September 29th, 2020: The Writer's Process

     I've talked before about certain motivations for writing stories. Sometimes it was nothing more than just a crazy idea that occurred to me while I was working. For "Deathburger," I heard an ad on the radio for a spicy new hamburger that a restaurant was coming out with. While I was putting paper into my printer, I wondered to myself, what if someone created a new burger that was so spicy that someone actually died from it? That became the basis for a humorous story about a town that used a tragic event to bring more people into the town.

     "Picture of the Ghost" was a little more involved. My wife Pam likes to watch these paranormal shows where psychic investigators examine a house that people claim to have ghosts in them. Using sophisticated equipment, they go through the house room by room until they get some kind of reading that indicates an otherworldly presence. They then pull out devices that supposedly allow the "ghosts" to communicate with them, and start asking questions to determine if a spirit is present and who it might be. Is it some demonic being, or has Aunt Tillie just come back to say that the family isn't polishing the silverware well enough? The investigator then tells the audience what the ghost has said and sites "research" that "proves" that the ghost is a previous owner of the house who died violently. After watching one of these shows one day, I wondered to myself, "What if they got it wrong? What if they have the wrong person? Maybe they misread what the specter was trying to say. What if the ghost was having trouble operating the equipment?" That lead me to write "The Picture of the Ghost," about a poor country boy who dies in prison and finds himself unable to move on to the next life. When he encounters "The Ghost Sweepers," all kinds of problems develop.

     The Word trilogy that I've been writing for the past few years is based on an observation I made watching science fiction movies. Sometimes, an explorer would land on a distant planet that was occupied by telepaths, people who had no verbal language but spoke to each other's minds. It always seemed really strange to me that they were able to communicate with the earthling in clear English, even though they had never seen an earthling before. So, I wrote about my own race of telepaths, all women, who "spoke" in images rather than words. As I developed what was supposed to be a short story, I kept coming up with more and more "what if's" until the story was big enough to fill three books. It took on a religious tone as the women on the planet had a totally different Garden of Eden story that took place. Instead of giving in to the evil creature and disobeying God, their "Eve" stayed faithful and rebuked their Satan.

     What about my time travel novel, "At Some Point in Time?" Sometimes a writer will draw from his own personal experiences in life or things he has seen. Each story has a question that it tries to answer. For that book, the question was, if you had access to a time machine, where would you want to go? I thought about the life of Christ or some monumental event in history, then I thought, what about something more personal. I began to imagine a brilliant scientist who was in a very unhappy marriage. He had married on the rebound when he lost touch with the girl he had hoped to marry, and the match he settled for was not a good one. So, having invented the world's first time machine, his colleagues keep telling him that he should go back in time and change his life to a happier one. He resists the idea, thinking that it is too selfish a use for his amazing machine, but when an accident occurs, he does indeed get sent back thirty years. The controls were not set properly, so the way he gets sent back is awkward, but he makes the best of it and tries to help his younger self build a better life. It turned into a very popular story, with pseudo-science, history, romance, and Christian elements woven in. If God lets me live that long, I would like to write a sequel to it set twenty years in their future from the end of that book.

     So, many things will inspire an author to write a story, sometimes just a quirky thought that runs through his mind, and sometimes a concept that evolves as the work progresses.