where do you get your ideas?

[hermetic]

That question has always seemed silly to me.

For me, that's because the answer is another question: "from where don't you get your ideas?" I mean, I don't know about other people, but lack of ideas has never been an issue

Comments

[hermetic]

You know how Bear talks about conscious and unconscious mastery of skill and how that process of acquisition of insight and craft is really, well, hard, and (imho) fucked up? Yeah. That.

Half the time, I'm forgetting to ask myself those questions you bring up. Partly, it's that yeah, my mastery of craft is still, well, unmastered. Partly, it's that I'm still trusting that my subconscious knows what it's doing well enough to get stuff out to the point that I can consciously tinker with it.

Sometimes, I am aware of exactly what I'm doing with stuff. I mean, I know what things represent, what kind of foreshadowing is going to work at which point in the story, what the allusions or resonances I'm working with/against are... but dude, that is often still so damn hard.

Look at "Dogsbody"--I knew going in that I wanted to think about the cost of war on a person, but that didn't survive the first real draft, because the heart of the story lies in the question of what ties we choose to bind us, which relationships are important to us and in what ways, and I didn't realize that that needed to be explicit (vis a vis Eva and the protagonist) until really late in the game.

And that was despite knowing all sorts of things about Eva and who she is, far beyond the scope of the story as written.

Let me tell you, I felt like such an idiot when I made that realization, because, dude, I should have known that from square one. Especially since it was always floating in there, somewhere, in between the neurons.

All this to say: I feel like such an infant, too.

[ljgeoff]

Yep, I've done that, too. In fact, thinking about it makes me want to pick up a couple of my stories that didn't sell and look at them again.

Or, like, when we used to critique stories and say "What this story is about" -- we need to go beyond the "this is a story about a little girl who meets a giantess and realizes that she's really one of the fey" -- go beyond that to "this is a story about finding out that who you are is not who you were told you are; there is more to us than what we are told, than what we expect, that we are a mystery even to ourselves."

Or I'll ask myself a question like "What if you had a son who was horrible? What if you had a son who was evil? What would you do? And I could see so clearly the other side of the creative force, the need to destroy something out of love. Now if I can write *that* story, I'll call myself a writer.

[hermetic]

*nod*

Would that be the story with the fierce and terrible mother who rides across the sky on a horse made of the bones of her children? Or a sister story to that?

(Because that one? That one is going to be amazing.)

[ljgeoff]

She had seven sons. They carried her across the sky on their sholders, on their backs and thighs, arms and ribs, even on their knuckles and knees. She lifted her face to the moon and laughed, wild eyes black in the moonlight.

see ya at Wiscon. :)

[lunapalma]

I don't think you should be so hard on yourself about when you realized you needed to be explicit about Eva. Isn't writing a process of making the unconscious conscious? Don't you need to write a draft of a story to understand certain things about your characters, or, better, about how best (plotwise) to show (or crystallize--I'm struggling for a metaphor here) those things?

I know that there are conflicting views in the spec fic world about process and revision: some writers insist on following Heinlein's rules and suggest that rewriting is a waste of time, while others wouldn't dream of sending out a piece that hasn't seen multiple revisions.

But from my own admittedly infant perspective, I need to get a first draft done to begin to understand where the heart of a story lies: even if I already know certain core things about the characters, their history, and their relationship to one another. I think that even if you have thought through these things about a character in advance, the question is always how to plot the story in order to show them (especially through conflict).

Even though I am spending more time now on doing plot outlines before I start writing, I still suspect that my process will always involve a discovery phase of writing my way into a story, and then doing some significant rewriting after the first draft (and savvy readers like you) help me understand the best (and, for a short story, most economical) approach to revealing and developing character (especially where and how to dramatize, and where and how to take other approaches to getting information across). It's all a very complicated balancing act!