Story ideas to spark your creativity

Building Inclusive Worlds

9/9/2023

I just finished reviewing my notes from Building Inclusive Worlds, a four-week worldbuilding intensive offered by Writing the Other that I took last fall. Favorite gems:

Monocosmology (an entire world with one worldview or one religion) is both unrealistic and a lost opportunity for complexity and conflict. Three-dimensional humans are complicated, as are our relationships and societies.
Geography is similarly varied and creates a multiplicity of ecosystems (even in Star Wars, the desert planet Tatooine or the Forest Moon of Endor should have microclimates within the larger monoclimate).

Fantasy novels (particularly those based on stereotypes of Medieval European cultures) often reinforce rigid, heteronormative patriarchies or monarchies--which is one reason I choose to extrapolate my fantasy stories from inclusive, queernormative, egalitarian cultures. More interesting and more fun!

Presuming “Whiteness” as the cultural default is a bias based on colonialism, and another missed opportunity for cultural complexity. Solution: describe every character’s physical appearance.
Even “white” people have a wide range of skin tone, hair color and textures.

Including underrepresented identities such as asexual (no sexual attraction to others), bisexual
(attracted to both binary genders), and pansexual (attracted to all genders) adds depth to characterization and breadth to created worlds.
It can also be interesting to think of sexuality as a continuum, rather than a discreet label.

“Marginalized people often have a culture invisible to the dominant one.”
History is easiest to reconstruct from written sources, which leaves out a vast swathe of oral cultures. For example, “Greek” history is often based entirely on the literate aristocracy of ancient Athens, which was only one of many city-states on the Greek mainland and abroad. The Athenian written record also provides little to no insight into the lives of women, slaves, or foreigners who comprised the majority of the population.

The most powerful gift of this WtO intensive was exploring cultural appropriation (the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of other cultures by someone from a typically more dominant society).
I don’t live as a racial minority, and therefore am not comfortable writing (appropriating) that experience.

However, I can write about what it feels like to be ostracized and bullied as a member of an ethnic minority from personal experience. And I can draw on my experience in creating worlds where characters might be oppressed because of their ethnicity or social status.

The take-away: our stories are stronger when we reflect the varied and complex nature of our world.

Surprising Gifts of Nomads

8/25/2023

“At the beginning…all humankind lived on the move across a world in which the only barriers were the natural ones of forest, river, mountain, and desert, and the ones that humans made from branches and thorns.”
So begins Anthony Sattin’s fascinating exploration of nomads and their continuing influence, in Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World.

Modern European cultures have valued the written word and stone architecture, and undervalued oral cultures that left smaller footprints on the natural world--including nomads:

“…for most of the time Homo sapiens has been around, most us us were unable to read or write, but we were able to commit to memory long poems, huge amounts of information, and extensive, multi-layered narratives”
“Persia’s wandering sixth-century BCE Archaemenid kings committed very little either to tablet or parchment concerning an empire that was the largest the world had known. [By 539 BCE] the Persians were masters of 40 percent of the world’s population”

Scythians of the Eurasian Steppe:
I’m particularly interested in Scythian history for the novels I’m working on, which is why my writing friend Monica recommended this book (she is also writing Scythian-based fantasy). In addition to being the first to tame horses, invent the ox cart, and the horse chariot:

Scythians crafted “beautiful and highly sophisticated jewelry” that included gold ornaments for themselves and their horses (see images above from WikiCommons).
“Around 5,000 years ago, long before there was something called the Silk Road, nomads roamed the Steppe Route, driving herds, riding horses, linking west and east, mountain and desert, and the two great poles of settled civilization, China and Europe.”
Burial goods provide an idea of the extent of trade: “gold and silver from the Near East, Lazurite beads from Central Asia, and turquoise and carnelian mined south of the Caucasus Mountains or maybe in Iran. The copper weapons with curved blades held in place by silver pins were similar to those made in Troy.”

Nomads encouraged international trade:

“...people of the steppes, whose need to migrate had led them to master horses and invent wagons and chariots, had the habit of crossing vast distances [and] could tolerate strange customs and found ways around indecipherable languages.”
“Mongol khans made east-west trade…attractive by reducing tariffs and waiving local taxes on international goods. Duties on goods passing through the Black Sea ports were also kept low, perhaps no more than 3 percent of the cargo’s value; transit through Egypt, by contrast, could attract a levy of 30 percent.”
“…the Altai elite dressed in silk, trimmed their clothes with fur from cheetahs trapped in the Caspian forests, sat on carpets woven in Persia, and looked into mirrors made in China.”
“Roman glass, Persian textiles, and Greek silver have been found in Xiongnu burials. This tells us the migratory world was trading goods between the Yellow River and the Persian Gulf”
“Between the maritime routes and the Silk Roads, the Mongols had stimulated the nearest thing the world had ever seen to a global trade network”

Nomads encouraged multiculturalism:

In the Mongol mercantile center of Karakorum, “…Mongols, Chinese and Turks, Hungarians, Alans, Ruthenians, Gerorgians, Armenians, Arabs, and many others rubbed shoulders in the city’s alleys and shared benches in its taverns.”
“There was a mosque, Buddhist temple, and Nestorian Christian church among twelve main places of worship [and] the Great Khan [allowed] the Nestorians to pray for him, Buddhist priests to chant mantras, and Muslim imams to recite their salat, yet all the while he retained his belief in the sanctity of the earth, with its profusion of sprites and spirits”
“Under the Mongols, a babel of tongues wagged in caravanserais and post-houses between the Yellow Sea and the Mediterranean”

Nomads shared their wealth:

...redistribution was “key to maintain social order, and to repair social disorders. It is hard to reconstruct how the medieval Mongols defined collective happiness, but they certainly believed that the circular movements of things was crucial in producing it.”
For example: “Kublai Khan [instructed] the royal treasury to distribute the state’s accumulated wealth on the grounds that capital should be kept constantly moving.”

Researchers discovered a “nomad” gene:

“Among the Ariaal men living as nomads, those who carried the 7R genetic variant tended to be better fed and stronger…alpha nomads, But among settled Ariaal, the 7R carriers were less well-nourished and less dominant than their fellow tribespeople”
“In a nomadic setting, someone with this variant of the gene may be better at protecting herds against rustlers or finding food and water…but might not be beneficial in settled pursuits such as focusing in school, farming, or selling goods.”

The author suggests individuals with ADHD may be better suited for a nomadic lifestyle.
I’d love to read a story that highlights a hero with neurodivergent traits--similar to how Ender’s Game celebrated kids who played video games as the saviors of humankind.

Nomads--the original, self-sufficient “green” lifestyle:
“They lived in harmony with their surroundings because they were entirely dependent on them. Their way of life also required them to travel light because they had to pack and carry all their belongings with them when they migrated.”
The author journeyed with nomads in the Zagros mountains of Iran:

“The Bakhtiari know the significance of each tone of their herd’s bleating, when they are content, or hungry, or threatened, whether a birth of death is near, just as they know how to read the clouds, and scents carried on the winds.”

Closing thoughts:

“By reducing [nature] to entertainment, we have engaged in a process that has destroyed the essential balance on which the natural world depended, on which we depended. We have undermined the foundations of our biosphere.”
“Diversity--whether of thought, ideas, intention, color, or gene--has always been the key to humankind’s progress…The best things about humankind have come through cooperation, open markets and borders, free movement, freedom of thought and conscience, and nomads have always been among the best conduits” of these elements.

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World is an excellent resource for everyone interested in a sustainable future and/or a realistic understanding of our past.

More resources on Eurasian nomads: Empire of Horses, The Scythians, The Wheel, The Horse, and Language

Aliens Among Us: Moss Piglets

7/27/2023

Tardigrades, known as moss piglets or water bears, are extremophiles, organisms capable of surviving “the crushing pressure of the ocean floor, the DNA-shredding powers of radiation, temperatures just one degree above absolute zero (the temperature at which molecular motion ceases), and even the vacuum of space.” Dehydration, starvation, and air deprivation can’t kill these remarkable animals. A flexible protein allowing tardigrades to suspend metabolism is key to their survival.

There are about 1,000 different species of tardigrades, some more resilient than others. Tardigrades are found everywhere on Earth, from mountaintops to mud volcanoes, in stone walls and roofs, from tropical rainforests to deserts to the icy Antarctic. They’re common in lichens and mosses (hence the name moss piglet), and feed on plants, bacteria, and smaller invertebrates.
Fun fact: Tardigrades are visible using a common microscope.

Believed to have evolved at least 500 million years ago, tardigrades have survived five mass extinctions that killed off other species, including the dinosaurs. They’re distant relatives of spiders, crabs, and velvet worms.
Females are usually larger and more common than males, and some species can reproduce by parthenogenesis, meaning the females can lay self-fertilized eggs without male sperm.

Because tardigrades have survived experiments in space, they might provide evidence of extraterrestrial life. The (fringe) theory of panspermia suggests extremophiles that can survive in space (such as tardigrades) may have become trapped in debris from planetary collisions then reached Earth on an asteroid. The next time you come across damp moss, beware of alien moss piglets!

Ideal Readers for Writers

7/11/2023

Writers are often urged to identify and write for our “Ideal Reader.” Defining this ideal reader shapes the way we write and how our work is marketed by agents and publishers. For example, writing a children's picture book is a very different project from an adult science fiction novel.
In Craft in the Real World, Matthew Salesses points out,
“You can’t control who reads your fiction, but you can control whom you write for.”

I’m writing for readers who share my values and worldview:

readers who appreciate the power and magic of the natural world,
who believe courageous acts can change the world,
who long to overcome prejudice and celebrate human diversity.

As Ken Liu pointed out in the Gotham Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Intensive:

“Fiction is a collaboration between reader and writer. Every reader moves into the story with her own luggage and personal mythos.
“To be an artist is to be vulnerable and live with the reality that others will misinterpret your stories.”

How do we shape our stories, given that we’re powerless over how others interpret them?
Ken's advice: Pursue the stories that excite you.

I also find it helpful to focus on the integrity of the story, rather than when (or if) it’ll be published and what editors or potential readers may think of it.
As Jane Smiley said (quoted in Mattew Bell’s blog):

"I believe that you either love the work or the rewards. Life is a lot easier if you love the work.”

So I write to shape and polish the stories I’m given, to give voice to the characters living in my heart.
With each story or poem I finish, each book draft I revise, I feel an undeniable sense of accomplishment.
Matthew Bell (author of Refuse to Be Done): “No one can take the person you’ve become by writing your book away from you; few outside accomplishments can honestly do more.”

Self-Reliance or Racial Privilege?

6/12/2023

I was raised in family that values hard-work, self-reliance, and do-it-yourself independence.

Me in front of Grampa's house

This picture shows me in front of the house my grandfather built, crying after falling in the Michigan snow.
My mother’s late father, a machinist, bought acreage in Kawkawlin, Michigan in the 1940s.
Grampa built this house (himself) for his family from cinder- and concrete blocks.

My father grew up in a house hand-built from local stone (these rock houses were common in the Missouri Ozarks at the time).
My grandparents lived in that house until moving in the late 1970s into a single-wide trailer provided by the owner of the nearby lumber mill, where my grandfather worked as a night watchman. This childhood picture shows us visiting our grandparents at the rock house.

Our family at the rock house

Barn my dad built

My parents did much of the finishing work themselves on their country dream home. We cleared the land as a family and Dad built the barn.
I came of age admiring my family’s self-reliance, but two books I’ve read recently challenge my family’s myth of self-made success (His Name is George Floyd by Robert Samuels & Toluse Olorunnipa and Caste by Isabel Wilkerson) .

Like George Floyd’s mother, my father grew up in a house without indoor plumbing. But unlike her, he was able to join the US Navy and learn a trade (electronics). He leveraged that trade into a steady job at McDonnell-Douglas. George Floyd’s single mother worked for minimum wage, which was $1.50 in the 1960s and under $3.00 an hour until 1980.

Dad & siblings at rock house

Me with cat at the trailer

Picture of me posing with my cat on the trailer steps, Halloween.
My parents started out in a single-wide trailer, like George Floyd’s family, but they were not relegated to a Blacks-only neighborhood.
They were able to buy land (in a rural, all-white community)--unlike the countless Black couples of equal economic status whose buying choices were limited by restrictive covenants (outlawed in 1968) and continued de facto segregation.

When my parents wanted a loan to build a house, they were easily approved, as was my blue-collar grandfather in Michigan. However, Blacks are twice as likely as whites to be denied a mortgage, and almost a third of Black renters spend more than half their income on rent, making it nearly impossible to save enough money for a downpayment on a house.

Me in graduation regalia

I graduated from a mostly-white public high school in a rural area, with well-funded sports teams and advanced placement classes.
George Floyd spent high school playing football and basketball, working toward a sports scholarship and barely passing his academic classes, at an under-funded all-black high school in the inner city.

When I went to college, my parents’ relative wealth as homeowners gave me a financial advantage, even though I had to take out student loans and was given a work-study job to help cover tuition.
When George Floyd went to college, he was completely reliant on his sports scholarship, but this talented athlete never played a single game. Taking remedial classes to address his academic deficiencies made him ineligible.
Everyone born into poverty begins life disadvantaged in the US, but if your skin is brown, that liability is compounded by racism. Driving While Black remains a risk for all Black Americans. A Black man is always subject to racial profiling--no matter his education or wealth (such as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and NFL defensive tackle Matthias Askew).
For George Floyd, and too many other Black Americans, this systemic prejudice proved fatal.

Crafting Emotional Resonance

5/24/2023

I’ve been striving to incorporate more emotional resonance in my writing. Writing teachers I admire agree that generating strong emotions in readers is the ideal.
There are a number of techniques that writers can use to achieve that ideal.

In The Emotional Craft of Fiction, Donald Maas says readers’ emotional experience of a story doesn’t come from the emotional lives of characters. It comes from readers themselves.

Tidbits from his post, How to Produce an Emotional Response in Readers:

…readers fundamentally want to feel something, not about your story, but about themselves.
They want to connect with your characters and live their fictional experience, or believe that they have.
Each reader has a unique emotional response to a story. It’s unpredictable but it’s real.
Put on the page what a character feels and there’s a pretty good chance that, paradoxically, what the reader will feel is nothing.

I recently took a class from Susan DeFrietas, The Heart of Story. She generates reader emotion through story structure (the way the character grows and changes), by how story conflict is revealed to the reader, and through language (specific character thoughts that carry emotion).
In two recent posts, DeFrietas explores the importance of story stakes and character background and how to combine body language and character interiority to generate more impactful reader emotion.

As John Thornton Williams notes in The Indirection of Image:

Revealing the interiority of a character in a way that feels natural, yet resonates powerfully within a reader is one of the most difficult tasks of the fiction writer.
Considering how powerful that emotional connection between reader and character can prove to be, and how empty a story can feel without it, it's vital that the writer bridge the distance between reader and character in ways that are subtle rather than clumsy.

Thornton advocates the literary device of indirect imagery, using character attitudes toward objects or the environment to reveal character emotion:

Something as simple as a car parked on the street surely looks different to a lottery winner than to someone who just got evicted.
[Using] indirection of image—[the character’s] interiority is simultaneously revealed and left, to a degree, ambiguous—that invites the reader to absorb such breadth of emotion. Even if the reader can't articulate exactly what [the character] is feeling, he/she surely experiences it on a level that is deep and resonant.

I’m reminded that emotions are complex and conflicted. When I explicitly label a character’s emotion (happy, sad, relieved), I flatten and limit what cannot be easily articulated, and leave no room for reader interpretation.

Another blogger, Robin Farmer, advocates using personal emotional truth in our writing to engineer reader empathy.

Farmer advises:

Embrace the fear of vulnerability.
I could not write [my] story with authenticity until I dug deep and understood why I had been stuck and what led to a breakthrough. My clarity informed and honed the behavior of my character.
Collect bits of dialogue, favorite lyrics, phrases, discarded scenes, observations, and reactions—anything that provokes strong feelings and may feed your current or future story. Visit often.

What we write creates our world

5/18/2023

I’m not a fan of the grimdark worlds of dystopian fiction filled with suffering and pain, where a solitary hero (or chosen few) struggle to survive: 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Lord of the Flies, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Mistborn, etc.
I prefer to hope for (and write about) a future where refugees fleeing danger (in Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and elsewhere) find peaceful, productive lives; where we use our creativity and ingenuity to create a better world (Star Trek, Solarpunk Magazine, Ethan of Athos, Always Coming Home, The Fifth Sacred Thing).

As Jill Leopold points out in her New Yorker Magazine article: “Dystopia [is] a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one.”

In a recent essay, Phil Athans notes that we have a responsibility as writers to consciously advocate for the oppressed and marginalized:
“science fiction and fantasy worldbuilding in general is and always has been, at least to some degree, an activist project.”
He commends “authors working to bring a more enlightened and inclusive, more contemporary view of gender into genre fiction.”
A worthy goal in this era of radical conservative transphobia.

Of Ash and Elm

3/25/2023

Story ideas gleaned from Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings, by Neil Price.
Spirituality: Gods and other divine beings were “as much a natural part of the world as trees and rocks.” The Vikings “did not believe in these things…they knew them.” The “air and paths were alive with magic…the crackling tension of the Other World at its intersection with our own.”

Magic: “The world of sorcery looms large in Viking spirituality, as do the women and ergi men who practiced it. …these special men and women were familiar with the sutures of the world. They knew the places where different aspects of reality overlapped, and also the gaps sometimes left between. …they straddled the rivers between realms, leaving footprints on both banks.”
Dystopia: Viking mythology was heavily influenced by a dust veil that blocked sunlight for over a year in 546 CE. “The sun’s light was blocked in a hazy mist that allowed no heat to penetrate, while at night the heavens were filled with wavering curtains of fiery color, like a sunset that went on for months.”

Weapons: Ring swords: “were the kind of swords that might acquire names, about which tales were told--weapons with life histories…Dragvandil…a blade so long it dragged on the ground…Scream of Anguish, that glowed brightly in war but shone with a pale light in peacetime…Skofnung, the unnaturally sharp sword … in which were bound the souls of twelve berserkers”
According to the author none of their helmets had horns.

Hospitality: “Guests were welcome; indeed, their presence was partly the point, bound up in the grim logic of obligatory and reciprocal hospitality that was part of the elite code. [Halls] were arenas for mutual recognition, for the telling of tales over feasts and drink…for giving and receiving of rings and other tokens of largesse”
Time-distance… “transport is perceived not in terms of the measured physical separation [distance] but by the time it takes to travel between [two points]."

Gender:
The vikings included “people who adopted a remarkably broad spectrum of different gendered identities…Male-bodied individuals buried in conventional women’s dress and/or with normatively feminine accessories have conclusively been found at several sites” as have warrior-women buried with weapons.

Bling: “Their clothes, possessions, furniture, vehicles, and buildings were all decorated--as was their skin…They wore clothes embroidered with ornament along with jewelry that was a mass of writhing creatures and patterns….The chairs they sat upon, the beds they slept in, the bowls they ate from, the wagons that carried them, the harness of their horses, the walls of their homes--images everywhere. Their armor and weapons, especially, were layered with visual symbols and pictorial codes. [They lived in] a world of stories told in pictures…a thoroughly visual world.”

Lesbian Lizards!

2/24/2023

Parthenogenesis, reproduction without male sperm, fascinates me. This natural form of asexual reproduction occurs in a wide range of plants and animals, including some species of insects, spiders, snails, crayfish, brine shrimp, sharks, amphibians, reptiles, and birds.
Parthenogenetic offspring can be full clones of the mother with the same genes. If the mother’s egg divides, the offspring gets only a fraction of the mother's alleles since DNA mixes during meiosis, creating genetic variation.

A famous example of an all-parthenogenetic species is the New Mexico whiptail lizard of the US Southwest.

These all-female lesbian lizards engage in butch-femme “pseudocopulation” with one lizard mimicking a male to stimulate ovulation in the other female.

I have a short story in the works, Pargensia, exploring the implications for inheritance and cultural stability of a human-like species reproducing by parthenogenesis. What happens when a child in this monolithic culture turns away from her inheritance--something no one has ever done before?

Some species (such as cockroaches) flip between sexual and asexual (parthenogenetic) reproduction depending on their circumstances. This factoid is a key element in my short story Captain Palaio’s Twilight Flight, which explores space-faring folk who’ve reproduced by parthenogenesis for generations and their response when they meet breeding males on an alien planet.

Short Story Writing with Elizabeth Sims

1/7/2023

Photo by Tom Bender

I had the good fortune to attend a webinar with Elizabeth Sims on Short Story Writing for Publication.
Elizabeth is the author of one of my favorite how-to writing guides, You’ve Got a Book in You: A Stress-free Guide to Writing the Book of Your Dreams.

The class was hosted by Jane Friedman, who offers insightful blog posts as well as reasonably priced ($25) online classes of interest to writers.

What I learned:

To be an effective writer, it can help to analyze other people’s work you read.
Write freely and without restriction: If it didn’t have to be pretty, what would you write?
To free up your writing, you must be willing to dwell in uncomfortable territory.
If your first draft isn’t crummy, you haven’t thrown your all into it.
Dump the perfectionism.
The key to plot development is to ask questions (What if …? Yes, and . . .). This will open your story like a flower.
Agents (and editors) want STRONG, BOND-PROOF CHARACTER MOTIVATION.
Characters in a dilemma are fascinating, because we wonder what we’d do in the same situation.
Agents (and editors) like the hero’s adventure because readers respond to it.
Instead of just one main problem, give your character(s) two to enrich the story.
Don’t rush your ending. Let the reader understand the final and complete story.
Economy is crucial in a short story: few characters and minimal plot.
Polish your story and make it bright.
Don’t shy away from deep themes in a short story (death, loss, betrayal).

I found this class useful and enjoyable. Elizabeth and Jane made a great team.

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