posted
I've got dozens of little motifs and story ideas in my head, but most of them couldn't stand as stories by themselves. I've heard OSC and others say that a story happens when two ideas merge and become something bigger. Like in Magic Street where the story of the magical affluent African American street merged with A Midsummer Night's Dream.
But I can't seem to make any of my stories work together. They all occur in completely different places and must occur there. It's getting frustrating.
posted
Maybe you can find two that seem most dissimilar and make them go together. It was something we were doing in the writing class I went to last night. Supposedly Da Vinci said the human mind seeks to connect dissimilar things or something like that. Like Beauty and the beast.
Posts: 366 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
Did anyone else feel that the whole Titania/Puck/Oberon thing didn't really work too well for Magic Street?
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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The two most dissimilar--no. There's no way they'd go.
The one is the idea of the woman whose husband gets a face transplant from her brother.
The other is a villain "species" in the far future made up of members of different species who are all infected with the same virus that makes them crave violence like they crave air, water, and food. A decent guy gets infected and races to find the cure before he kills the ones he loves most, meanwhile fighting the urge to join the army of those who are lost to the infection.
The first story has to take place in the near future. The second is so far in the future as to be in an unrecognizable universe. How do I merge them?
This is what I'm talking about. There just is no way to make these stories work together, but when I try to write each individually, there's just not enough there to be interesting.
posted
Well, if you like these ideas, they could be merged. The man working on the cure, his wife gets a face transplant from his sister. But maybe that wouldn't be good.
Maybe the issue is that you need more ideas. OK, so there's a woman whose husband gets bro's face. You can expand this way:
* And then what happened? * Why? * What else happened?
Over and over, till you get a lot of ideas. Maybe enough to get a whole story. Or maybe some of them will fit in with the racing-for-the-cure guy.
(I never could get OSC's idea of merging ideas to give me a coherent short story, either ... at least, not intentionally. But I could put things together in a novel that way.)
posted
I have a bit of a problem with getting ideas to fit together as well.
Generally I find that my ideas come as scenes that I think would be dramatic (like if I could turn it into a movie.. with internal monologue). Or bits of writing that I think would sound dramatic ("death with a list").
So far the only approach I've gotten any success with is to mash a whole bunch of them together and pick out the bits that don't fit. Even then, all I get is a plotline.. and most of those don't work.
I haven't read Magic Street (YET), so I can't comment on that.
<incoherent mumbling about a conspiracy theory on Survivor>
[This message has been edited by Noctivigant (edited September 09, 2005).]
posted
By the way, it isn't necessary to try to merge two stories into one. The idea is simply to merge two ideas that work together to produce one story. It might be that neither of the ideas is a story idea on its own, but together--well, it's like rubbing two sticks together to get fire. (Of course, that's not very easy, either.)
Posts: 932 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
> it isn't necessary to try to merge two > stories into one. The idea is simply to > merge two ideas that work together to > produce one story.
Exactly. And when combining ideas, you needn't stay married to the original ideas -- let them develop.
At the Writers of the Future workshop, you have to write a short story in 24 hours, using an object given to you by Tim Powers and an interview with a stranger.
The first time I was at the workshop, the object was a packet of sugar that Powers told me to prentend was salt. And my interview was with a caricature artist. I ended up writing a story about an oil painter in medieval England who encounters an apothecary with cursed salt. The path from the object and the interview to the story is fairly easy to trace.
The second time I was at the workshop, the object was a pair of reading glasses, and the interview was with a wandering, homeless, family-less clown from Belize with a kitten named Pepper (the kitten's name, not the clown's.) I ended up writing a story about an interstellar cargo pilot who encounters a roving AI ship near a star that has just gone hypernova. The path from the original seeds is not so clear, so I'll sketch it out.
The reading glasses had lenses, which eventually led to the idea of a gravitational lens, which eventually led me to the idea of quasars, which led me to the idea of gamma ray bursts, which led me to the idea of hypernovas.
Meanwhile, the wandering clown with no family became a wandering AI ship with no family, and then the kitten became the AI's not-yet-completed offspring.
Of course, that story would never have come about if I'd stuck to the glasses as glasses and the clown as a clown. (Not that you have to go far afield to write a good story: Another WOTF writer also interviewed the same clown and wrote a very good story about a clown and a three-eyed alien monkey.)
posted
Yeah, I think for me the problem was that the faerie aspects began to entirely overweigh anything important about being black in America. It isn't that being black had nothing to do with the story, but it became very minor.
I think that if you combine two ideas, you should try and achieve a balance between them, let each idea have a real impact on the other. Card even had a character in the book who was originally interested in African folklore traditions, but he failed to bring in any of those stories, he relied entirely on the Shakespeare angle (which was ironic, given that Titania and Puck were both constantly saying it wasn't a reliable or accurate portrait).
posted
The fact that this topic started up about the same time as the "Where do you get your ideas from?" topic inspires me to suggest a topic on how ideas turn into stories (for posts like Eric's above--which I love to hear, and which I believe people are actually asking for when they talk about where ideas come from).
So, I'll go start that topic and hope that people will be willing to talk about how two or more ideas grew into the stories they've written.
posted
So why would someone get a fact transplant from their spouses sibling? If they were a good tissue match, the chances are they wouldn't look that different anyway. Also, I didn't see why the time settings for the two stories have to be so different- insofar as you described them.
Maybe the guy gets the virus as a result of the tissue transplant. In a culture where such frivolous transplants were common, it is likely enough, or if the children of people who had them could get it as well as the fathers. Retroviruses can get into the male gametes.
The problem with merging them is that the face transplant story is supposed to be a bit of a horror, where it's not a common procedure yet. Her husband and brother get in a car accident together, hubby's face gets horribly burned, brother dies but has his face intact, so the surgery is attempted.
Even if the husband doesn't look much like the brother, I would be freaked out as a wife.
But it's not enough of a story as is. Wife sees husband. Is freaked out. The end.
posted
What about if the brother was either much uglier or much better looking? There are theories that how you look determine how you are treated. How would his boss react? Would it affect his job performance? Perhaps he had a job where he was seen a lot, or on TV or something. Viewer perceptions could be affected. If he gets better looking, does he start getting cocky? Make more money? Have personality changes? If he gets uglier, does he become depresses? Develop split personality syndrome and believe he's being inhabited by the spirit of his dead brother?
Etc, etc, etc. I bet there's a bunch of stories in that idea. Just keep playing with it.
posted
I don't know why the other one has to be so far in the future. I mean, the important thing is the virus, right? That has nothing to do with having it set in the far future.
The problem with the face transplant is that the only part being transplanted is the skin. The underlying bone and muscle is what gives your face all of it's distinctive characteristics. So a "face transplant" wouldn't result in a close resemblance between the donar and recipient.
There are also issues of consent and everything. Someone would have to release the brother's tissues for transplant and someone would have to give the husband's consent to the operation.
So how about this, it's a brain transplant. They get in a wreck, the automated medical recovery unit gets there and pull out one body that's basically been completely crushed, including the skull, but the brain is still viable, while the other body is fine except for a strut that went clear through the head from the temple. The time limit for the operation to keep the brain alive is six hours, consent forms are automated through insurance coverage in the future and the brother had a blanket clause allowing any of his organs to be used to save the life of a relative in the event of his death.
That puts your "face transplant" story a good long ways into the future. Then the guy realizes that he simply can't go back and live life in his brother-in-law's body. So he goes out and kinda becomes a soldier of fortune or what have you. Eventually he meets this army of retro-gengineered crazies and discovers (or his robo-doc friend does) that they're being manipulated by an artificial virus that alters their brain chemistry making them prone both to violence, easily brainwashed, and dependent on a synthetic drug distributed to them by the bad guys.
Unfortunately, he gets infected with the virus while studying it (usually the victim is exposed to the virus during the brain-washing program), and has only a limited amount of time before he either goes berserk from the virus or dies because of not having the controlling drugs. So there you have it.
Unfortunately, these two ideas still don't have that much in common. I mean, he's got a reason for wandering around like this, but how that makes him especially qualified to fight the bad guys is unclear to me. So maybe it's a government plot, and he used to be a researcher in this field before he decided to go ahead and pretend that he died in the accident too. That way, when the bad guys round up all the experts that would be able to stop them, they miss this guy, because he disappeared for personal reasons before they started disappering all his collegues.
Oh, and the government can be controlled by aliens
posted
The problem with brain transplant stories (aside from the bazillion nerve connections that would need to be made) is the Phantom Limb problem. It's a problem amputees face, the brain holds a 'map' of the body. The limb goes away but the brain map is still there and gets bored sometimes - missing limb starts to itch and twitch. Imagine a brain missing an entire body. It didn't stop Bruce Campbell from making The Man With the Screaming Brain though.
Posts: 87 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
It is medical fact...it's just a complex skin transplant, after all. The problem is that getting a "face transplant" will not make you look like the donar. Since your face is mostly a matter of the underlying bone structure, if you didn't transplant the entire front half of the skull basically intact then the idea doesn't work anyway. That's why I suggested a brain transplant.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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