{"id":8797,"date":"2014-01-27T06:00:10","date_gmt":"2014-01-27T12:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=8797"},"modified":"2014-01-27T06:00:10","modified_gmt":"2014-01-27T12:00:10","slug":"evolution-idea-murphs-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=8797","title":{"rendered":"The Evolution of an Idea: Murph’s Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

People often ask writers where they get their ideas. There are a lot of answers to that question. I think everyone does it a bit differently. A month ago, I published the story \u201cMurph\u2019s Law\u201d on this site. You can find it here<\/a>. A couple of readers wrote me and asked where it came from.<\/p>\n

On May 28th, 2013, I awoke with an opening line in my head. \u201cWhen I pissed on Bobby Smith\u2019s grave, I didn\u2019t mean anything by it.\u201d I logged in to Evernote on my phone and recorded it. For those of you who don\u2019t know Evernote, it is a program that allows you to take notes, voice recordings, or pictures and access them from either your phone or your computer. It\u2019s a wonderful program that I don\u2019t use as much as I should.<\/p>\n

A good opening line is a baited hook for a pantser (someone who writes without any plan). I liked it, but I didn\u2019t know what it could catch. I toyed with a couple ideas, including the vengeful spirit of Bobby Smith who wasn\u2019t keen about getting pissed on. I tried a version of the \u201cResurrection Mary\u201d story. I wrote a few opening paragraphs. It didn\u2019t do enough for me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read Dracula three times in the last year for two different classes. The story got me thinking about this crazy Van Helsing guy who goes cutting the heads off of corpses in the graveyard and how easily he gets Lucy\u2019s would be lovers to go along with her decapitation. Here, Arthur, hammer the stake through your fiancee\u2019s heart like a good boy. LIKE A MAN! Stoker liked to reaffirm his characters’ masculinity.<\/p>\n

I started thinking about stumbling across a lunatic vampire slayer in a graveyard. The graveyard connection made me think of my opening line. In need of a story for the week, I sat down and decided to see where it would go. I decided to ditch the name Bobby Smith. I didn\u2019t like it. There was nothing wrong with it, but it lacked the familiarity I wanted. I had a \u201cMurph\u201d and a \u201cChuckles\u201d in my high school class. They were nothing like the characters, but I liked the familiarity of the nicknames. All the stuff about Murph getting his nickname came out of nowhere. I typed it out before I even thought about it, and it became a theme for the story.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s part of the fun of writing. If you relax, your brain will make connections that you didn\u2019t know were there. A piece of a story you read once, a random goofy thought, or maybe nostalgia for the place you grew up–God knows what dark, cobwebbed corners of your mind produce this stuff, but it is all there. Writing is cleaning out the metaphorical closet. Every character is a part of you, even if they are the parts that you would never publically claim. If I were a romantic, I might compare it to throwing bones, as if it were some act of divination. Instead, I\u2019ve always thought of my brain as a big cup of Yahtzee dice. I toss it all out and hope it\u2019s something I can use. If it gives me a peanut butter sandwich, a werewolf, and a Carnival cruise liner, I might come back with a werewolf eating peanut butter aboard a crippled cruise ship on the first night of the full moon, dreading what will happen if they don\u2019t get rescued in time. Pardon me while I log in to Evernote.<\/p>\n

The cemetery is set in the town of Fairfax, Iowa, which is a geographical mash-up. There is a Fairfax just west of Cedar Rapids, but it isn\u2019t my Fairfax. I didn\u2019t know it existed. Fairfax is my name for a made up town that is a combination of the rural towns I grew up around, a \u201cfair facsimile\u201d of the area. The real Fairfax is about the size of my imagined town, but I\u2019m sure it doesn\u2019t have anywhere near the problems. Fairfax shows up in several of my stories, an unfinished novel, and a screenplay. It\u2019s my Castle Rock. It\u2019s whatever I need it to be. Oddly, I just looked, and if you walked \u201cas the crow flies\u201d from the local bar to the cemetery on the edge of the real Fairfax, you would cross a cornfield.<\/p>\n

The other question I\u2019ve been asked: \u201cIs Van just crazy?\u201d My thought was that it doesn\u2019t really matter. Murph did what he did and will have to live with it either way, just like he has to live with Chuckles\u2019s death. Of course, I know the answer, but it is mine alone. \u00a0Is Van crazy? Was the girl a vampire? Are they even mutually exclusive options? Where you and I fall on that debate has more to do with us than it does with Van. Either way, he\u2019s got a stake through the heart. At the end of the day, that is really all that matters.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People often ask writers where they get their ideas. There are a lot of answers to that question. I think everyone does it a bit differently. A month ago, I published the story \u201cMurph\u2019s Law\u201d on this site. You can find it here. A couple of readers wrote me and asked where it came from. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[534,720],"class_list":["post-8797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-process","tag-ideas","tag-murphs-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8797","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\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}