I'm Scott M. Roberts, author of The End of the World Pool, which appears in the May/June 2009 issue of Intergalactic Medicine Show. Pool is about a boy who is haunted by a disturbing presence at the bottom of a scummy pool in the back of the house his father and uncle are renovating.
My write-up covering a few of the details of Pool's backstory is featured on Side-Show Freaks right now; I'll be expanding on the process through which Pool came to being on my website, LordOfAllFools.com
In the meantime, I'm open to answer any questions any of you might have about the story.
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Or, even better (since writers have to learn how to find ideas everywhere and anywhere, and since stories need more than one idea), how did you go from the ideas to the story?
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Lately, I’ve been going to old photographs and drawings to spark my creativity. I keep a collection of images on my laptop that I think go well with whatever project I’m working on; when I get stuck or need a new idea, I go through the photos, pick an intriguing aspect and get back to work. For example, right now I’m rewriting my novel, The Lord of All Fools. LOAF takes place in a world very much like WWI America/Europe, so I’ve been going to the American Memory collection at the Library of Congress’ website and browsing old photos from that era. I found this great photo of a bunch of British kids in a trench during a bombing raid. I had no idea that trenches were so narrow. There looked to be barely enough room for the kids to squat down. That image sparked an idea that will translate into desperate run through the trenches of a war-torn city (once I’ve written it).
Sometimes, my ideas start out with a goal. I had just finished my first draft of LOAF, and I wanted to see if I could write something short and very action-oriented. When I’m writing off the cuff (like I am now), I meander terribly. So I wanted to keep the situation—whatever it turned out to be—limited. At the time, I was interested in breaking into Baen’s Universe, another great online magazine. Baen’s focuses on upbeat action; I set out to craft a story specifically to make a sale to them.
(Yes. I believe in targeting material for a market. I like to make money for what I write whenever possible...)
What I came up with was the story of a communications engineer on a starship that has just been eviscerated by an enemy attack. The attack occurs within the gravity well of a gas giant; without power, the starship begins to be pulled toward the gas giant, so our hero has to get off the boat. He can’t wait for rescue. Unfortunately, I…um…meandered. The flash fiction piece (less than 1000 words) mutated into a 7000 word, convoluted short-story called Fingers, which is dull, introspective, and which I love, but can’t find a market for.
Fingers was the story that convinced me that outlining my plot was essential to my writing process, by the way. I learn more from my failures than from my successes, I guess.
The trick to finding ideas, for me, is to be aware and engaged. Kathleen pointed out that writers gather ideas from everywhere and everything; that’s true, sort of. You have to be observant. This aspect of writing has changed for me as I’ve gotten older. When I was an angsty, angry teenager, with ideas and hormones surging in equal portions through my body, coming up with ideas was a LOT easier. This was because I wasn’t mature enough to have developed a quality filter. Consequently, although I was bursting with ideas, they were all terribly cliché. As I’ve gotten older, and more practiced in my craft, I’ve (hopefully) trained myself to not spend time on worthless ideas. But that quality filter comes at a price of lowered production. I balance the two by trying to pay attention to where I am and what I’m doing so that I don’t miss anything that could spark a story. (NOTE: It’s really important that writers don’t wait for that spark, though. Getting an idea is fine; but inspiration should not replace hard work and diligence)
In 2005, my novella Blackberry Witch, won 2nd place for its quarter in the Writers of the Future contest. I got to take part in a week-long workshop with KD Wentworth and Tim Powers. After the workshop, I went walking around Seattle with the exceptionally smart Michael Livingston. Everything was a story to us. We fabricated fantasy universes out of pebbles on the asphalt; we were freaking machines of invention.
We were paying attention. You'd be surprised at all the wonderful stories you can find if you're looking for them.
quote:how did you go from the ideas to the story?
Ahhh, process.
*********WARNING: SPOILERS***************
Well-- I wrote up where I got the idea for The End of the World Pool in Edmund Schubert's Side-Show Freaks blog. After Laurel Amberdine passed the story seed to me, I brainstormed it for a bit. I brainstorm by asking questions.
For reference, here's the seed:
“A place which remains in perpetual darkness, no matter what kind of illumination is attempted.”
The first question, of course, is "Why can't there be light?" My first answer was "Because the place is outer space, in the middle of an asteroid that has some sort of black hole devouring it." My brain was in science fiction mode, from just having finished writing Fingers. I put that idea aside-- because I knew I was going to be burned out on science fiction, and my brain wasn't in a place to do the research required for a black hole story. Also, I know that hard-sf is not a genre at which I excel.
So...what next? I didn't want to write science fiction; what places have I been that have been absolutely dark? I've been in caves, spelunking; I've been caught in the middle of a rainstorm after dark in the Italian alps; and I've been swimming at the bottom of a little lake in Texas where the water was so muddy, you couldn't see the surface if you looked up.
The little lake won out because I've also been on the verge of drowning. So there was some terror associated with the memory.
I had my dark place-- a lake, or a body of water...a pool. Because pools are these nice, safe, clear things, where kids splash around and squeal, and horse around. Except when they haven't been cleaned in 20 years. Then their nature gets subverted. I'm a subversive at heart, and the idea appealed to me.
But even a murky pool doesn't stop illumination, if you've got something like a flashlight with you to take down there. What will extinguish light? I knew at this point I was writing a horror story, so I settled on a mystical/supernatural phenomenon. A water spirit-- a rusalka, to be precise, though I never say so in the story. (At least, not in the finished story. In the original draft, the idea of a rusalka was brought up by Grant.)
I had my antagonist and part of my setting. Because rusalka are liminal constructs-- they inhabit the borders between water and land, and according to some myths, are most dangerous to boys entering puberty, I also had the age of my protagonist. Question time: why would the boys be near a scummy pool? How would they meet the rusalka?
By this point, I was ready to start plotting. This is what I came up with:
quote:Pilot Jacobs is an eleven year old boy helping his father (Ulysses), uncle (Hector), and cousin (Captain) repair an old home. Captain dares Pilot to dive into the stagnant swimming pool; Pilot takes the dare, and swims down and down—at the bottom he finds sand instead of concrete. At the very bottom of the pool is a dark area. Something touches his leg; when Pilot opens his eyes he can see nothing at all. Nothing permeates the darkness of the pool. Scared, he swims for the surface, and thinks he sees a ovely hand retreating back into the darkness.
When he comes out of the pool, he can’t stop thinking about the deep quiet there beneath the water.
The next day, Pilot tells Captain about the thing touching him at the bottom of the pool. They resolve to go looking for it. They tape up an old flashlight, and put on swimsuits and swim masks. They get to the bottom of the pool and find that the flashlight doesn’t work at the very bottom of the pool, though it comes back on as they ascend.
“Did you ever feel like you needed to breathe? Down there, I mean.”
Captain picked a string of brown goo out of his hair. “What? Yeah, I mean, ‘course I did.” He shook the slimy thing off his finger. “Except.”
“Hmm?”
“Except…all the way down there. When we couldn’t see anything, I didn’t think about it. I guess.”
Pilot nodded. “Me either.” Not until he’d seen the light. Not until the flashlight had come on again.
The next day, the boys meet Turk Bass, a general contractor who their fathers hired to do landscaping. Turk is foul and mean-spirited. He tells the boys of the murder of Illyana Burkeson in the house, and how her husband Clay Burkeson was never seen again. Later that evening, Pilot sees Turk slip into the water for a midnight swim, and he hears someone with him. A woman’s voice, strangely accented. Suddenly, Turk cries for help—Pilot watches as something pulls him under the black water. He calls for his father who dives deep into the pool to rescue Turk.
When Ulysses comes out of the pool, Pilot can tell he’s been changed somehow. He is distant and distracted. Pilot knows he is thinking about the pool and the deep silence down in the bottom. Captain and Pilot conspire to stay near Ulysses to prevent him from going in the pool again.
They are not successful. Ulysses sneaks away and jumps into the pool. As Captain and Hector work to pump the water out of the pool, Pilot takes a more direct course. He jumps into the water to save his father. At the bottom of the pool, he finds his father in the grip of a creature who looks like a little girl, but who has the corpse of a woman hanging off her shoulders. Ulysses calls the little girl his daughter and talks about making her peanut butter and banana sandwiches. The girl doesn’t like Pilot—she begins withdrawing the darkness around them. Pilot notices that as the darkness withdraws, his father begins to come back to himself. Even though he’s in danger of drowning, Pilot herds the darkness away, freeing his father little by little.
The girl weeps and cries and strikes out at both of them, and struggles to steal Ulysses down a dark portal. Pilot follows half-way, summoning the myths of Egypt to burn away the darkness and raise his father like Horus raising Osiris. Father and son break free and leave the pool.
When the pool is drained, they find the corpse of a woman and a half-born baby girl.
As you can see, the outline does not reflect what the story actually became.
After making the outline, I began writing. It was really that simple for me. When I got stuck (and in this story, it was only once), I went hunting for some spooky imagery to put me on the right track. I was lucky to find Edgar Allen Poe's Annabel Lee. After finding that, it was just a matter of diligent work to put it to paper.
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quote:After finding that, it was just a matter of diligent work to put it to paper.
...meaning, I continued asking questions and writing them and their answers down. When I found an answer I didn't like, I changed the answer, until I came up with one that felt true.
Like life, the questions never change. The answers we give them do. Which should be in a Chicken Soup for the Soul book somewhere, making me money. Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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Yeah, but it's only interesting to other writers. Any readers who read that probably collapsed and died from sheer boredom.
I also feel a bit like David Copperfield, saying, "See right there? Those are the wires I use to suspend the mirrors..." Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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I think it's a good thing for writers to understand their writing processes.
And I believe that when a non-writer asks a question like "where do you get your ideas?" they are really trying to understand the writer's process.
Part of the writer's mindset is being about to see ideas everywhere all the time, and if anyone wants to become a writer, learning how to do that has got to be one of things they work on.
Of course, it's only one of the first steps, and developing a story-generating process is part of what needs to come next.
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quote:I think it's a good thing for writers to understand their writing processes.
Yep. It's part of understanding yourself.
I said on another forum:
quote:I see a real need for internal criticism and self-review-- there are few things more valuable to me than to lay my unicorns on the altar of introspection, cut them open, and make sure that they're not zombie robots.
Now, if I could just stop changing the way the process works for me...
quote:developing a story-generating process is part of what needs to come next.
What, it's SEQUENTIAL? Like, I have gain levels in Writer?
Aw, man...
What has helped me, in terms of story generation, is to keep a journal. Writing for thirty minutes or so every day helps me organize my brain and exorcise the diminuitive demons that collect there, and that can distract me from focusing on my project. While I'm journaling about my ordinary, day-to-day, I also take a few minutes to jot down notes for future story ideas. Occasionally, I'll sketch-plot something that has really caught my fancy.
It's like making homemade spaghetti sauce. You put the basic stuff together, set the burner on low, and WALK AWAY. Don't prod the sauce, man. Let it simmer, and work on your main dish. Come back to it when your main dish is ready, and the spaghetti sauce will be waiting for you to add some love to it.
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What about the story title? I know there are some stories I probably would never have picked up, except they were recommended by other, because the title just didn't in any way grab me, appeal to me, or prick my interest into reading the jacket cover.
For instance in your example above of the captain of the starship story -- how did you decide on the name Fingers and why? For many stories, you can't seem to understand the title until after you're read the story.
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You've found one of my hidden weaknesses-- titles. I am AWFUL with titles, as End of the World Pool demonstrates. Originally, it was called SlimeKing; it was submitted to the Codex contest as Three Minutes, Forty-Two Seconds With Annabel Lee, that sounded like a really cheap, scuzzy porno. When I sub'd to IGMS, it went under Horseplay In the End of the World Pool. Edmund thought that didn't set the right tone, and asked me to drop 'horseplay.' I agreed.
Fingers was originally Fingers of the Gas Giant, because it was about the gas giant's gravitational pull dragging my character's starship down. As the story evolved, he was able to get off his starship, onto the enemy one-- and found almost everyone there dead from a virus. He contracts the virus as well. One of its effects is that when he hears a noise, he feels fingers sliding along his skin. So the gas giant's fingers and the virus' fingers are working to kill him, or drive him insane.
You know who's really good at titles? Ken Scholes. That guy crafts titles like fine china. It must be something about the Pacific Northwest, because Jay Lake is able to do the same thing.
The one story of mine whose title I absolutely LOVE is a psychological/supernatural (surprise, surprise...) drama called Out of the Deep Have I Howled Unto Thee. The title is taken from the Latin de profundis clamo ad te domine-- Out of the depths I call unto thee, Lord. It's about a religious man struggling with lycanthropy and self-imposed loneliness, and a werewolf-possessed 1942 Indian Sport Scout motorcycle.
I don't generally title my stories until after they're finished. (Out of the Deep is an exception to that.) When I start a short story, after I've written up the plot, I give it a preliminary title. This is really just a file name, like 'Blue Harvest.' :-) As the story evolves, and themes or recurring images begin to float to the top, my subconscious massages the title a bit, and I begin to get an idea for what I want to call it.
Sometimes, it works out; sometimes not. There's an art to title-making that I just seem to lack the skill for. Alas! I shall persevere and eventually get it.
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![[Smile]](smile.gif)
The flash fiction piece (less than 1000 words) mutated into a 7000 word, convoluted short-story called Fingers, which is dull, introspective, and which I love, but can’t find a market for.![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
