Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is our most frequent
story starter -- idea, milieu, character, theme, what-if, trope, editor
request, etc.
As usual, I don’t think I can break this down into a neat
answer. Right off the bat let’s eliminate writing to market (what’s currently
hot in other words), which I never do, or writing something in response to an
editorial or agent request. I don’t have either of those individuals. (Yes, I
hire freelance editors to do edits on my
books but it’s not the same as an editor at a traditional publishing house
telling an author what they’d like to see written for a contracted book.)
My mantra is pretty much “I write what I write and I write
what I like to read.” Fortunately for me, there are quite a few wonderful
readers out there who seem to also enjoy the way my Muse works in crafting
stories! Thank you, readers!
Now that we’ve cleared up those issues, back to the topic of
what inspires me to write any given novel.
Looking over my backlist in order to write this post,
apparently the majority (not all) are situation-driven. My first ever published
science fiction novel with romantic elements, WRECK OF THE NEBULA DREAM, is
basically “Titanic in space…” as one reviewer said, inspired by the events of
the Titanic’s sinking, but set in the
far future, on an interstellar luxury liner. So I had the basic story idea and
then I worked to identify who the hero would be (a Special Forces soldier) and
why he was on the ship at all. The same for the heroine (a businesswoman) and all
the other characters.
STAR CRUISE: OUTBREAK - what if there was an epidemic on an
interstellar cruise ship? STAR CRUISE:
MAROONED - what if a group of passengers
went down to a planet for a day and were suddenly abandoned? The Alien Empath series, like DANGER IN THE
STARS – what if alien empathic priestesses from a less advanced planet were
kidnapped by the interstellar crime syndicate and forced to commit crimes?
TRAPPED ON TLANQUE – what if an Ancient Observer was left behind by her people
thousands of years ago, and still sleeps in stasis?
In each case, the situation leads naturally to who the
characters need to be and what kinds of things will happen over the course of
the novel.
My award winning science fiction romance series Badari
Warriors (Sectors New Allies) started as a situation – genetically engineered
soldiers held captive by the alien scientists who created them and now joined
by an entire colony of humans, kidnapped by the same scientists for
experiments. The books within the series are now driven by the main character for
each book and what adventure that person will have, as well as the overarching
series arc I have going on.
One standalone novel, MISSION TO MAHJUNDAR was sparked in part by two
photographs. Here’s what I said in a
post explaining why I wrote that book: “First,
in college one of my best friends was an amazing woman named Cheryl, who had
been blind since birth. I’d never known anyone who was blind, prior to meeting
her, and Cheryl was awe inspiring, amazing in her refusal to accept any limits.
She taught me many things, particularly how to use the other senses when one
sense is denied. I always wanted to honor Cheryl by imbuing a character with
her spirit and determination. …one day I saw a photo of a windswept, abandoned
temple, standing alone on a plateau, somewhere in the Middle East. The image
remained with me and I pondered – as one does – what adventure would bring
people to this remote location and what would happen to them there. What would
they be seeking? Would they find whatever they needed? This became the temple
of the Mahjundan Ten Gods, where Shalira must go on her wedding journey, to
seek a key to her mother’s long-closed tomb. ..Third, and this was the key
thing that put all the other elements together in my mind and set off the plot,
I happened across a perfume ad in a magazine. The illustration was very dark in
tone, with a woman in a purple-and-gold hooded cloak holding a beautiful
crystal bottle that glowed golden. The light from the bottle illuminated her
face. And I thought, that’s it! That’s Shalira inside the tomb. Then I needed
to know who would be there with her…and my Sectors Special Forces soldier, Mike
Varone, told me he would be, of course!”
Sometimes my novels are inspired by the character. Looking
over the list of 35 or so books, that seems to happen mostly when I want to
write a sequel. As with HOSTAGE TO THE STARS, the sequel I wrote for Johnny, a
secondary character in MISSION TO MAHJUNDAR where it was already established he
was a Special Forces operator. Here’s
what I said in my “why I wrote” post: “Johnny
had more story to tell… the good friend and loyal team mate, but I kept
wondering what he would do after the adventure ended, he really was out of the
military service and back on his home planet. Turns out he was restless, unable
to settle down and plagued by flashbacks. I’m very fond of Johnny and I hated
leaving him at loose ends like that. He
needed something to draw him out of ordinary life and provide him a new focus.
A way to transition into the new chapter of his life, if you will… So I thought what if Johnny was put in a
situation where he had to return to active duty for reasons (no spoilers here),
to accompany a hostage rescue team, and then there were complications? So the
team goes in, locates the woman they were sent to extract, and only then learns
of another woman prisoner from the Sectors. The team leader refuses to go after
this second person and Johnny – of course – sets off to find and rescue her by
himself.
The situation was much the same for Khevan and Twilka, two
survivors of the WRECK OF THE NEBULA DREAM, which readers had been asking about
since WRECK first appeared. My notes: “Once I had my cup of tea ready, removed the
cat from the table and concentrated on just Khevan and Twilka, it hit me like a
lightning bolt that I wasn’t interested in telling the story I had in mind. OK,
that’s a bad thing LOL. So I tried to turn the entire concept inside out in my
head. I asked myself what happened to the real Titanic survivors who were
Twilka’s equivalents – rich, society people who didn’t lose loved ones on the
ship. They pretty much went on with their lives. As I said to myself, you don’t
normally have two Titanic-level events in one lifetime. (Unless you were ship’s
crew but that’s a different story.) So what would Twilka have done with her
life, if she and Khevan weren’t together? And of course, WHY wouldn’t she and
Khevan have stayed together? That’s the key question - was it only their wildly
different life styles and places in Sectors society? Or?”
A few of my stories are created based on the need for an
alien pet. Four years ago, my friend author Pauline B Jones and I started the
Pets In Space® annual anthology of all new SFR, with the goals of supporting a
worthy charity, Hero-Dogs, Inc., and hopefully garnering new readers in the
process. PISA4 releases on October 8th by the way and can be
pre-ordered here.
So each year
I’ve had to ponder what alien pet I want to write about and then what the
storyline will be. So far all the stories occur on my Nebula Zephyr star cruise liner. Here are my comments on why I wrote last
year’s story, STAR CRUISE: MYSTERY DANCER: “I
started with the concept of the pet because that drives my plot for these PISA
adventures. For some reason I kept seeing a mental picture of a Siamese cat,
but with a third eye. But I’ve done a cat and a catlike alien before, for
PISA1, although Midorri, the alien pet there actually is kind of a cross
between a red panda and a tribble who acts like a cat. So I wanted something
very different and I started thinking about what if the cat wasn’t actually a
real animal at all? I ended up making F’rrh a ‘jenfellini’, which is something
like a genie, living in a beautiful lacquered box. Visualize the gorgeous
painted boxes that come from Russia.
Then, the tenuous link
to Russia reminded me of the whole tragic story of the last Tsar and his
family, and how they were murdered but for years rumors persisted one of the
children might have survived. Various individuals claimed to be ‘Anastasia’ or
another of the siblings, and of course there have been movies and plays written
with that theme. I always flash back to the version with Yul Brynner (such an
intense actor) and Ingrid Bergman because that movie was one of my mother’s
favorites and also left the answer to the question of “Is she or is she not
Anastasia?” somewhat open at the end. My daughters loved the animated fantasy
version of the tale, with the voices of Meg Ryan and John Cusack, when they
were growing up.
So I had the heroine –
a possible princess on the run – but how could she fit into the Nebula Zephyr?
Since the hero would be one of the former Special Forces soldiers who make up
the ship’s security force, I had to be able to make the two interact and fall
in love in a situation fraught with danger and suspicion.
I’ve wanted to do a
story about the Comettes dance troupe which performs aboard the cruise liners
since I wrote my very first published scifi romance, Wreck of the Nebula Dream
(a sister ship of sorts to the one I write about nowadays). Dancing is a skill
a maybe princess might have at a high level, right? So let her be a new member
of the dancers….throw in a fabulous jewel and we have the story!”
So there we have it, a closer look at what kicks off a story in my mind and how the various threads come together to create a plot!
