Category Archives: Story Ideas

Everything I write sucks.

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you_suck_sadLet me try to express this as articulately as I possibly can:

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!!

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

Perfect Justice needs more warmth. Woman’s Best Friend needs more depth. New Magic needs more content. Second Chances needs a likable character. Manifest Destiny needs a reason for the reader to care.

Shadows of Prophecy needs real characters. Echoes of Prophecy needs a plot.

Fragile Gods needs a better outline.

And The God Disease just needs a better writer.

How to write amidst the endless barrage of life

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Thank you, Broaddus, for that much-needed kick in the pants to get me arse in motion once again. That is EXACTLY the reason I started this site; to get my friends to grab me by the arm and say:

“JASON! What are you working on now? Is it done now? Will it be done soon?’

Whether my work is good or bad, published or unpublished, lauded or hated, the only true failure is if I don’t keep writing.

The Excuses

They aren’t necessarily good excuses. But they’re still excuses.

I worked 9 hours of overtime last week; to some people, that’s going to sound like nothing. To others (those who log 40 but spend 20 of them at the coffee machine) it may sound excessive. To me, it’s just tiring. And when my workday is long, when I come home I kind of need to recharge my batteries. I can’t dive straight into writing unless I still have some energy.

Weekends are obviously a great time to catch up, but we had company Saturday…pretty much all day. I was also up until 2 AM, which is 5 hours past my normal bedtime, making Sunday a wash for any productivity.

New Hobbies and Old

The gathering Saturday was to create characters for a new 4th edition campaign, and one trying out some new house rules. It’s a different sort of campaign for me in that I’m trying to NOT DM — at all. My friend Rich is, for which I am very grateful. The hope is that this will leave all my creativity for writing.

The two new episodes of South Park so far this (13th) season have not disappointed.

Wizards of the Coast, with D&D Insider software tools for tabletop gaming, have disappointed. More on this soon in a full post on the subject.

A co-worker got me into Battlestar Galactica; I’m about halfway through the first season (no spoilers please) and so far I am monumentally impressed. Those who know me know that I am not easily impressed, especially by television, so this rapidly puts BSG in contention for one of my favorite shows of all time.

I finished Drood by Dan Simmons. It was really good but it could have been a lot better. There was loose ends that Simmons did not tie to my satisfaction. Still, Simmons’ real strength is his incredible ability to narrate extremely complex characters, and this shines through from the first sentence to the last.

Upon re-recommendation from dad, I have decided to give George R. R. Martin another try, so I am reading A Song of Ice and Fire from the beginning (A Game of Thrones). If I remember correctly from before, Tyrion was my favorite character. I still like Martin better than David Eddings or Terry Goodkind. (Sorry long-time fantasy buffs.)

The Writing

Most of the recent writing energy I have expended recently has been spent outlining Fragile Gods. This is an odd sort of process for me, intermingled with a lot of “wait and see.” I don’t just sit down with MS Word and outline a story end to end.

Instead, a thought occurs to me. “What if I did this?” I will ruminate and ponder the idea for several days, and it will spawn several sub-ideas; sometimes for characters, sometimes scenes, sometimes themes. If I like where these stray ponderings take me, I work them into the outline. Rinse and repeat until I feel like I have “enough”.

When is that? I don’t know. It’s the sort of thing I know when I know.

I will tell you one theme I am considering is abortion. Writing on modern topics can be deadly, and abortion is the most polarizing issue I know. “Handle with extreme caution.”

In my opinion, a good writer should not simply be pedantic about his own viewpoint. Rather he should explore the issue as fairly as possible from all angles. Straw Vulcans hold little appeal to me.

My idea for abortion in Fragile Gods is to combine the two types of magic in the world of the Drim and put them on opposite sides of the issue. It’s important that you know up front that neither the Drimmi priests’ magic nor the Sight is upheld by the story as the “right” magic over/above the other. There are good and evil practitioners of both.

My idea is that those with the Sight are sometimes called upon to See the mind of unborn children, and at early enough development when there is no neural activity, the Seer sincerely reports that the child has no mind to read. The proponents of abortion in this fantasy world cite this as evidence that abortion does not destroy human life.

The Drimmi priests, however, have a kind of pantheism which includes honoring all life; including unborn life. Their own power over the elements and the Drim lends credence to the idea that they may know more about the inner workings of the unseen universe than the common man, too.

This (if done correctly) can be moral dilemma at its finest. Two credible parties on opposing sides of an intense issue, each with dissenters among their own ranks.

Originality is as originality does.

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originality

So a few posts ago, my good friend Ben commented:

You and I do not normally see eye-to-eye about matters such as this, but I offer you the following comfort anyway, for what it’s worth.

Over the years, I have seen a number of artistic endeavours which I would consider “original”. Of these, only one (the Blue Man Group)could be considered “enjoyable”, or even “not nauseating”.

So please don’t be discouraged if your idea is not entirely original. When ideas are used many times, it is often because they are really good ideas.

The lesson there is a good one. One can write good fiction even if all the elements are Older Than Dirt. A story can only be so interesting unless there is some sort of Big Bad and it will be hard for the audience to care unless there’s a band of Heroes involved.

So on that note, I have this great idea for a kind of Space Opera. It happened A Long Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far Far Away, and follows a Farm Boy named something cool like Luke NounVerber who becomes a Knight in Shining Armor. I think I’ll open with two characters using Bilingual Dialog to add to the sense of mystery and fantasy for this series. They meet Luke NounVerber who falls into the Dulcinea effect when he sees a hologram of a Damsel in Distress. (Because Everything’s Better with Princesses.) So this Luke NounVerber meets a Cool Old Guy who is capable of using Charm Person, and is so powerful he Doesn’t Like Guns. Together they team up with a Smuggler who I think later may may an interesting Takahashi Couple with the princess.

This story will have Laser Blades which are Color Coded for Your Convenience, and Cool Starships to permit Casual Interstellar Travel. The first story will end Storming The Castle.

Personally, I think this story is going to make me millions of dollars, and so popular that I can have not only three installments, but 20 years later, I can do three more as prequels!

But if my chances of making this story a bestseller or a movie aren’t good, please, for God’s sake, Never Tell Me The Odds.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes 1:9 (ca. 250 BC).

There really isn’t.

Striving for true originality in fiction is a fools errand. Any writer worth at least his own weight in third-world currency knows this.

And yet if you just remold and refit previously used ideas in obvious ways, you won’t be telling a worthwhile story. You’ll just be RE telling Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings. For more on the latter, see Brandon Sanderson‘s essay, originally titled “How Tolkien Ruined Fantasy” but since so many people objected — without reading it — it has since been renamed “Actually I Don’t Hate Tolkien“.

Here’s an excerpt:

His work was so revolutionary that the market couldn’t deal with it. Readers wanted more books like LotR, but other authors weren’t ready to produce high fantasy yet. The only thing they could do was try and do what Tolkien did.

But they didn’t do what Tolkien did. They didn’t create a new world, with its own mythology, its own society, its own technology, its own races and creatures. This wasn’t their fault–they just weren’t ready to jump to that level. So instead they applied their considerable creativity toward copying Tolkien. Instead of creating true high fantasy, everyone created more low fantasy–but they used Tolkien’s world as a base instead of our own. The result was a kind of tainting of the entire genre, a ‘Tolkienizing.’ Fantasy didn’t mean ‘the genre where the author creates his or her own unique setting.’ It meant ‘the genre where the books include elves, dwarfs, wizards, and quests.’

Copy a work too closely, and it turns out you’re not “copying” the author at all. You’re just reusing their work. The truest homage to Tolkien is to create NEW worlds, a form of plagiarism which results in some measure of originality.

How?

Because tropes and cliches are like ingredients. They’ve ALL been used before. But sometimes you can still hit upon combinations of them which haven’t yet been tried, or even if they have, they weren’t done quite right. This is how the Matrix was able to see wild success in spite of the fact that it’s premise was an Overused Sci Fi Plot Device.

The image I chose for this post is spot on. You must be careful when combining different elements, or else you’ll end up with Ninja Pirate Zombie Robots.

I’ve told aspects of my new fantasy novel to a number of people, including several fed up with fantasy. But I’m combining elements of different cultures and genres and subgenres in a way which hopefully is a new recipe, and deliberately subverting some overused tropes and cliches, such as Luke I Am Your Father. (My related characters who end up on opposite sides of the Big Bad/Hero divide know they’re related the whole story long. There’s no revelation.)

The result?

Even the Skeptic is intrigued. (See Mr. Snuggles reply to my introduction of the Drim.)

Solved

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Rather than try to conjure a whole new title from scratch, I decided that “Mortal Gods” is still on the right track, but it has been used before because it is entirely too predictable and generic a phrase, though paradoxical in nature.

A slight modification produces much the same implication, but in a form I find both more poetic and more original.

The name of this novel shall be Fragile Gods. This carries even deeper implications than the original title, while still remaining true to the story I plan to unfold.

New novel underway: Mortal Gods

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In my last post, I introduced the Drim, elemental gods from my new novel.

Last night, I did about 90 minutes of research on ancient earth cultures, some of which have been underused in fantasy and science fiction. Genre fiction readers have seen many incarnations of Olympus or Odin. I want to move away from that.

I also brainstormed for about 20 minutes straight for a title.

This is after thinking for about week about this story, its ideas, and trying to come up with a title all day every day; in my car, at work, at home, while gaming, you name it.

Because of the mishmash of theological themes I’ll be toying with, and for reasons I can’t reveal until the end of the story, I eventually settled on “Mortal Gods”.

Today I started to google that phrase, and as always, there’s nothing new under the sun. Orson Scott Card wrote a short story called Mortal Gods. It’s been years since I’ve read it, and now I have no idea if the title bubbled to the surface from my subconscious, or actually was an original thought. (I’ve often had this problem reading philosophy, too, recognizing something which I’d thought of last year, but maybe I’d only thought of it because of a quote or movie or song or pop culture icon which already made use of the same themes or ideas.)

Mortal Gods is also the name of a novel by some guy named Jonathon Fast – also science fiction. Fortunately for me, it’s not very popular or very good.

Mortal God is also the name of a Death Metal band from Finland in 1992 which has now broken up.

It is frustrating to know the title that so thoroughly excited me as an immediate way to encapsulate grandiose ideas of this story (some of which I can’t even reveal to you yet) has already been repeatedly used, and in similar context. It is even more frustrating to know that if I rack my brains for another week to produce a different title, it will likely be no more original than this one.

It worked…

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addictedRather than quitting World of Warcraft cold turkey (which I have done before, but it didn’t stick in the long run), I have instead tried the the route of discipline:

Simply playing less.

It worked. When I feel the urge to game, I will attempt to scratch the itch by playing much more cyclical one-player games instead. I don’t know how others feel, but for me single player games don’t cut it anymore; I just get bored with seeing the same content over and over. Cheats, mods, savefile editors and such can add a certain additional replay value, but those grow stale even more quickly than the original game.

So then I pace the apartment. I check chess.com compulsively every five minutes. I watch *gasp* television. (Streaming with no commercials, still, though.)

And then eventually…I get bored enough to write.

Success!

I wrote for some 7 or 8 hours Saturday and another 4 on Sunday. Furthermore, I managed a personal first: Diving directly into another story while the ink from my last project is still drying.

I considered putting up another poll to ask what you want to read next, having now (re)finished Perfect Justice. But then I’d want to give the poll time to gather enough info — the last one took about ten days before all votes were in, and even then I only garnered nine votes in total.

Instead, I decided merely to write the next story.

For those who are keeping up with me, I’ll go ahead and tell you the next one is going to be Second Chances; you can read the synopsis over on the sidebar.

I will also introduce you to a new project on my idea board:

Road Rage is about a guy so frustrated and angered by the idiotic and dangerous ways of rude drivers that he finally decides to do something about it. But he isn’t content with merely taking your license. Violate his rules, and he’ll be taking your life.

What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?

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bunnycryMisery is like high-powered story fuel.

My next short story is about a guy who’s had a recent run of very bad luck. (Of course, thanks to a mysterious peddler, his luck is about to change.) To write his perspective, I’m going to draw from my own experience from the lowest points of my life.

Getting fired from a temp job for being home (on doctor’s orders) due to having a spinal headache (MOST unpleasant) and going into shock following a medical procedure (relating to breaking my spine in 2006) was one of the worst weeks of my life. I was in so much pain and agony that there were hours where (1) I sincerely thought I was going to die, or (2) I really didn’t know much of what was going on around me.

As a kind of sympathy card for the rough week I was having, my employer let me go, saying they just needed a warm body in the seat and if I was going to be…well… y’know, in the hospital, that just wasn’t acceptable to them.

There was another time where my girlfriend dumped me one day, and my cat died the following day. When it rains it pours, right? And other pessemistic cliches.

What about you? What were some of the worst experiences of your life? Breakups? Firings? Injuries? Sicknesses? Screwed up travel plans? Combinations of all of the above?