the old ideas in our bones
Hello! And welcome, especially to everybody who signed up for my newsletter through the Berkley/Penguin Random House giveaways and sweepstakes!
It’s been two months since Dead Space came out, and much has changed for me in that time. I moved from San Diego, CA, to Portland, OR, where I am now surrounded by greenery and living by myself (plus cats) for the first time in over a decade. I got my second covid-19 vaccine. I have socialized with vaccinated friends. The other day I browsed at a bookstore (Powell’s, obviously) for the first time in many months. I take a lot of walks in the woods. I went through a pretty heavy first revision for my next book (more on that in a bit) and will be doing it again for the second revision any day now.
I’ve received many lovely emails and messages from readers about Dead Space--which, to be honest, is a little bit of a surprise, because I have never been able to predict which stories will resonate most with readers. Every message I receive makes my entire week. I am so happy that people are reading and loving my weird little sci fi mystery book.
Some links and updates:
I wrote about The Big Idea behind Dead Space over on John Scalzi’s blog.
As well as Five Things I Learned Writing Dead Space over on Chuck Wendig’s blog.
And a bit On Social Isolation, Thrillers, and the Limits of Connectivity for CrimeReads.
There is a video of the Dead Space virtual launch event hosted by San Diego’s amazing indie bookstore Mysterious Galaxy, in which author Audrey Coulthurst and I talk about all manner of bookish things.
And, of course, some buy links: Mysterious Galaxy | Indiebound | Powell’s | Barnes & Noble | Amazon
Also: MAYDAY Magazine will soon be announcing the winner of its short fiction contest, for which I was the judge! I had a great time reading the stories, which spanned so many different genres and styles. Keep an eye on their website and social media for the fiction and poetry contest results.
Most of my time lately has been taken up working on my next novel. I received notes from my editor right before I moved, started working on it as soon as I had my desk set up and my post-moving clutter down to a manageable level, and turned it in last week. It’s another middle grade fantasy story in the same genre as my third book, City of Islands, with magic and adventure and adults being jerks and kids being brave and monsters. It takes place in the mountains instead of on the sea, which means it is also a love letter to mountains, especially the cold, strange, unforgiving but breathtaking beauty of mountains in winter.
Another thing that this book has in common with City of Islands is that both grew out of ideas that I first started exploring many years ago. City of Islands began life as a NaNoWriMo project back in 2010 (and I rewrote it again for NaNoWriMo several years later). The book I’m working on now goes back even farther than that. It started as an unfinished short story sometime before 2003, which is the creation date of the oldest file I have of it (and I know is not the first) (yes, I keep everything) (everything). It was never even truly much of a story. It was pretty much just an opening scene: a girl moving slowly and carefully through an autumn orchard at dusk, on a hillside above an isolated walled down, hunting monsters that she knows are out there somewhere. The various drafts I tried and failed to complete over the years explored different scenarios to surround that image, but nothing felt quite right until now.
I’ve been thinking about why some ideas, images, or stories stick in our minds for years and years, while others, even many that seem very exciting when we first conceive of them, fade away without ever developing into anything. I try to jot down every glimmer of an idea I have, which means I have dozens of notes on my phone, scribbles in notebooks, and a ranked spreadsheet of ideas, ranging from one-line descriptions (“she had to marry a goat”) to multiple detailed paragraphs to pages of prose and story beginnings. Some of those ideas come from years and years ago; some come from last week. I browse through the lists and files from time to time, to remind myself of what kind of weird things have caught my interest.
I know not all of those ideas will someday become stories. Some of them aren’t that interesting anymore; others are pieces that are better incorporated into bigger ideas.
What I’ve realized is that the ones that stick most for me are those linked to very vivid images in my mind. I’m not the kind of writer who starts with a concept or a theme or a well-developed premise; that all comes later in the writing process. I know a lot of writers start with concepts or premises or characters; some start with a particular idea they want to convey or a scenario they want to explore. But that’s never worked for me. I always start with a particularly vivid image or scene. For an idea to start to feel like it could be a story, I have to feel my way around until I find that image, then figure out what it feels like to be there, what could bring a person into that time and place, what kind of person would find themselves there.
This is often more about the atmosphere and mood than about the more definite details like plot or premise or character. In my early attempts at writing the girl in the orchard, things like her name, her age, the kind of monsters she was hunting, the reason for her town’s isolation, all of that was changeable. What mattered to me, every time I found myself thinking about it, was the visceral, sensory feel of being in that scene. The difficult of seeing clearly at twilight. The chill in the air. The smell of a forest after first frost but before first snow. The crackle of fallen leaves underfoot. The tingling sensation of knowing there is something hiding out there. The awareness of how far it is to the light and warmth and safety of town. Those are the pieces I kept using and reusing as I tried to figure out what kind of story could contain that scene.
That process of figuring out the story is not automatic or simple. Once I decide to focus on an image and build a story out of it, that’s when the real work begins. Ideas are the easy part. The hard part is everything that comes after. It’s a series of endless decisions; all writing is a series of endless decisions. And even though it can sometimes feel like those decisions make themselves, as though the story is flowing or turning or twisting in a way the writer does not intend, they are still, in fact, decisions that come from our squishy little brains. We may not understand how or why we want one thing or another, but every one of them is a choice we make. (Avoiding those decisions is a very common reason for getting stuck in a story, but that’s a topic for another day.)
Who the character is, why they are in that place, what they want, what they are afraid of, what their world looks like, how they want it to change, how they feel about their current situation, what they crave and what they grieve--these are all things are necessary to turn an idea into a story.
All those subsequent steps--the actual writing of the story--are more interesting and more appealing to me if I start with an image or scene I can really feel. I don’t care at all, when I start, if I have a clever concept or twisty premise or smart plot. None of those things is interesting on its own. I really, really don’t care how what I’m imagining is going to read to other people. (In fact, if I try to start with thinking about how a story will read to other people, it always fails. Always. Every single time.) It’s not that those things don’t matter. They do! And, again, starting from those places clearly works for other writers. But for me, they aren’t what makes me want to dig into a story. I have to feel it before I can begin. I have to be there.
I’ve been thinking about this both because I’ve just turned in a novel based on an old, lingering image, but also because I’m contemplating what to write next. I don’t have anybody expecting anything in particular from me, which is frightening from a financial planning point of view--but creatively exciting, because it means I can do what I want. I’ve been thinking about the stickiness, clingiest, most lasting images and scenes in my mind, the ones I’ve been carrying around, turning over, twisting about, polishing and examining for years or decades. The ones I can feel most vividly, that haven’t faded in, oh, eighteen or so years, even as they have changed and grown, and the story that are attached too has evolved as well.
The uneasy comfort of being momentarily safe and warm within walls of stone while a blizzard full of unseen threats rages outside. The way the absolute darkness of being underground seems to breathe and watch and wait. That giddy and breathtaking first glimpse of familiar mountains on the horizon after a long time away.
I’ve been holding on to these images because I know the story I want to tell, but I’ve never quite got around to doing the work to tell it. Now seems like a good time to change that.