Mystery Discoveries

I like to clean out closets in the spring (okay, I like to clean anything, period) and this month I decided to tackle the kitchen cabinets and a big entertainment/storage unit we have in the living room. Both are sorely in need of organization, and one of the cabinets had a rickety top shelf that needed repair. While my guy was handling the latter, he found this in the very back of the top shelf:



We don't drink, so it definitely wasn't ours. I did a little research and found out it's a pressed glass liquor bottle from a manufacturer in Puerto Rico, and was once possibly filled with rum. I doubt it's valuable -- I seem to remember my parents having bottles like these back in the seventies -- but it is interesting to see that it was hidden in the very back of a cabinet. Perhaps a previous occupant was indulging on the sly? If that's the case someone would have had to use a ladder or climb onto the counter to reach it. But what if it was hidden for another reason?

Beneath a pile of clutter in the storage unit I also found this:



It's a beautiful stationery set in pristine condition, but it isn't mine. Since the storage unit came here completely empty (I know, I unpacked it before we moved) it's either a gift someone gave me that I forgot about, or it was left by a visitor. I've asked everyone but so far no one has claimed it. Since I'm a letter writer and architecture junkie, I'm happy to put it to use, but it does raise some questions. Why would someone go to the trouble of bringing a set of stationery on a visit, hide it in my storage unit, and then leave it behind?

Mystery discoveries are great story starters. Imagine your character finding a beautiful old liquor bottle filled with something other than liquor: a message, jewels, rare coins, or perhaps something more gruesome, like teeth, or wedding rings. A stationery set becomes even more interesting when your character finds a half-finished frantic letter in the very bottom, or a list of names being crossed out, or old hundred dollar bills tucked in every envelope. Using a mystery discovery as a story starter is like undertaking a reverse treasure quest -- your character begins by finding the treasure, which compels them to backtrack to find out how it got there and what meaning it has.

Have you ever made any mystery discoveries in your home that would make good story starters? Let us know in comments.

Spark My Story

Storytellers are often avid collectors; I think most of us have fairly hefty libraries so book collections are likely the most popular. Before he sold most of them author Larry McMurty had a personal library of 450,000 books. I'm trying to imagine just dusting them and I can't. My own book collection is much more modest -- it's holding steady at about 2K presently -- and I only collect certain authors, but have spent many happy years hunting down and acquiring their entire backlist.

Sometimes the things we writers collect can be a little odd, too. Watergate fascinated my grandmother the poet; in addition to buying every single book published about it she also obsessively collected magazine and newspaper articles written on the subject. Author and former D&D player China Miéville is supposed to have a pretty amazing collection of role-playing game bestiaries. Edward Gorey was a huge fan of fur coats; he owned 21 of them and not only wore them but put many of his characters in furs, too (I've never owned a fur, and since I have much love for all furry things I'd rather see them on the original owners.)

I think probably the strangest writer collection I've ever heard of belongs to author Amy Sedaris, who collects plastic meats. Yes, plastic meats, as in toy play food.

Other than books, I collect art, music, handmade quilts and Victorian American photographs and ephemera. I also have a modest collection of story sparklers; these are what I call the small, random and sometimes mysterious objects the universe throws at me as inspiration on a regular basis. For something to make it into this collection it has to fill four qualifications:

1) It must be something small (if it's larger than a ping pong ball I take a photograph of it)
2) It possesses mysterious origins and/or qualities
3) It shows up unexpectedly
4) It instantly gives me one or more story ideas.

The most recent addition to my story sparkler collection is this little sketch I found this morning on my telephone message pad. Now I do know where this came from -- my daughter the artist, who can't resist drawing a pair of eyes or a face on the pad whenever she's in the kitchen or on the phone. And while I've collected most of her formal artworks over the years, I love these little thoughtless random sketches with a passion, so I save those, too -- but I don't write stories about them.

Why did this particular sketch throw a story spark at me? I'm not sure. It could be the expression, or the flowers in her hair. Because I didn't want to know, I didn't ask my daughter, either. Whatever it means to her, the moment I first glanced at it a character whirled into life in my head and started telling me her story. A minute later I was in the office looking at the sketch while I dictated the story idea it gave me to the computer. With most story sparklers it usually happens that fast, too. So when you see a character named Ivi show up in one of my books in the future, you can blame this sketch (and my kid) for her presence.

My love of all things vintage and the fact I'm constantly shipping things is responsible for this another recent addition to my sparkler collection: this slightly rusty key. I found it after coming home with a package; when I moved it from the car into the house it dropped from the bottom of the parcel onto my kitchen table.

I called my shipper to ask if they had lost a key, which they hadn't, and then I contacted the sender, who also said no. I examined the box, and found that one edge of some packing tape on the bottom of the box had rolled over. My working theory is that when the frayed cord attached to the key came in contact with that exposed adhesive it must have stuck.

Because it's small and pretty flimsy I'm fairly sure that it's something like a diary or old suitcase key. The shape of the top, however, intrigues me. I've never before seen a key with this odd triangular shape. There are some letters stamped in the metal on both sides, but rust covers all of them except a G and maybe a Y. At the moment I'm torn between wanting to clean it so I can read all the letters and leaving the lovely rusty look intact. I adore keys of all kinds, so finding this old beauty dropping (literally) into my life prompted me to revisit a story idea I had about a mystery key. Having the physical sparkler come into my hands in such an interesting manner added to the original idea, and now I have a working plot outline for the story.

Just how powerful can such random story sparklers be? Imagine you pick up some take-out from your favorite Chinese restaurant, and when you open your cookie to read the fortune you get this:



My guy did the other night when this fortune landed in his lap. Now he's not a writer, so he didn't get it, but the moment I saw it I thought, What if Elizabeth Moon likes Chinese, and collects the fortunes . . . ?

Postcard Stories

I love finding old postcards at flea markets and junk shops. Usually they're stacked upright in a shoe box for easy browsing, and I always hunt through them for what interests me: images of natural wonders, historic monuments, works of art and architecture from around the world and that sort of thing.

Most of the antique postcards I find are blank (originally purchased as souvenirs, I guess) so any I come across with stamps and writing are extra special. This past weekend I scored three (two that were definitely over a hundred years old) that had intriguing little notes on them.

The first showed a photo of the Ancien Hotel de Valois in Caen, was mailed from France to the U.S., was written by a Ms. or Mr. Litch, and detailed a lovely walk in the country:

Dear Aunt Kate, Mother and I have been taking a day's vacation from sightseeing to wander about the country roads and fields. We wandered along a beautiful curving road with steep grass-covered banks and either side where scarlet poppies wove among the grasses beside our own thistles and Queen Anne's lace and soft purple blossoms that take the place of asters. Now and then we clambered to the top of the bank to look over the fields, whose absolutely smooth slopes roll over to the horion, only broken by box hedges and slender tufted trees. Affectionately, F.H.L, Caen, August 5th, 1911 (I'm assuming since Aunt Kate's last name was Litch that the writer shared it. I'm betting F.H.L. was a woman, too.)

Another French traveler wrote from Paris to her grandmother in Massachusetts, and if I'm interpreting her handwriting correctly, teased the old lady about wearing a cap like the female French peasants. She also described in color the black-and-white image on her postcard:

Dear Grandmama, How now you like to be (?) grandmother and wear a cap tied under your pug? Those are bright copper pots shining in the sun, and those faces are brown as the thatch of the cottage roofs, and all seasoned with smiles and wrinkles. (?) on our way to have to sail home tomorrow. As ever, Elvira, August 21, 1911

This postcard sent from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to a minister in Florida has a blurred postmark that shows only the month and date, but it was mailed with a 2-cent stamp, which means it could have been written any time from November 2, 1917, to June 30, 1919, when the rate for postcards and postal cards was 2 cents. The writer talked mostly about school, but she mentioned a worrisome family concern toward the end of her note:

Thanks for your card. Sorry you didn't get to Chautauqua. We had a wonderful year. I got home Aug. 21 and started school Aug. 25. I've had a full year by spending 8 weeks at Chautauqua. My fall schedule is full, too. District Teachers meetings a V.E.A. Convention. Mother and Dad want me to take them to Southwest Va to Abingdon. Dad is getting too shaky to drive very far -- says he can't see. Helen, September 14

Aside from being wonderful fragments of personal history, old written postcards can be great story starters. While Aunt Kate's sister and niece were wandering in the French countryside, what else did they see besides flowers? Did they make their boat back to the states? Which ship did they sail on from France to the U.S.? Who might they have met on board?

As for the teasing Elvira, she sounds like quite a character -- funny and appreciative of beauty. Who else did she meet in Normandy? Is it possible that she encountered F.H.L. and her mom during her travels (they might have missed their ship on August 6th, after all, and if they had I bet Elvira would offer to share her cabin with them. She seems like that kind of generous gal.)

Helen's card has some mystery to it as well; Chautauqua (which I think might be this place), the V.E.A. convention, and why did she visit Shenandoah in September, when she was already in school (or working as a teacher, as VEA in Virginia is a teacher's organization.) She just got home Aug. 21; did she live near the park? She was obviously devoted to her parents; worried about Dad being shaky and having vision problems. What happened when Helen took the parents to Abingdon (a very historic place, btw)?

Do some online research to answer your own questions (I found all the links for this post in about two minutes) or correlate something you know happened about the location with the details you cull from your postcards. You can look at the history that happened in your postcard writer's era as well to get a feel for what their world was like, too.

1911 was an interesting year; back in the States William Howard Taft was serving as President (probably our fattest), Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to the Senate, Italy declared war on Turkey, the French and German squabbled over Morocco, Marie Curie won the Nobel prize, and the Philadelphia Athletics beat the New York Giants four games to two to win the World Series. Everyone was reading The Broad Highway by Jeffrey Farnol and listening to the last of the red-hot mamas, Sophie Tucker, sing Some of These Days; Orville Wright set a record in October for sustaining flight in a glider for nearly ten minutes -- a record that wouldn't be broken for another ten years. There were ominous days ahead, too: in three years Archduke Ferdinand would be assassinated and touch off WWI, and four years after that a global influenza epidemic would kill an estimated forty million people.

For stories I'd write about two of my postcards I'd probably run with the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in August 1911 -- that was discovered one day after Elvira mailed her postcard to her grandmama from Paris -- and I bet she'd get sucked into the hoopla over the crime. Maybe she'd get mixed up with a dark and dangerous art thief accused of stealing the infamous Mona, who first uses her to establish an alibi . . . and then falls in love with her. In September 1911 the French battleship Liberté exploding in Toulon harbor, killing hundreds -- perhaps something the Litch ladies saw if they'd decided to prolong their holiday and travel south. Moved by the suffering of so many, F.H.L. might defy her mama and slip out of their hotel at night to work as a volunteer nurse at a makeshift hospital in the harbor. That's where she and her new friend (a handsome French surgeon, naturally) would discover the real cause of the terrible accident, which would force them to risk their lives to prevent another, more horrible tragedy. Something to do with Morocco . . .

In addition to serving as great stock for your story idea file old postcards make great writer-pal gifts, too (fill up a recipe card box with them.) Sometimes antique dealers want a couple of bucks for the older specimens, but at the flea market I paid only twenty-cents each for mine. You can also find lots of them pretty cheap from some ephemera dealers on Etsy.com -- just be sure and look for cards that were used.

Story Snaps

While on the road I took a few pictures whenever I saw something interesting. I was behind the wheel for most of the really spectacular scenery, so I didn't get any of that, but I did look around whenever we stopped.

It was too cold for flowers to be blooming, so I was surprised to see these brave beauties opening in front of one hotel. I liked the contrast of the petals against the brick building, and how jarring it was to see such a determined sign of spring in the midst of a lot of stick trees and frozen ground. Reminded me a bit of my cranky rose bush back home, which flowers whenever it pleases, weather be damned. And who planted this, I wondered, and why was only this bush blooming? I wrote all about it in my journal that night, and I think I might play with it a bit more and see what comes out of it.

My mom spotted this rusty old workhorse outside the restaurant where we stopped for lunch. She claimed she used to have one exactly like it, and launched into kind of a gruesome story about how women back then used to get their fingers caught in the rollers. It made me take a solemn vow to never again complain about doing laundry in my nice new fully automatic washer.

Then I got an idea about a girl doing laundry during the Depression, and how her clothes went into that old washer ragged and threadbare but came out through the wringer as something very different. A play on the old Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale, but with a definite Americana twist. I got out my notebook and jotted down a quick outline of the idea before we left.

This is a shot of the window of a guest room I stayed in at a family member's house. It was late afternoon when I took it, and the room was fully illuminated, but the light is different in the mountains. After I had the shot the display on my camera showed this rather spooky view.

If a house is filled with shadows, all the windows might look like this; like portals to another dimension. I love windows because they're the eyes of the house, and they never stop watching the world even when someone draws the blinds. And suddenly for me blinds took on a whole new meaning, and more notes had to be scribbled down.

Not everyone can take a four-day road trip to find interesting stuff to photograph, but you don't have to. Story ideas and writing prompts are all around us every day. This afternoon I saw a license plate on a car at the market that gave me a new character name, as did the name of the little town in Washington state that showed up on a package that came in the mail. It's not so much where you are as it is what you're paying attention to in your corner of the world. You don't even need a camera; just be open to the possibilities, and story ideas will start popping up all around you.

All the Answers

You never know what gems you'll find in your book store's discounted stock sections. At my local BAM they always have a pretty decent selection of mini boxed kits, usually discounted up to 75%. Rummage through these and you might find anything from Paris in a box to a little Zen garden for your desk.

I like to play with cards, so whenever I see a card deck of any kind it grabs my attention. Since I also have lots of questions, I definitely couldn't resist The Answer Deck, created and designed by Nicholas Zann.

The Answer Deck is a kind of alternative Tarot, with 73 illustrated divination cards that use concept words like Abundance, Challenge, Greed, Power, Truth, etc. Mixed among these are random characters (The Master, Dark Haired Woman, Friend, Hidden Enemy) and a few nouns (Battle, Journey, The Lesson.) The cards are all beautifully illustrated with graphic black and white images representing the corresponding words. According to the mini instruction booklet you ask a question, draw cards from the deck, arrange them on the included paper mat, and then interpret an answer* based on the layout and how they relate to each other (also briefly explained in the booklet.)

I paperclipped my mat to a piece of cardboard to keep it flat before I dealt a few layouts and ran some questions by it, and the answers were certainly entertaining. I'm either going to take over the world, become rich beyond my wildest dreams, or finally find the egg slicer my guy put away and subsequently forgot where he put it. If the fates are listening, I'd really like the egg slicer back now ((and click on any of the following images to view a larger version):



The really interesting thing about these cards for me was how well they might work as creative prompts. Simply shuffle the deck, deal out a couple of cards, and see what ideas they spark, which you can jot down like this:

Woman of the World - Scandal

Immediate thoughts: How do you take down a woman of the world? Scandal certainly does an excellent job, but if she is a woman of the world, why didn't she see it coming? Or maybe she became a woman of the world because of a scandal in her past, or she intends to cause one.


The Fool - Talent

Immediate thoughts: Talent and wisdom rarely go hand-in-hand. One is random, the other has to be earned (usually the hard way.) I also recalled something from a baseball documentary about a very talented player who still had to be actively discouraged from chasing after firetrucks.

Add more cards to what you deal out, and you can see story patterns beginning to emerge:



Faith - Clarity - Change - Fair/Gray Haired Man

Immediate thoughts: What we believe can change in an instant. One is never so adamantly confirmed in their beliefs as the moment just before they're ripped apart. Like believing you're done with love, and your life is so much better lived alone, and then that fair-haired guy with the amazing voice and gorgeous green eyes smiles at you . . . . well, we'll save the rest of that for the autobiography. You get the general idea.

I had such a blast playing with these cards that I went back and bought three more decks for a giveaway. If you'd like a chance to win one, in comments to this post tell us about an unconventional source of inspiration you've tried (or if you can't think of one, just toss your name in the hat) by midnight EST on Saturday, January 28, 2012. I'll choose three names at random from everyone who participates and send the winners The Answer Deck and a signed copy of my Kyndred novel Nightshine. This giveaway is open to anyone on the planet, even if you've won something here at PBW in the past.

*Please note that as with most mass-produced divination tools The Answer Deck is intended for entertainment purposes only.

Digging for Story

The January/February issue of Archaeology magazine features among other way cool stuff the top 10 archaeological discoveries of 2011. These include:

- A Viking boat burial found in western Scotland

- An untouched burial chamber in Guatemala that may be the tomb of a rare female ruler from the second or third century AD

- An ancient Roman ludus (gladiator school) in Austria that is being digitally reconstructed

-- A bronze vessel unearthed in Xinjiang, China found to contain the world's oldest soup, with millet noodles still intact after 2,400 years

There are articles about researchers finding evidence off the coast of Sicily of why Rome won the war at sea it waged with Carthage (bronze battering rams fitted to the prows of their ships); interesting theories about what fulachtaí fia, mysterious burnt mounds in Ireland, were used for; and the rush by scholars at the University of Chicago to create digital images of tens of thousands of clay tablets unearthed in Iran in 1930 before some ongoing and very complicated legal battles result in the sale of the tablets or their return to the Iranian government.

All of these real-life discoveries, theories and issues make terrific reading, but they also provide innumerable opportunities for storytellers. Reading about such marvelous finds always invokes a sense of wonder in me. Who is that Viking, and why is he buried in Scotland? How did a female end up ruling a male-dominated culture? What subjects did they teach at gladiator school? Were they really eating Ramen noodles as far back as 2,400 years ago?

Archaeological discoveries are always a goldmine for the historical fiction writer, but they offer a lot for a modern-day story as well. Imagine a university intern rushing to scan those embattled ancient Persian tablets, and in the process he accidentally drops one. It breaks open and . . . what happens next? Does he find something concealed inside the clay? Does it release some kind of ancient Persian demon? What if just arranging the tablets in a certain pattern can open a doorway to another time, another world, another reality? Maybe the legal disputes over the tablets is a ruse, or a way to disguise the real battle (and if you're a political thriller writer, I'm sure you can run with that all the way to Tehran.)

Antiquity attracts me as a storyteller not just for the evidence of it that archaeologists discover, but for all the details we'll likely never know. Ireland's burnt mounds, which date back to the Bronze Age, may have been used for cooking, bathing, brewing alcohol or dyeing textiles -- some activity that involved heat intense enough to crack stone. Since there is no general consensus among the scholars, the purpose of the mounds is up for grabs (from the way they're described, they sound to me like some kind of ancient kilns.)

Even small details from real life discoveries can enrich your fiction. On page 14 of this issue is a little sidebar with an image of a gold and sapphire medieval ring and a brief explanation of why sapphires in the medieval period were primarily worn by royalty, nobility and important members of the clergy. Wearing sapphires was (and still is) supposed to bring clear thinking, enlightenment and good luck. One of my characters from the new Darkyn trilogy definitely needs all three, so now by reading this I've learned something I can use in that book.

I love this magazine, but there are also plenty of resources on the web where you can go virtually digging for story for free:

UK's Antiquity offers some free articles from their archives to read on their web site (scroll down to the bottom left for the editor's choice.)

Exploring Ancient World Cultures takes you on a virtual reading trip around the world by way of the distant past.

Run searches on specific eras and topics you're interesting in researching, and you'll find sites like Friends of the Hunley, a group dedicated to educating people about the recovery, conservation, and exhibition of a Civil War-era combat submarine.

LiveScience -- at the moment the history section is running an interesting piece here on a strange ancient Roman "winged" stone stucture found in England.

Why do civilizations collapse, anyway? Here's an interactive web site set up by Annenberg Learner to answer your questions.

Prompt Anatomy

Being a storyteller is like having telepathy; we're tuned into stuff that non-writers generally don't pick up. Things like words, images, music, dreams and life's random ephemera catch our attention and for some reason start the gears turning.

Having an extra/sixth sense is also the one major blip in our wiring that can create the most problems for us. Like telepaths we have to learn early on how to discard or block most of the unexpected inspiration that prompts story ideas, or we end up going crazy.

Sometimes you can't get rid of the prompt, and I've talked about how to manage that. I think the prompts themselves are interesting, too, because they're often very simple ordinary things that don't even register on other people's radar. Like my most recent additions to my story idea file:

You have done well made frozen.

This rather silly phrase came to me in a dream I had a few nights ago. I was back working as a bookkeeper (yes, it was a nightmare) and going through a massive printout on old green-bar dot matrix paper. These words were printed on a sheet toward the end, and for some reason jumped out at me. They had been deliberately inserted, I realized, a threat veiled as praise, and no, I can't explain how I knew that.

Reading words in a dream fascinates me, so if I can remember them when I wake up, I always write them down.

Everything from there was like a Tom Clancy novel with me racing around trying to prevent some nameless catastrophe, but when I woke up the words are what stuck with me. They were like something someone with not a great command of English would say, i.e. the old Zero Wing joke "All your base are belong to us." It felt like a puzzle I had to figure out, though, so I kept thinking What was done well? What was frozen? until I jotted down a vague idea for a story about extraterrestrial miners drilling to tap the core of a comet and unleashing a star eater.

letter24

This was the I'm-a-person-not-a-SPAMbot verification I had to type to post a comment over on Bill Peschel's blog. At first it replayed some pop songs from my teens in my head (the Brothers Johnson's Strawberry Letter #23 and R.B. Greaves's Take a Letter, Maria, both of which I loved.) I actually bought some strawberry-scented stationery once because of the Brothers Johnson. I'm pretty sure I used it to write a love letter to my boyfriend Rob, too.

It was the seventies. We did stuff like that. What? It was romantic.

Anyway, the phrase made me jump from teen memories to a story idea that would not leave me alone. Letters have been story prompts for centuries, but e-mail has slowly turned handwritten correspondence extinct, and it's not a big stretch to imagine a day someday soon when no one writes real letters anymore . . . unless they had to keep what was in the letter protected, or confidential. Some future grim government or joyless regime might go all Fahrenheit 451 to keep that from happening, until a martyred revolutionary's letters are discovered, and smuggled out to be copied over and over and distributed. What is contained in the 24th that would (naturally) be what takes down the letter-burners.

Letter #24 would definitely have to be strawberry-scented, though. As homage, the Brothers Johnson deserve no less.

Free Memory 387704

My guy jotted this down on a notepad he left on the workbench in the garage, and no doubt they relate to the available space on one of the energy management controllers he programs for his job. I have little sticky notes like this all over the house, and I'm afraid to throw them away in case they're something he needs for work.

The words Free Memory kept poking at me. What if some day our memories are taxed, or locked away, or held hostage? Would 387704 be the code that frees them? Or would citizen #387704 refuse to hand over their memories? I ended up writing down more questions than answers, but it seemed like something I'd really like to explore with story.

Light Output (Lumens) ~ Energy Used (Watts) ~ Life (Hours)

Words off the front of a Philips DuraMax flood light box value pack. We use the bulbs in motion sensor lights outside so that while I'm walking the pups in the dark I can see if any critters are hanging around in the yard. It's nice to know that I should get about a thousand illuminated dog walks out of these, but we really need to invest in some of the new extended-life LEDs (I'm already on a mission to replace all the old incandescent bulbs in the house with greener alternatives.)

If human beings were born with similar labeling, we'd have a world where babies came out coded with what they'd be able to do, how much it would cost and what their life expectancy is. As we continue to figure out the human genome, maybe someday we'll be able to predict some of those things while people are still in utero. But would it a good thing to know all that upfront? And what happens if someone outlives their expiration date?

You writers out there, what was one of your oddest prompts? Did you ever turn it into a story? Let us know in comments.

24/7 Story

If you have a camera to play with, you can challenge yourself as a writer by going out and in 24 hours taking at least seven pictures of the people and things you see that would make up the elements of an interesting story (and don't worry if what you photograph is painfully ordinary. Most of us rarely see knights in shining armor on a daily basis.)

Here's a 24/7 collection I composed over the weekend to use as an example for this post:

Begin your photographic story project by finding a setting that appeals to you. This lake here has inspired not one but three novels for me, so when we had a particularly spectacular sunset I thought this shot would make an interesting beginning. It's lovely but it's also a little eerie. Everything is very still, almost as if it's waiting for someone to arrive. So it can eat them? Or deliver them from the past into our time? Something to think about.

The next day I ran into . . . all right, all right, so occasionally I run into knights in shining armor when I'm out and about. Sue me.

This dazzling gentleman really epitomized for me the element of the hero (or protagonist) in the story. As archetypal characters go, you don't get any more classic than this. He's on the move, and definitely geared up and ready for battle; I feel sorry for anyone or anything that gets in his way. At the same time the big guy is also holding up a rose instead of a lance or a sword.

One flower, a million interpretations. He could be looking for a lady to give it to, or maybe a lady just gave it to him. It could also represent the sort of life he wishes he could live; perhaps he's tired of being a knight and now simply wants to settle down somewhere and putter around in the garden. What if he happened to be caught in a storm, and took refuge under those dark trees by my eerie lake, and woke up the next morning to find himself in 2010?

Wherever there is a knight hero, there is also milady heroine (or another protagonist.) It's a given, trust me. She's lovely, mysterious, and she has a thing for sideways glances and beseeching come-hither looks. Is she the Lady of the Lake, or La Belle Dame Sans Merci? What if she's a little of both?

I think she's hiding from something that wants to make sure she never receives the rose. Maybe it's the same thing that drove her down to the eerie lake, where she follows Sir Big Guy into the future (option #1). Or walks down by the lake to find him in her time of 2010 (option #2.) In my story I'd probably go with option #1, because if I wrote this heroine she'd have a spine to match Sir Big Guy's; I'm an equal opportunity writer. I also know that no matter what era they live in, very few women in real life are helpless or stupid. We may not wear the shiny armor or get the fancy titles, but we fight just as many battles as our guys.

What would a novel be without a motley crew of secondary characters? Deadly dull, I think. Secondary characters are fun to write, don't have to try to fill the hero or heroine's shoes, and can be the most malleable (and therfore valuable) story element. At first sight I'm almost convinced the guy on the left is my hero's younger brother. The handsome, harmless little bro who just wants to have a good time, but then has to grow up in a hurry when Sir Big Guy vanishes.

This trio of friends or lovers were obviously having a lot of fun, and amazing story power just radiated from them. I stared more than was polite because their open happiness fascinated me. That's not a dynamic you often see happening with 2 guys + 1 girl. Who are they? Should the lake toss them through time, too? Or are they going to be the ones who help my protagonists return to the past?

Wherever there's a hero and a heroine and a likeable bunch of friends, there's always someone who would very much like to ruin that forever, aka the villain (or the antagonist.)

Very often my antagonists turn out to be heroes waiting to be inspired to give up their wicked ways, and this guy is no exception. But until I figure out if/how I'd reform him, I won't believe a word he mutters. He may tell me he's just going to knock the apple off someone's head, but I still watch his aim -- it will always be lower. He's definitely from 2010; maybe a renegade scientist who turned the lake into a time portal so he could go back in time and steal Sir Big Guy's fortune, legacy, lady . . . or set himself up to take the place of an important king so he can change history (in his own favor, of course.)

Every story needs a conflict, or a problem for the characters to wrestle with and/or resolve. As a storyteller I'm attracted to both the dark and light sides of story conflict, and the ones I find most interesting are those that can't be quickly or neatly resolved.

Conflict comes with choices to be made by everyone in the story, and can be summarized by the image of the two bottles here. They could contain anything from a dark beer and a light ale to root beer and cream soda. Or poison and an antidote. Or something else. My characters won't know until they take a swig. Or perhaps they're permitted to try only one, so which one do they choose, the light or the dark? What if the choice my characters make decides which time they'll be stuck in? Some nice possibilities here.

Once we find out exactly what the eerie lake does, and the hero explains his armor and his rose, and the heroine likewise comes out from behind her fine feathers, and the motley crew do what they can to liven things up while the villain adjusts his aim and we discover exactly what is in the bottles of conflict and how they're going to change things for everyone, we come to the time when we have to shift into resolution, so we can solve the problems, wrap things up and finish the story so everyone can go home.

Or not, at least, not entirely. I'm a series writer, so every ending is an opportunity for me to see what happens next. Rather than let the characters vanish on the last page, I'd rather follow them somewhere else, see what they go from here. For me the characters really are what drives every story, and I like to take more than one journey with them. And that eerie time-shifting lake obviously isn't going anywhere.

The next time you'll be out and about for a day, take your camera with you, and snap some shots of your corner of the world. You never know who you'll run into, or what story they're waiting to tell you.

Runaway Trains Part II

Yesterday I talked about the three types of new story ideas that regularly bedevil me; today I'd like to tell you how I calmly and intelligently sort through new ideas, neatly categorize them and only use those that result in bestselling novels. And as soon as I figure out how to do all that, I'm sure I will.

New story ideas are the Viagra of writing; they make you feel like you can nail anything. Inevitably the feeling wears off and you're stuck with a lot of work you don't think you can do. Back when I was a youngster I had a million ideas, and whenever a new one hit me I'd drop everything and work on it. Until I had to stop and do a story for another, better new idea. And just as that one grew tiresome, yet another would whisk me away.

After building a depressing collection of a hundred or so story fragments and partial novels, I knew I had to stop idea-hopping or I'd never finish anything. So I made the vow: I will finish everything I write, and not start anything new until the story is complete. Only my new story ideas didn't go away; they began gathering and organizing and ambushing me. Soon every time I started writing I'd get hit by a barrage of new/better ideas.

Eventually I crumbled, stopped writing the story I was working on, and opened a new file. But by that time my vow had forced me into the habit of plotting and outlining my ideas before I started writing them. I decided to do the same thing with the new idea, only I didn't plot out an entire story. Instead I wrote a brief outline of just the idea itself.

I still felt torn; it's hard to resist something that bright/shiny/new. But: outlining the new idea preserved it, and dispelled my anxiety over losing it to the abyss of Stories Forgotten. That allowed me to return my focus to my current project. There was another side effect, one that didn't become apparent right away: over time the idea I put aside got better.

To illustrate, here is one of my more recent new story ideas: to inherit millions, you have to spend a week in a haunted house. It was such a dinky, run-of-the-mill idea that I ignored it, until two young female voices popped into my head. They wanted to chat about it. And they wanted me to listen. While I was trying to update my business ledger.

Their names were Lucy-Something and Something-Taylor. They were also bestest friends, the sort who honestly believe they are, which made me think if I wrote them I'd have to kill off one of them like immediately. This evil thought did not discourage them or the images that began flashing around them: a reading of a will, a decaying, haunted chateau, and a rather delicious-looking veggie pita.

I think it was the chateau that did me in. Or maybe the pita. Anyway, I put aside the ledger, pulled out a plotting template and addressed my twin mosquitoes: All right, you two. You've got ten minutes. What?

It's like being a reporter live on scene, only you don't have to wear makeup, pantyhose or helmet hair. They started over while I listened and jotted down everything on the page (see my lousy handwriting on the left here.) And sure enough, when the ten minutes were up I had a decent one-page outline, a list of ideas and questions to jog my memory when I read it again, and a couple of potential directions in which to take it. I gave it a temp title (The Inheritance) and filed it away in my idea folder, and then I caved in a bit more and wrote out a couple pages of dialogue (the unaltered rough draft of which you can read here.) Lucy and her pal finally shut up, and I went back to crunching my numbers.

Flash forward a couple months to this week. I was talking with a friend about NaNoWriMo and and how I wanted to do something new and completely different this year. The friend (who is used to these conversations) asked what I haven't done yet, and with Halloween already on my mind I said a haunted house story. I love really good haunted house books, the twistier the better. Since I don't personally believe in most of that stuff, writing my own so that it was plausible enough for me while giving it a completely new spin would also be extremely tough, aka a true writing challenge.

I rambled on with some bits and pieces of haunted house/ghost story ideas I've had floating around in my head forever, and she (patiently) listened and gave me feedback. By the time the conversation ended I had worked out what I wanted, just not the who or the why. Also among those bits and pieces were Lucy-Something and Something-Taylor, who I'd thought of occasionally since outlining their idea. They'd had a few months to percolate a bit, so they had more to say to me this time around. A lot more.

All the free-floating stuff in my head began to fall into place to build a haunted chateau. While I made the salad for dinner (and made a note to buy more pitas) I was also building a story outline of my dinky mosquito idea, which now seemed much bigger and faster and scarier. Later I pulled my old outline and the dialogue pages from the idea file, shuffled the story concept around a bit until I began to see the who and the why of it. A train whistle went off, and then it arrived: a big, wonderful who; a dazzler of a why.

If I had started writing the idea back when it first hit me, I probably would have turned out a nice little short story. Dinky, run-of-the-mill, nothing special. Time, thought and serendipity had turned my buzzing little annoyance into a huge steaming iron horse of a story, one I think is going to make a terrific novel.

Related Links (freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive):

Holly Lisle's Notecarding: Plotting Under Pressure

PBW's Ten Point Plotting Template and Single Novel Plotting Template (link corrected)

Alicia Rasley's Outline Your Novel in Thirty Minutes

Text Block Writer is "a virtual index card program for writers. It can be used to organize research papers, articles, fiction, non-fiction, books and whatever related to writing. It is intended for people like me who use paper index cards to write all the notes and pieces of an essay, and then arrange the pieces and then use that to type them into the computer. With this program, you can type in the notes and arrange them on the computer, and then export them to an rtf document (that can be opened in word, open office, or just about any other word processor)" (OS: Windows; designer notes "This program requires version 2.0 of the .NET framework.")

Image credit: © Christian Lagereek. Fahraeus | Dreamstime.com

Runaway Trains Part I

I've always thought new story ideas belong in three categories: ravenous mosquito, rose bouquet and runaway train.

Unfortunately the ideas I get most frequently are of the ravenous mosquito variety. Like the insect, this sort of idea is annoying, and there's not much to it, but it's hungry and persistent. This is why it circles your head and distracts you until you feel like swatting yourself with a baseball bat. Mine are forever whining What if...? The only good thing about them is that if you don't feed them anything eventually they do buzz off.

Rose bouquet ideas are much more substantial, and they show up on your mental doorstep like a polite gift from the muse. They're lovely and lyrical, and not pushy at all. Whether you accept them or not, they make you feel appreciated and loved. If you have to set them aside, they're also quite willing to bloom in silence until you're ready to admire and arrange them. Many of my old romances were rose bouquet ideas, and if you plant them regularly they eventually become a garden that is always sprouting new varieties (frankly I never get enough of these.)

Then there are the runaway train ideas. Nothing else is as huge and powerful as these monsters. When they show up, everything else stops. They are often packed with tons of story elements and info, and they are driven by an engine that sounds like it will go forever. When they hit you, they can wreck you for any other story, but if you decide to jump on and go along for the ride, the rush can be incredible.

No matter what sort of new story ideas you have, finding a method of dealing with them is important. Ideas are great, but they can also become such a frequent nuisance that you're never able to finish writing any stories. When you have to commit to a writing schedule (pros are forever under a deadline) it's especially imperative, because new ideas can actually interfere with and even derail your contracted work.

This is where I ran into some problems, because the weird thing about any type of story idea is that I never know how important it is or where it will take me. I've had runaway train ideas that dragged me off to go nowhere fast, and ravenous mosquito ideas that grew into big beautiful stories that seemed quite willing to write themselves. I always thought that after I wrote enough books I'd be able to predict in advance which ideas will work and avoid the ones that won't, but that hasn't happened yet. This also is why I'm also reluctant to banish anything to the void.

Up tomorrow: How I manage story ideas that allow them to develop and grow while I stay sane and on schedule, and what happens when a mosquito idea grows to be the size of a train.

Image credit: © Christian Lagereek. Fahraeus | Dreamstime.com

Fire Me Up Ten

Ten Things to Fire and Inspire the Imagination

Ancient Calendars walks you through the history of timekeeping and (if you're not careful) might spark from story ideas.

What are the basic emotions? Experts don't always agree, but skip them and scroll down to check out the tree-structured list of primary, secondary and tertiary emotions.

Because earthly thoughts don't always do the trick: Julia West's Cosmic Thoughts generator.

Imagination Frequent Fliers: Yeeta.com's Fantastic Out of This World Fantasy Pics.

Who says hairstyles are boring? Not the folks at The Costume Gallery's Hairstyle History archive.

Help yourself to 2,382 plot starters at Hatch's Plot Bank.

OneLook's Reverse Dictionary will take a word or concept you type in and compile a list of definitions and links related to it.

More visual stim, courtesy of Yeeta.com: 40 of the Prettiest and Fairest Images You Will Ever See in Your Life.

I dare you to play here and not be inspired: Steven Savage's Seventh Sanctum.

"Vicissitudes depicts a circle of figures, all linked through holding hands. These are life-size casts taken from a group of children of diverse ethnic background." Oh, and P.S., they're exhibited on the bottom of the ocean.

All of the above links were pilfered from the amazing online writing linkage library that is Margaret Fisk's Writing Links