I can't really speak from experience on this, I'm afraid, but from what I understand, the most frequently asked question of writers of fiction -- particularly horror fiction, in which I do a bit more than dabble -- is "Where do you get your ideas from?" Stephen King observed that there's no "idea store," no one place where ideas lounge about waiting to be corralled by some writer type and dropped into a work-in-progress.
This I can say with some confidence: anything, anything at all, can be an idea for a story. What makes or breaks a writer is recognizing those ideas when and where they happen, but more than this, combining them with whatever other ideas are percolating in his or her brain in a way that's (hopefully) unique and interesting.
So, again following the example of Mr. King, I present here some notes on how some of my stories came to be. Regrettably, specific examples from unpublished stories (and let's face it, that's the majority of them) might not make a lot of sense if you've only read the excerpt, but that's unavoidable; I do hope to find homes for every one of my unpublished children at some future time, and many markets will not consider stories that have previously been made public in any forum, including on the author's website. One price of living in a wired world.
Back in college I got on a major Crash Test Dummies kick. I took a girl I knew to see them open for Elvis Costello at the Mann Music Center back in the early 90s, and no disrespect to Elvis, but I could have left during the break between shows and been quite happy. The Dummies were touring behind their second album then, God Shuffled His Feet, and were generating quite a bit of buzz (even if we didn't call it "buzz" back then). I liked the lead singer, Brad Roberts, a lot because of his profound bass voice as much as his lyrics -- and for my money, I still do a credible impersonation of him in the shower.
Anyway, one of the songs on that album that was brilliant but got zero airplay was "The Psychic," the lyrics to which go like this:
She knows the future like the palm in your hand
She knows your past like the lay of the land
The first time she met me she saw right through me
Some cards and a cane in her hand -- and she said:
"All the years that have come to pass
And all the years that shall be
I see here right before me"
She said her visions were a bane in her life
She could not control them, they kept her up nights
I know what you're thinking, I haven't been drinking
She knew things that cut like a knife -- and she said:
"All the years that have come to pass
And all the years that shall be
I see here right before me"
Will there be earthquakes and great tidal waves?
Can she see back to the dinosaur days?
How can she foresee just by squinting at me and
Can she see me naked in her mind's eye?
What does she think when she foretells a disease?
Would she keep it a secret if death stood before me?
What could some cards hold, where is her foothold
Can I escape what she sees? And she said:
"All the years that have come to pass
And all the years that shall be
I see here right before me
I see here before me"
Like I said, brilliant. But what made it more so was Roberts' vocal performance; somehow, at least in my mind, he conveyed the impression of someone brought up so short by an idea -- in this case, how a psychic can know things she has no earthly business knowing -- that his fascination borders on obsession. Except the word that came to my mind when I thought of the narrator of the song wasn't "obsessed." It was "enthralled."
And therein lay the genesis of the story "Enthralled," which I consider the first serious horror story I ever wrote. I took the concept of a psychic, or medium, and mixed it together with a wide-eyed, credulous college kid who just can't get past the idea that because she knows things about him, he's in her power. I even named the kid Brad Roberts as an homage.
It took me the better part of a year to write the first draft, which came to more than 13,000 words. Unfortunately, the length turned out to be a serious handicap since most magazines cringe when they see so many words all together. So in essence, in terms of story length, I'd all but priced myself out of the market. Eventually, despairing that the story would ever be read by anyone but Lisa and me, I started hacking away at it in an attempt to get it down below 10,000 words, a nice round number that stood as the upper limit to some of these markets, and although I didn't get there right away -- it took more years than I want to think about -- I sent it out after each round of cuts. Every time it came back unsold, I'd slice away some more words before submitting it again.
Suddenly I noticed something interesting happening: the story got better. I'm not being facetious here, either. I'd never really been a believer in the old truism that ninety percent of writing is rewriting; often as not, my first draft was my final draft. But with "Enthralled," when I forced myself to sit down and make some hard choices about what to include and what to axe, I saw for the first time that less often really is more. Ernest Hemingway once bragged he could write an entire story in only six words: "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn." God knows I'm not slick enough to pull that off, but reducing the word count undoubtedly made "Enthralled" a better story, and going through revision after revision undoubtedly made me a better writer.
Incidentally, once I finally dipped below 10,000 words -- about 9,950, actually -- the acceptance from Scotopia Press magically followed close behind.
It started with Rachel Ray and chocolate fondue, I think.
My wife Lisa and I took our son Jack to a book signing with Rachel at the King of Prussia Mall in early 2004. Lisa loved to watch Rachel cook; I loved to watch Rachel for an entirely different reason. (This was before she became so overexposed, the poor thing.) Anyway, I paged through the cookbook she signed and happened on a chocolate fondue recipe. With Lisa's birthday around the corner, I thought I might surprise her by making it.
That never happened -- I'm dangerous in the kitchen, and not in a good way -- but I remembered the recipe.
Not long after, I woke from a dream with an image in my mind, really not much more than an impression, of dark red wallpaper striped with gold at the back of a stair landing disappearing into nothingness. I don't know where it came from, nor do I know whether it might have been a snippet of some other story; a good many of my story ideas come straight from my dreams, especially the early morning ones when I have a foot in the sleeping world and a foot in the waking one. Regardless, I added to this subconscious image a conscious one: three people huddled in a hallway at the top of those stairs, watching the advancing nothingness with mounting dread.
These three things -- recipe, vanishing wallpaper and cowering people -- floated along in their own separate orbits for months before they collided and "The Sisters" began to take shape.
Chocolate fondue, of course, didn't have to be chocolate fondue. It could have been any dish whatsoever, but it ended up serving two purposes. First, it gave me Fran's occupation of chef, from whence flowed the restaurant and the scenario for finding Jason in the dumpster in back. Two, it provided the reason for Fran to walk down those stairs midway through the story and discover what he discovers.
Nevertheless, fans of Rachel will be interested to note that the chocolate fondue recipe in the story is virtually identical to the one in her cookbook.
"Sweat Brothers" is another example of disparate ideas tooling around in my mind until they struck each other in a way that made sense as a story. The first is a theme that has always interested me: a group of kids working toward a common goal early in life grows up and grows apart but comes back together later in life to sort of compare notes. Stephen King employs this theme often; right off the top of my head, I'm thinking "The Body" (better known in its cinematic incarnation as Stand By Me), I'm thinking It, I'm thinking Dreamcatcher
The second was a friend named Seamus McElligott. Seamus was an incredibly talented runner who went to Haverford College, a many-time national champion in NCAA Division III who was good enough to battle the really big boys on occasion. In fact, one of my favorite stories about Seamus has to do with the fact that when he was a senior he won the Division III cross-country championship on a Saturday, rested Sunday, and on Monday not only competed in the Division I meet but claimed the last Division I All-American spot. (They stopped allowing D3 runners into D1 championship meets after that.) Seamus only got better the following year, 1992, when at the Penn Relays he ran the fourth fastest 10,000 meter time in the country. Alas, at that year's Olympic Trials Seamus qualified for the final but couldn't run because of an njury he'd aggravated the day before while -- I think -- doing a video promotion for NBC.
At some point, Seamus got on a mostly downward spiral. He was at loose ends in his life generally, unable to settle on a career that would make him happy even though he was brilliant. Long story short, Seamus committed suicide a few years later; although I hadn't talked to him in a few months, I know he was all but unable to run because of a back problem, and I'd wager that had as much to do with his decision to end his life as anything.
These two ideas were percolating in mind when I flashed on a Great Opening Line; that happens to me sometimes where I'll just be casting around for words that sound good, sound right, together, and I'll come up with a line that I think would be great to build a story around. In this case, the line was as follows: "This is the story of five sweat brothers, and how they once grabbed a tiger by the tail, and how it flung them off -- and where they landed."
That was all I had at first, no plot, no characters, nothing else. But when I thought of the line in light of the theme of youth revisited in old age, and of Seamus and the demons that drove him to kill himself, the story took shape.
Aside number 1: "Five" as the number of "sweat brothers" orginally suggested a cross-country team to me since a team has five scoring members, but I reduced that number by one when I started seeing Ricky, Mick, Harry and Steve as a relay team; losing the fifth person really seemed to sharpen my plotting somehow.
Aside number 2: Ernest Hemingway once said something along the lines of: "If you want to write a great novel, lose the first chapter. If you want to write a great short story, lose the first page." I won't presume that "Sweat Brothers" would meet Papa Hemingway's definition of great, or anyone else's for that matter, but I did try to apply his lesson to my writing; the Great Opening Line I mentioned doesn't appear anywhere in the story.
