lies and immoral choices even when he succeeds for the betterment of others, even when life would be easier if he chose righteousness over corruption. He tests the boundary between their love and his dishonesty. And just like real people, the other characters are obsessed with him and his darker nature, even as he clings to revenge right to the bloody end.

Besides. Epic Fantasy! Swords! Magic! Evil spirits!

—-

Exile: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Follow her on Twitter.

The great thing about Sharon Lee and Steve Miller is that they give true value for your reading time. For example, in this post about Necessity’s Child, the latest installment in their celebrate Liaden Universe series, they are not content to give you just a single Big Idea — no, they give you a whole smorgasbord of ideas. Let’s dig in, shall we?

SHARON LEE and STEVE MILLER:

The ideas that ganged up on us and finally produced Necessity’s Child come in several sizes — Huge, Big, Medium, and Small.

The Big Idea came from Sharon’s maternal grandmother, who was wont, when she was particularly exasperated with her granddaughter’s elementary school self, to exclaim: “If only you would be stolen by the gypsies!”

That actually sounded kind of cool. Unfortunately, though the wish was frequently repeated, the Rom of Baltimore clearly knew better than a funny-looking gadje kid who read better than she talked; Sharon remained unstolen

On one particularly. . .strained. . .day, the wish having been reiterated several times, with feeling, Sharon thought she’d take matters into her own hands. Whereupon, she put the question — subtle-like, you understand: “Where do the gypsies live, Grandma?”

Grandma was reading a magazine. She answered without looking up from the page

“They live hidden.”

Oooh, that was even cooler, though it posed a potential problem.

“Where?”

Grandma beamed a look of disdain over the top of her half-glasses.

“If I knew where, they wouldn’t be hidden, would they?”

Point.

Since there didn’t seem to be any way to pursue this line of investigation without opening herself up to even more grandmotherly scorn, Sharon abandoned the topic. But, had she only known it then, she’d already gotten the gold.

They live hidden.

Face it — there’s a reason why so many fantasy and science fiction stories want to talk about the Land Beyond the Wall, and Those Beautiful People, and The Slans, and The (various) Secret Societies of This ‘n That.

They live hidden? That’s not just a Big Idea; it’s a Huge Idea.

It’s certainly an idea to which we’ve returned many times, because, in fact, we all live hidden; we’re each of us more, or other, than we show ourselves to be — and often more than we, ourselves, know. You could write a million riffs on they live hidden and learn something new, every time.

For Necessity’s Child, we decided to take the Huge Idea more literally than we often do. We not only wanted to find out what-or-who, specifically, was hidden, and why, but what would happen when (1) it-or-they were revealed, and (2) what was hidden over here intersected with what had been hidden beneath our feet.

So, we met three characters in our shared headspace, as we do; three people from very different circumstances, each of whom lived — or had lived — hidden.

First, we met Kezzi of the Bedel, apprentice to the kompani’s grandmother. Kezzi glories in the hidden life and despises Those Others, the gadje.

Syl Vor yos’Galan Clan Korval has until recently reluctantly lived hidden from Korval’s enemies, learning survival skills that no little boy should ever need. Reunited now with his mother, on a strange world, he’s struggling to re-adapt to open living.

And, last, we met Rys, a man so deeply hidden that he’s even a cipher to himself.

So, what do we have so far?

Huge Idea — they live hidden; Big Idea — Sharon’s unrequited romance with the gypsies; Medium Idea — what will happen when the lives of three very different people intersect; how will they change; and what will we learn, this time?

Which brings us to the Small Idea.

The Small Idea is, well. . .awfully prosaic.

You see, this month, February 2013, marks the Silver Anniversary of the Liaden Universe®. The first book in the series, Agent of Change, was published by Del Rey, in February 1988. Necessity’s Child, available, well. . .right now, from Baen, is the sixteenth Liaden Universe® novel.

When you’ve been writing in a particular universe for twenty-five years, it’s only fair to those readers who may want to sample your work, but who are understandably hesitant to commit to sixteen novels — it’s only fair to give those readers a door into the Universe; a book they can read without any prior knowledge of the series, or of the ongoing characters. We’ve previously written several Liaden portal novels. . .and it was time to write another.

The challenge in writing portal novels is that they have to be satisfying to both new and existing readers of the series. There should be new characters, new situations, and hooks into the rest of the Universe so readers who have been with us since 1988 will find a fresh and exciting narrative, characters that catch their hearts, and a story that enriches the existing canon.

In addition to all of that — because who doesn’t want an exciting story and engaging characters? — a portal book needs to do scene-setting, and lay deep background, for the new folks, so that when they, hopefully, step through the door to explore the rest of the Liaden Universe®, they’ll feel right at home.

Portal books ought, also, and ideally, be fun to write. That’s true of all books, really; life is too short to write stories you hate. But it’s especially true of portal books, which allow authors to leave the straight narrative pathway, and chew up the scenery a little — or, OK, a lot.

Necessity’s Child was enormous fun to write; it was like giving ourselves two weeks at the ocean in high summer, with unlimited roller coaster rides.

We hope you have just as much fun reading it.

—-

Necessity’s Child: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit Sharon Lee’s Facebook page. Visit Steve Miller’s Facebook page.

Normally, when someone approaches a writer with the words “I have a great idea for a book!” the writer reels back in exasperation and fear. But in the case of John Hornor Jacobs, there was this one guy he just had to listen to. Who was this guy and how does he relate to Jacobs’ latest novel The Twelve-Fingered Boy? Here he is to tell you all about it.

JOHN HORNOR JACOBS:

I got the idea for The Twelve-Fingered Boy from my father. But don’t tell him that.

My dad’s a funny guy. He’s seventy-four and seriously cranky. My kids adore him but call him Grumps.

He’s a man of contradictions. When I was a kid, he introduced me to The Illiad and The Oddyssey, Frankenstein and Dracula, The Hobbit and Dune, possibly to get me to stop pestering him but really because of a deep-seated love of all things fantastic. When I was sick, he brought me The Savage Sword of Conan and Batman comics and ginger ale. He told me once, “You can have any book you want, I’ll buy it.” Two weeks later he brought me my first library card, saying, “I’m not made of money, son.”

But he could (and still can) be a tremendous dick. He made me a bookworm but then he forced me to do so many things that directly contradicted that bookworm nature. From eight to thirteen years old, I was in some boat every weekend, somewhere in Arkansas, Mississippi, or Louisiana, fishing for bass, or crappie, or gigging frogs, or freezing my balls off shooting ducks, or ass-high in scrub-brush hunting turkey. I had to play football because, goddamn it, no son of John Jacobs was not going to play football. (Yes, we have the same name…and yes, I have heard “John Jacobs Jingle Heimer Schmidt” about 17,235 times, give or take. That is why HORNOR is in there.)

He’d often make me arm-wrestle him. Or he’d ask if we needed to get some boxing gloves. He stopped asking that question when I got older and said, Yes, yes we do.

Eventually, there was a break. Bet you saw that coming. Nothing dramatic—no tearing of hair, no rending of clothes. No fistfight. (Well, not really.) But at a certain point, it became obvious I was tired of being his hunting and fishing companion and wanted to do whatever the hell fourteen-year-old boys did in 1985. Play Dungeons & Dragons and talk about girls and pick at our acne and masturbate furiously in the privacy of our bedrooms. Stuff like that.

But there was this other side to him. The one that loved The Lord of the Rings. He gave me that, and I’ll always be grateful.

As I’ve aged, my dad and I have become closer. Every Monday night, my daughters and I go over to my folks’ house and have pizza. Mom and Dad are well-to-do (Grumps was a fairly successful Southern lawyer, owning TWO seer-sucker suits) so we drink good wine and sit in their immaculate kitchen and catch up.

Invariably, a conversation like this will occur:

GRUMPS: Son, you’re the writer. You know what would make one helluva book?

ME: No, what?

GRUMPS: A vampire that works for the government. He’s old and bored so he offers his services to his country. And, of course, he’s the most badass hombre they’ve got, like a one-man swat team. Shit, that’d be a good book. You should write that!

ME: I think that one has already been written. It’s called The President’s Vampire. It’s pretty good.

GRUMPS: Well, shit on a shingle. I got another one. Was thinking about it when I was reading Harry Potter the other day—

ME: You’re reading Harry Potter again? How many times is that?

GRUMPS: Goddam it, I’m in my seventies. I’m not gonna waste my time reading crap. I want to read the Harry Potter series again before I die. [shakes his head, sour look crosses his face] That woman.

ME: Don’t start on Rowling again.

GRUMPS: I could die tomorrow! There’s so many more damned adventures she could tell in that world!

ME: [Clearing throat] What was your idea?

GRUMPS: Okay, picture this. There’s a family graveyard up in the Ozarks. The government’s putting an interstate right smack-dab through the graveyard. Imminent domain. So when the family begins to move the graveyard, they discover Grandma and Grandpa aren’t totally dead. They’re witches!

ME: That’s a little Harry Potter-ish. Might be something in it, but I’m working on this Lovecraft meets Southern gothic thing now—

GRUMPS: Lovecraft? Southern gothic? Nobody gives a shit about Southern gothic.

ME: Well, I do.

GRUMPS: People want more stories about witches and wizards, goddamn it. And one of the kids, a descendant of these witches, he’s got the power to shove things away from himself.

ME: Shove things away from himself? That’s kinda puny.

GRUMPS: You’re a writer? He does it when he’s angry. Use your damned imagination. Think of the possibilities!

And so I did. I thought out some of the possibilities. I scuttled the witch idea (though I reserve the right to return to it, just FYI) and thought about this explosive ability more as a superpower and pondered what might give someone that power. Genetics and a catalyst, maybe? I began searching the web for real human mutations. I’d been aware of polydactylism and the title sort of popped out at me in one of those ah-ha! Moments. Like in all my books, I mashed up many of the things I was interested in at the time: juvenile detention (and, snort, rehabilitation), prison escape stories, superheroes, physical and emotional abuse and how it tends to be passed on, generation to generation. “Man hands misery onto man. It deepens like the coastal shelf…” the old poem goes.

I realized I wanted to tell a superhero story, but without the superheroes. Just kids trying to figure out what to do in a morally ambiguous world with supernatural—or extranatural—abilities.

Thematically, I was interested in exploring the cages we all live in, both figuratively and literally. My protagonists are physically caged, both in space and in their own bodies. They’re isolated and alone—isolated by the knowledge of their own differences. What kind of bonds form in juvenile detention? What does having a real obvious physical “deformity” in a juvenile male society mean? What kind of coping mechanisms will boys develop to survive in a world poised to grind them up?

A constant word I use in this novel is incarcerado, which takes on a larger meaning as the boys learn more about their extranatural abilities.

In the end, I wanted to tell an adventure story my dad might enjoy. It’s weird, but he’s always my first audience.

Too bad he’s so cranky.

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The Twelve-Fingered Boy: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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