The methods in the madness...

[Theinkswell]

Inspiration, she can be a difficult mistress. I wondered what things stand out for you as inspiration for a piece of writing? A lot of my interests outside of writing is in the science, and as such I am a reader of New Scientist and the like. I do come across a lot of good material in such things.

How about yourselves, to give some semblance of structure to my enquiry, allow me to put it my interest into two parts.

1. What was the strangest source of inspiration, that lead to something that was a genuine step from your usual writing topics?


2. What writing habits have you adopted?


My strangest inspiration is and continues to be new scientist magazine, truth as a strange place indeed and nothing is more worthy of fiction, though recently I have taken some inspiration from instrumental music, setting the tone or pace of a particular piece of writing to the imagined ideals of a piece of music I would have on my Ipod. I think ultimately I am a knowledge horder, and I love learning new things and that gives me insight into other things that I do, writing is a big part of that and so I supposed it was bound to have a knock on effect.

For me it was the Arthur C Clarke’s third law; that any sufficiently advanced technology would appear to be magic. Not the exact quote, but it lead me down the road to a piece (as yet partially complete) that was about that, a world where advanced technology existed, but as a punishment for a war crime against a rival neighbouring planet, the other human worlds removed the population’s memory limiting their ability to advance artificially, and keeping the world in a restricted epoch of understanding.

So all the nanotechnology and augmentations that had been genetically coded into the race before this point, were perceived by the children of that world as magic and strange powers. Fantasy is a interesting place to read, but I do not usually look to write in it, it lead to the interesting exercise of creating a tech, and then reverse engineering what it did, and how it would be perceived by a more primitive culture. The sentient computer system designed to maintain the punishment mistaken for gods and/or demons as they went about their business enforcing the sentence. You get the point, but it was perspective I hadn’t considered, science fiction by other means you might say.

My only real writing habit, is that I never read when I when I am writing, I knew someone who wrote also and themes of the newest book he was reading would creep into his own work, I didn’t want that, for better or worse I wanted my works to be a honest reflection of my perspective of the world. So no reading of almost any kind whilst writing. With a wise man’s fear still burning its way into my mind from the shelf, I am close to breaking from the writing to read it. Although now that I think of it, I have trouble writing at home, too easy at the click of a button distractions for me, so I write almost entirely on my commute to and from work, with some in lunch time, that or some local coffee shop which I kind of detest, all those knowing looks, people thinking that you are trying to look cool or important. Guess that makes for two habits

[Sue]

The oddest inspiration for me was a slightly patronising suggestion from an acquaintance that I should rewrite "a mythical tale" for children, in verse, that could be turned into a film. Being irritated by this twee suggestion, I stood a Greek myth on its head and produced a fantasy novella, which was quite different from anything else I'd ever written.

On other occasions I have had the characters in my head (for years) and simply wrote to see where the ideas went. That too worked well, because a plot emerged as I wrote.

The most difficult has been where I wanted to write about a theme - in this case, the decline of the English horsedrawn era of transport, where traffic moved from coaches to railways. It was hard because it was a downward story arc, not an upward one. I planned and planned! And researched, and planned some more! It's easy to write about the arrival of a new and popular and successful technology (Malcolm Macdonald did so for the railways) but I'm still hacking at Coachman!, months after I started writing, and weeks after the first draft was completed.

I'm gradually pushing away the researched history, and bringing elements of conflict forward, so they come into the story sooner. I've had to mentally put away all the history books that were the sources of my information, and start shuffling incidents between my characters instead.

I had never written a historical novel before so that too was a big learning curve, but the story had been in my head for years and it wasn't until t'interweb began to supply out of print texts online that I was able to do the necessary background reading without spending a year (and huge amounts of money) on library reading and purchasing books.

Interesting thread.

[Theinkswell]

Interesting that you mentioned a Greek myth, I have a started piece that I kind of lost my way with, about a person who was the reincarnated soul of Odysseus and through a blow to the head whilst been mugged, his past life comes to him, and the trail of him getting home becomes also the events of the Odyssey though in a contemporary setting, as though Poseidon is still punishing him, cursing him to instead of escaping his anger, relive it through the myriad of lives thereafter.

I think you are brave taking on historical writing, it requires so much initial leg work, the advantage clearly of total fiction is the ability for it to be spontaneous. I am more of a “let the character loose upon the page” kind of writer, though I have a rough A-Z idea of the story, it invariably detours all over the shop. Did you find that you had to plan everything out to ensure that you weren't just shouting facts at the reader, certain genres can be difficult to balance the narration, with technical/historical hyperbole.

I was part of small informal group who would write nano fiction, 1500 words and the winner from the previous month would start the piece or give a start that had to be either featured or clearly the root source of any inspiration.

That made for a fun exercise too, as it forced to try in terms that you might not initially do yourself to begin with. That and 1500 words is nought and therefore each one becomes precious. I was forced to raise to the occasion in some instances and that is always a good thing, I know from experience, that there is a danger in not exposing your writing to others, it can hamper your development to my mind. Hence why I am here I suppose.



On your comment on the themes, is it that you are looking to do just that, the decline of the carriageways to rail could have many relative parallels which you could use in another time period. So was it the specific theme and substance of that which made it such a potent period in your mind, or perhaps some other ancillary interest that happened to complement it?

I only ask because I would have believed that any themes would be transmutable to just about anywhere, and if the one you chose was difficult, it could easily enough be done elsewhere. Whereas despite the extra work you stuck to it. I just wonder why that was?



Also I sense a clue in your Avatar...

[Sue]

...I think you are brave taking on historical writing, it requires so much initial leg work... Did you find that you had to plan everything out to ensure that you weren't just shouting facts at the reader

...was it the specific theme and substance of that which made it such a potent period in your mind, or perhaps some other ancillary interest that happened to complement it?

Yes, I did have to do a lot of planning. I had to make a timeline of historical events so I could pin down certain known spectacles that would be of value to the story - like the opening of several railway lines, the coronation of Victoria, the last Mail Coach procession - they all occurred in 1838 so that was the perfect time for the story to be set. I had a great deal of knowledge already, as I drive horses on a regular basis, teach people to do so, and have written non fiction articles for specialist carriage driving magazines on some of the material I've used in the novel. The great-grandfather of one of my friends was the biggest coach proprietor in England in the 1830s, so I had some original correspondence to indicate how he looked at his business, and a family tree that gave me some other characters. Plus, my great-grandfather had been a coachman. It would have been a crying shame not to use those gems in a truly historical setting. To have shifted them into some fantasy world would not have done justice to them. The facts dictated the theme.

I was part of small informal group who would write nano fiction, 1500 words ...I was forced to raise to the occasion in some instances and that is always a good thing, I know from experience, that there is a danger in not exposing your writing to others, it can hamper your development to my mind. Hence why I am here I suppose.

I too belong to a small informal group, which I started 4 years ago. I think such feedback is very valuable. For one thing, our group has no set homework. (I used to set tasks or topics, but everyone came with something they were already doing, so after a year of trying to steer the group I gave over!) It's a great way to try out material you're already working on. Knowing that you are going to read it out to the others (one of whom is a well known and successful writer; another, like me, a teacher of English Lit) does tighten your approach when you're preparing for a meeting. I'm rewriting a couple of Coachman! chapters ready for Monday night - or I would be if I wasn't chatting on here!

[Theinkswell]

Sounds like you quite the makings of some serious literature there right on your doorstep. I do like when you are able to make a piece in some way relevant to you personally. I wrote a novel, predominantly supernatural in flavour, but I wrote it based in my home town, so I could visit those places I wanted to include and give it strong sense of locality, also made me chuckle to reflect on those places I grew up in, and giving the lead character similar tales and intimate knowledge of how the locations have changed.

The terror of having a teacher read my works would instill a fear akin to my childhood. Grammar is still my achilles heel at the moment, and I could well imagine all manner of red type scrawled across it disapprovingly.

Brrrr....

[Sue]

Grammar doesn't seem to be a problem for any of us - in spite of the crime novelist having dropped out of the school system at twelve Besides, when you read your work out aloud, flow and readability and intelligibility are more important than how you've punctuated it. If it flows and is understandable when read, it is probably also grammatically correct where it needs to be. Mind you we are all very critical listeners and can spot oddities and repeated words at first hearing.

After some juggling of opening chapters and drastic pruning of irrelevant threads, I think I have now got a reasonably polished draft of Coachman! with everything in the right order...

I may post the first few chapters for further comment (though I think most people on here will have already seen them when the current order ran something like 5, 2, 3, 4, 1!)

Now to find a home for it and start on the next...

[Theinkswell]

Yes I spied it when I came on, I will avidly devour the said piece.