Saturday, April 25: Mississippi Mud
DADDY, WHERE DO STORIES COME FROM?
by John M. Floyd
Do you ever read a story or novel and wonder how the author came up with it? What in the world did he or she hear, or see, or read, or dream, that triggered the idea or ideas that led to the finished product?
Okay, I know, sometimes it doesn’t matter. But what if the story was a really good one, one that you know you’ll remember for a long time, one that left a deep impression on you? What if you’d just like to find out more about it?
Secrets of the Rich and Famous
Well, now and then an anthology or a collection of short fiction will feature a summary of exactly that kind, and will reveal the origins of — and sometimes other little factoids about — each story in the volume. A recent example is Stephen King’s collection Just After Sunset. A section in the back of the book includes several paragraphs about each story, telling the curious where the Kingster got the inspiration to create that particular tale. I enjoyed those little revelations. They made me feel that SK is actually human after all, and has everyday experiences just as I do, and finds a way to use those to work his magic.
Another author I’ve always liked is Larry McMurtry. In Books, his nonfiction account of his adventures as a bookscout, he says the idea for his novel Cadillac Jack came from a D.C. street corner where two pimps were discussing a third pimp who had just cruised by in a Caddie. Talk about a strange source of inspiration …
Secrets of the Poor and Unknown
As for me, almost anything can crank the engine that gets the storywheels turning, but I remember a few times when ideas appeared almost intact and fully formed in my head. One involved a visit to a tiny, remote island in Prince William Sound a few years ago — my very first thought, when I saw its tangled forests and fog-shrouded peaks, was: “What if you’d been left here to die?” The resulting story, about an Alaskan bank robber double-crossed by his accomplice, was written aboard my friend’s boat that night as we lay at anchor in a cove on that unnamed island, and became “Rainbow’s End,” the title story of my first book of short fiction.
Another story was born when my wife informed me that the power company had apparently cut the TV cable while digging in our yard, and when the cable folks came to fix that, they wound up cutting the power lines. Believe it or not, they played musical excavations for several days, back and forth, blindly disrupting each other’s efforts, before both services were fully restored. By then, though, the incident had morphed into a mystery called “Dooley’s Code,” which I published first at Amazon Shorts back in ’06.
Whatever Lights Your Fire
Some of my other stories weren’t tied to a single event, but came about because of something I decided I wanted to try, something I hadn’t done before. One story, “War Day,” was written using only one character and no dialogue at all, and another, “Doctor’s Orders,” was almost nothing but dialogue. “Clara’s Helper” was a mystery short featuring only two people in a single setting, like a one-act play. Another, “The Early Death of Pinto Bishop,” happened only because I wanted to do a story about a little boy in the Old West, and “A Place in History” involved a time-traveling novelist. In those last two cases I knew what subject I wanted to write about before I came up with the plots themselves. And I once wrote a story with only an opening line in mind. I knew I wanted it to start with one lady whispering to another, “He’s still out there.” Who’s still out there? Out where? I didn’t know yet — I just figured that would be an interesting beginning. It became “Knights of the Court,” about an Assistant DA stalked by a killer.
And sometimes — not often — I do a story based only on a picture I have in my head of certain characters. I’ve so far sold more than two dozen stories in a “series” featuring a nosy schoolteacher and a guy she taught in the fifth grade, who is now the sheriff of their small Southern town. (Think “The Andy Griffith Show” and then imagine Aunt Bee helping Sheriff Taylor do his job whether he wants her to or not.) That series began one sleepy afternoon when I was sitting on my mother’s front porch, watching her keep an wary eye on a couple of strangers driving slowly past her house. To my surprise, I could suddenly see this bossy, plump schoolteacher character in my mind (although Mom never taught school, and is neither bossy nor plump), along with the pleasant but lazy fellow who would become Sheriff Chunky Jones. Not that it matters, but the following is the opening of “Guardian Angel,” the first story of that series. I had it written in my head even before my mother and I left the porch to go inside for supper.
Angela Potts was always the first to see trouble coming.
A retired schoolteacher, she pictured herself as a lone sailor stationed on the bow, watching for rocks and icebergs in the fog. In reality, her lookout point was the wooden swing on her front porch. From there she monitored the usually calm seas of her hometown, alert for any sign of a threat.
The point is, ideas are all over the place, if we watch for them. Anything, anyone, anywhere, can be the catalyst for a story. Or a series.
Be alert.
I adore your Angela Potts stories! I am mulling over a series character myself right now and hoping I have as much success with her as you have with Angela. Thanks for another great column!
In my opinion, even the most miserable experience provides material that sometime will leap to mind and be just what you need to move a story forward. I can trace some story ideas to an event. Others, I haven’t a clue. I suppose they go back to either experience or a devious mind. You are better at finding or remember roots than I am. I do recall spending an hour in a small coal mining town in southern Ohio late in the Great Depression. The desolation and air of hopelessness provided the setting for a story called “Switchback.”
The McMurtry story seems to support the theory that bad neighborhoods and taverns often provide great material.
Did you mother solve the mystery of the two strangers cruising the neighborhood? It reminds me of a few times with Pinkerton’s when I had to park on a quiet residential street and wait. It didn’t take long for a cop car to arrive. Always wondered what the neighbors thought when the police left and I was still there.
Great column and I just loved the title.
I like the idea of looking at a beautiful scene and thinking “how would you kill someone here?” Occupational hazard for some of us…
Where do ideas come from…? I never pondered it much, but it seems to me that a number of the story ideas I get come from rather obscure facts, which become clues in a mystery story that I then build around said fact. (For example, when you hang up a telephone for a second and pick it up again, if the person you were talking to has not yet hung up at their end, they will still be on the line.)
And some have been built on things “everyone knows” that turn out to be absolutely wrong, which in turn trips up an “expert” who should have known the real truth, but obviously didn’t. (Seasons are reversed south of the Equator, so this summer day here in the US is a deep winter day in Chile.)
Others are built around a serendipitous moment that makes me go “Of course!” (An example of this was in the creation of the movie THE LAVENDER HILL MOB, in which a truckload of stolen gold bullion has to be smuggled out of the country, but how? The producers of the film were stumped, until one of them happened to pick up a lead miniature of the Eiffel Tower–and he said “Of course!” So they get the gold out of England by melting it down, casting it into Eiffel Tower paperweights, and shipping it openly right past the Customs people, who pay no attention to the “lead” paperweights.)
And then, there’s the simple moment in which I look around and say “This would be a perfect place for a murder…”
I love the “where-did-that-story come-from” stuff! A simple thing can trigger an idea; Daphne duMaurier was watching a farmer working in his field with birds happily diving behind him, gobbling up the unearthed worms. She wondered simply “What happens if they stop being interested in worms?” The result was her story The Birds…
I do think a lot of us like to find out more about what triggered the idea for certain stories. (Jeff, I’d never heard that about the duMaurier idea before — I love that kind of thing.)
By the way, I was rummaging through some of my stuff last year and uncovered the old issue of AHMM with “The Birds” in it. What a find!
Dick, I forgot to address your question. As it turned out, the two mystery motorists were visitors who had lived there in my hometown (near it, actually) many years ago, and were cruising around looking at how much things had (not) changed. This of course upgraded their status to “acceptable” in Mom’s view.
As many of you already know, life in smalltown America — especially the Southern version — is a whole different world.