Big ideas and plotting have always been a struggle in my writing. I envision worlds and characters and interactions with ease; sentences and paragraphs come naturally from my fingertips. But climax and plot and sequence? These emerge slowly if at all.<\/p>\n
For years, alas, I thought that I was condemned to writing only of my own limited experiences, using my quotidian existence as source material. \u00a0But rarely are happy lives the stuff of good novels (see: \u00a0Tolstoy), and I am blessed with a happy life.<\/p>\n
Eventually I figured out that if source materials are good enough for Shakespeare, they’re good enough for me! \u00a0So now I mine ideas from the wealth of the texts around me. \u00a0I love newspapers, especially the tiny columns of human interest stories that run down the margins, giving two or three sentences of a story–a\u00a0kernel\u00a0big enough to build around, but small enough to prevent imprisoning the story in reality. \u00a0A few years ago, I read about a young man taking the bibles out of a church before burning it to the ground, as a form of protest against who knows what. \u00a0Despite numerous google searches, that story has never resurfaced, but it lives on at the core of two of my three NaNoWriMo novels.<\/p>\n
I also find ideas in the biblical, Old Testament book of Judges. \u00a0Now, my dad is a pastor and my origins are deeply religious, even fundamentalist. \u00a0In response to this, I strive to embrace the good parts of my heritage of piety and reverence for holy texts, and bring that into my writing. \u00a0And the book of Judges is as good as it gets for source tales–sex, lies, and videotape (metaphorical, anyway). \u00a0It portrays an anarchic society, or very nearly anarchic, a society making up the rules as it goes along. A society dependent on deeply flawed leaders with limited authority to help them discern justice from injustice. \u00a0The most interesting society possible, in other words. \u00a0I find ideas in those lives of sinning saints and saintly sinners. \u00a0Eventually, once the stories of the judges are exhausted, perhaps I’ll find another holy text to mine–but for now, I draw storied guidance from their faith and follies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Big ideas and plotting have always been a struggle in my writing. I envision worlds and characters and interactions with ease; sentences and paragraphs come naturally from my fingertips. But climax and plot and sequence? These emerge slowly if at all. For years, alas, I thought that I was condemned to writing only of my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[534],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-process","tag-ideas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}