Author: Meredith Holmes
Author: Sarah Avery
John B. Rosenman
A long time ago, there was this gorilla I knew. I was out of work, and the gorilla was similarly unemployed. At least he appeared to be, for every time I went to the Minneapolis zoo, all 800 pounds of him would be waiting for me at the cage bars like he didn’t have anything else to do. I swear the guy hadn’t moved an inch, and his expression was always direct and unchanging. “You poor jerk,” his brown marble stare seemed to say. “You still haven’t got a job, have you?”
I used to stare into those brown orbs, trying to make Mr. G look away. Never succeeded or even came close. For hours I tried to stare him down, wondering all the time, “What the hell’s going through your head? What are you thinking? What do you think of me? What are you trying to do?” I guess I was a little like Captain Ahab who obsessed about that great white whale, wondering what made it tick and if it had chomped off his leg because it was pissed off or just because it was doing its stupid, meaningless whale thing. Anyway, I’d stare and stare and after a while, I’d try to become that gorilla. I WILL BE YOU! I thought. I WILL GET INTO YOUR FURRY HEAD AND BECOME YOU. I CAN MAKE THE IMAGINATIVE LEAP, I CAN!
Well, I never succeeded. Just as well of course, since I don’t know what I would have done with his 500 pound female companion. But my experience did have one tangible result. I wrote a poem:
GORILLA
Wrapped in a bulging sack of fur
The gorilla stares
Down my winding mind,
Unblinking.
He is grotesque.
In primal maze a memory stirs.
I lift a musty arm
To paw a marble eye.
Words are vines untangling.
The gorilla climbs
Through my combed hair,
Gathers a jungle around my mouth
to swarm in sun,
Suddenly
I am hunger
leaping at hairless flesh
to tear blood wisdom
from its tongue.
Okay, it ain’t great, but my point here has to do with the way I get my ideas. They come straight from Schenectedy. No, forget that. Bad old joke. What I should have said is that most of my ideas just tend to jump out at me, often completely unpremeditated. That’s the way I wrote “Gorilla.” I just sat down and . . . scribbled, let the pen have its way.
Fellow writer George Guthridge has a much more systematic method for generating stories, a brilliant nonfiction idea machine that has resulted in professional sales for both himself and his students. His articles (actually a series) are posted on the Storytellers Unplugged site, and I encourage everyone to check them out. I don’t have anything quite as good or elaborate, but I thought it might be interesting to share my “method,” to the extent that I have one. Please note that not all my stories have their genesis in such a spontaneous, unplanned, non-cerebral way, but most of them do.
One place I like to hang out is Barnes & Noble. There’s a huge one in Chesapeake, VA which I haunt. What I do is walk around, sometimes with a cup of lava in my hand, and let my eyes roam. Often titles will ignite something inside me. Once I saw a book whose title was The Calm Technique. Bam! At once a similar but significantly different title leapt into my mind: The Death Technique. It’s about a man who’s able to will or cause his own decomposition and liquefaction – in other words, appear to die and rot. Lord knows, how one glance at that title inspired such a ghoulish tale. No wait, I think I do know. My horrific instincts simply “decided” to create the ghoulish opposite of a “Calm” technique. Look for it in HWA’s (Horror Writers Association’s) Dark Arts anthology.
I guess my main point here is that sometimes you should get in touch with your own inner gorilla and learn to love him. Open yourself up to inspiration and take chances. Trust your subconscious and avoid analysis and excessive thinking. Go with the flow and toss your safety net. Forget about outlines, scripts and character thumbnail sketches. Make it up as you go along.
Sometimes I haven’t had to make much up at all. Recently I opened a book of stories – at Barnes & Noble of course – and a story just leapt into my head. It was more or less fully conceived, though I didn’t read even one word in the book. Turned out to be one of my better stories too.
Some stories I’ve written have had bizarre origins.
* One day a sentence flashed across my mind: “I’m sitting in hell listening to Barry Manilow records when the call came.” I had no idea in hell what it meant, but I used the sentence to begin a pretty good SF novelette.*
* Similar to that, I made up a word, “Dreamfarer,” which I used as the title and inspiration for a whole novel. Okay, the novel sucked, but the title itself was great.
* One of my students became a little obsessive. She started to stalk me a bit. Did I mention she didn’t have good eyesight? One night she pulled up outside my house in her trademark chartreuse van. My wife was upset but I wasn’t. Hell, I had a great story idea about a guy who’s terrorized by a girl who drives a chartreuse van, and I went right upstairs and wrote it.
Back in ’87, I published an article on this subject. I called it “Stories Without Ideas,” and I thought I’d close with some excerpts.
. . . Readers might be interested in a phenomenon that’s happened to me more and more in the past few years: Stories come to me WITHOUT ideas.
What’s my point? Simply that for some writers, beginning stories without (or almost without) ideas may be a viable and productive approach, and it may be folly to wait until something more solid develops. True, you must have SOMETHING, but it may only need to be an interesting phrase or word, a potential title, or a vague question or sentiment. Here are some other examples from my own experience.
I remember reading once, somewhere, that the most frightening and horrifying thing of all is when a rose sings. The quote rattled around in my mental teapot for years till I finally wrote “When A Rose Sings,” which appeared in 2AM Magazine. When I started writing, all I had was the dimly remembered quote, but it metamorphosed into a story about a divinely lovely rose perverted by hard rock music into a flower that mesmerizes its victims by singing. Happens all the time, right?
Recently, another potential title whomped me: “Two Moons East of Tomorrow.” No way I was gonna let that stunner pass. After a false start, the title’s seed burgeoned into a tale about an alien being who can recapture the past by using people who lived it.
One last example: a year ago, I took my seven-year-old son David out on Halloween, and as he ran up a curved path to a house, he disappeared briefly behind a trellis. A question briefly nudged me in a way that scribblers as opposed to normal people train themselves not to ignore: What if that did happen, and the father couldn’t find his son? The result is “Daniel, My Son” [which remains one of my favorites].
“Where do you get your ideas?” I believe the answer to this question is endless because the creative process may be a mystery to the writer itself, submerged in a subconscious realm he can’t fathom. But to me, that’s part of the fun, the fascination, and the glory, for to bring something out of nothing is as godlike as any of us mortals are likely to get. So, fellow writers – pay heed to those unorthodox, sometimes barely perceptible nudges and flashes. It just may be a story knocking!
John was kind enough to share a little of the way his mind works in celebration of the upcoming release of Alien Dreams. Deena
