Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

I'm gonna teach you a little bit of math.

Stop laughing, Jana.

Sometimes, one plus one doesn't equal two. Sometimes, one plus one equals... eleven.

The idea is brilliant.
The book...meh.

Before 2009, there were books about Zombies, and books retelling Pride and Prejudice, but Seth Grahame-Smith combined them and...eleven.

Before Charlene Harris started writing, there were books about waitresses in the south, and books about vampires. She combined them in Dead Until Dark and...eleven.

 Grahame-Smith did it again with Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter and...eleven.

The math is simple. You take something you know, something familiar to people, or something easily researched (and public domain), and then you add something unexpected.

This is a good example from YouTube. Someone brilliant combined Party Rock with the Cantina music from Star Wars and...eleven. It's thirty-three seconds of beautiful.

What I failed, yet tried, to say last week, is how people are looking for connections to people who are the same as them. People who like both Zombies, and Pride and Prejudice. People who like Star Wars, and LMFAO. People like me.

 And it works.  People buy or click, because they feel connected. Plus it meshed two markets. People who like Pride and Prejudice but who wouldn't touch a zombie book, might buy P&P&Z. One market plus One market equals...published?

Applying It to Find the Next Great Story Idea

Okay, so step away from your story ideas for a second, and ask yourself, what are you an expert at? What aspect of our world do you know well enough to not need to do any research? Do you know well what it's like to be in the PTA? Do you really know how to do laundry?

For me, I know what it's like to work as an usher in a Theatre. And no Spell Check, I won't change the spelling. That's how we Haleians spelled Theatre. I know those details, so I can get it right.

Now, all you need to do is take your known world, and add something speculative.

Take your PTA world and add Zombies. Imagine the fight scene in the middle of the Bake Sale... eleven. Imagine monsters in the laundry basket, or a new laundry machine that becomes sentient and seeks for companionship...eleven.

I can use the Back of the Theatre world I know so well, and add... robots...ghosts...vampires...magic. All of the above. The story ideas write themselves.

If only the books did.

If you can't figure out yet what you're an expert of, think of something you love that's easy to research, or now in public domain. Add speculative, and...published?

Happy writing, people!
~Sheena

Cooking up Stories

Once in a long while, I read a book that doesn’t just stay with me, but changes how I see the world in some fundamental way. This week I read one of those books: An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, by Tamar Adler. 

I hate to be bossy, but I will: Buy it. You’ll want it in hardback. You’ll want to read it over and over again. You’ll want to underline passages—some for wisdom, some for practicality, and some for sheer beauty. You’ll find yourself looking forward to grocery shopping, without a list, eager to buy whatever vegetables look fresh and trusting you will find a way to enjoy them.

I must confess that I am not a foodie. I don’t watch cooking shows. I have never tasted truffles and I don’t drink wine because I don’t like it. I also don’t like very spicy foods or anything that tastes like the sea. I had foie gras once, in the south of France, and it took all my willpower to swallow without gagging. I have never learned how to cut up a whole chicken and I have an unabashed love of ranch dressing.

With Ms. Adler’s guidance, I may still make friends with a raw chicken.

An Everlasting Meal is not a cookbook, or even a book about food. It is about reclaiming a relationship many of us have lost or never had between buying food and nourishing ourselves with it. The subtitle, Cooking with Economy and Grace, is apt, but could as easily be reworded Living with Economy and Grace. For me, this is a book about living. And, for me, a book about living is necessarily also a book about writing.

I’ve been working on my first novel for about two years. When I started, the experience was as all-consuming as any budding romance. I was swept away with the act of creation, with guiding characters through my twists and turns, with the unexplored corners of my own imagination. 

It turned out to be a bit of a turd.

So, I began a second draft, and then a third, learning more about story structure each time. The more I analyzed and reworked, the more my writing time started to evoke the same emotions as scrounging for dinner when I haven’t made it to the store, the kids are hungry, and it’s already 6:00. I get enough of that feeling when it actually is 6:00 and I haven’t made it to the store and the kids are hungry. The honeymoon was over.

I studied scene and sequel, pacing, inciting incidents, four-act structure, 8-sequence structure, plot points and pinch points, and the dreaded info-dump. I’ve learned a lot, but the problem is that good stories don’t come from recipes. 

In An Everlasting Meal, Ms. Adler includes recipes sparingly, explaining in the introduction:

But cooking is best approached from wherever you find yourself when you are hungry, and should extend long past the end of the page. There should be serving, and also eating, and storing away what’s left; there should be looking at meals' remainders with interest and imagining all the good things they will become.

Isn’t it the same with stories? You begin from wherever you find yourself. You begin with a character, or a scene, or a situation. You follow your imagination through all the loose ends and wind up with ideas that can’t be used but get thrown into the hearty stock of creative juices to season another meal. You write today’s pages and then let them marinate as you go about your day.

The opening essay, “How to Boil Water,” graces the act of boiling vegetables or pasta or chicken with a spiritual simplicity:

There is a prevailing theory that we need to know much more than we do in order to feed ourselves well. It isn’t true. Most of us already have water, a pot to put it in, and a way to light a fire. This gives us boiling water, in which we can do more good cooking than we know.

This, too, is how to build a story: put water (or characters) in a pot and light a fire.

People have told stories as long as they have had language, which is somewhere on the same scale of ancientness as starting fires. Yet, when my son asks for a story, I seize up the same way I do when it’s dinner time and I haven’t planned a recipe. What if I get it wrong? What if I leave something out? What if I don’t know what I’m doing?

The other night, I surveyed my refrigerator and found only a few odds and ends hastily purchased without a plan. I had ground turkey, a bunch of kale, half an onion, garlic, and sliced baby bella mushrooms. In the meat drawer I discovered a forgotten but unopened tube of cooked polenta.

I scoured the Internet for a recipe that didn’t require canned tomatoes, and came up with zilch. 

So I started where I was, browning turkey with onion and garlic and mushrooms. I smelled all the spices in my cabinet until I came to garam masala, bought long ago for one recipe, and my nose perked up. I added a little, tasted, found out it’s freaking delicious, and added more, plus kosher salt and fresh ground pepper, tension on the tongue. I added the kale, steaming to emerald green. I dug in the pantry and threw  in a handful of raisins for sweetness. I cut cubes of polenta and browned them in butter, then called it all dinner. It wasn’t pretty, but the kids cleaned their plates, even the kale. When John got home, they couldn’t wait to tell him how good dinner was. Even the kale!  

The next night’s bean stew didn’t go as well, but I know I can still save it. I have bacon up my sleeve.

Ms. Adler gives the moral of this tale in “How to Paint Without Brushes”:

If we were taught to cook as we are taught to walk, encouraged first to feel for pebbles with our toes, then to wobble forward and fall, then had our hands firmly tugged on so we would try again, we would learn that being good at it relies on something deeply rooted, akin to walking, to get good at which we need only guidance, senses, and a little faith.

I picture ancient people around the hearth, telling stories of gods and monsters and romance and adventure as they break bread together, and I think: I have stories to tell as surely as I have water and fire and the wisdom to add an onion.

I have countless teachers, authors, and friends to thank for guidance. I have human nature to thank for senses. And I have An Everlasting Meal and a well-used pot to thank for faith.

There Must be a Story Behind the Story

Once upon a time, a woman whose dark brown hair was streaked with gray stood in a pool of water. She wore damp capri jeans rolled up over her knees. Next to her, a great, green frog hunched in the water, its mouth open wide. The woman peered into the frog's cavernous mouth in some consternation. After several moments, she leaned forward and stuck her head inside. "Are you coming?" she asked. Her voice echoed, but no one answered her.

 Quickly, the woman splashed around the frog. Where the frog's back should have been, there was an empty set of stairs. Whirling around, the woman caught sight of a tiny pair of wet footprints leading toward another pool. "Not again!" she muttered and pulled herself out of the pool onto the rough concrete sidewalk.

She didn't need to follow the footprints to know where they went. She ran to the round kiddie pool with the whale and the turtle. Her three year old boy was already trying to climb onto the turtle's back. "You're a quick one," she said, and stepped into the cool pool. Already both sets of footprints were fading in the heat.

Day after day, the woman and the boy came to the pools. The average observer might have thought they were merely waiting for her other children while they took swimming lessons at the big pool. Though that was partially true, something much larger was going on, something that would eventually change that woman's life. She was turning into an author.

 The conditions were perfect for such a transformation. A beautiful spot with lots of sensory stimulation. The need for her brain to stay alert, but with plenty of downtime And a question...

 WHY? 

 That's the question that transforms me from your average ordinary woman into a super-being capable of creating whole worlds inside my mind. Why would a character interesting enough to be the main character of a novel be standing in a kiddie pool? 

 Obviously she's a fairy with an affinity for water.

 Well yes, but why is she here? In this place? 

She's, um...helping a friend, yeah. Taking her friend's daughter to swimming lessons. This place is great and everything, but it's obviously not magical.

Why is she here at all? 

Hmmm....maybe she's trapped on Earth, and she got a job taking care of an elderly woman. Yeah! And she's falling in love with the woman's grandson, and this is his sister's daughter. Yeah. 

Why is she on Earth? 

 Ooh. Good question, and I'm glad you asked. Because she was being hunted for her particularly strong magic on her own world. Once she got here, someone closed the gates between the worlds, and now she is trapped.


Why is she so sad? 

 And so on...day after day. By the time I noticed what was happening, I'd already been daydreaming about it for weeks. I backtracked so far that the book I wrote was all about Jenny's time in her own world, not on Earth. If I ever write a sequel, however, this scene will be in it, for sure.

 It won't be a major scene of course. In fact, it may only be there for sentimental purposes. (Yes, I know, I know, kill your darlings. But surely, there will be a way for me to work in the setting at least. Only time will tell.)

 Nearly every story I have ever created began with me outdoors, doing a physically repetitive activity. Last summer, I took up jogging. The place where I live has a lot of hills, so, being an inherently lazy person, I like to jog on the nice, flat track. It can get boring though, so I asked myself why a character interesting enough to be in a novel would run in circles day after day. I discovered a girl named Amye, living in the dungeon of a castle in a fantasy world. Luckily for Amye, this was a relatively humane dungeon, and the prisoners are allowed two hours of exercise time in an enclosed courtyard every day. She has discovered a plot to escape, and she spends her time running around the courtyard trying to prove she is strong enough to be included. Whenever Stephen, another prisoner, passes her, he trips her and sends her sprawling. Again I had to head backwards through the maze of story ideas...Why is she there? Why is Stephen treating her like that? The answers turned out to be very interesting. And so another book was born.

WHY are you telling us this, Melanie? 

 My way of imagining a random scene and using it to create a whole world is probably not the method you use to create a story, and I wonder if we could learn from each other. It's good to find many pathways to creativity.

 My particular method works well for creating strong characters and rich worlds. It's not usually so great at helping me with story arcs, and that's something I really struggle with. So tell me:

Where do your story ideas come from?