Category Archives: The Writing Life

A guest post by Sam Knight.

My grandfather and my mother are avid readers, so I came by that honestly. Writing, however, is a different story.

I have a tendency to get sick. I mean really sick. If everyone else in the house has a sniffle, I have a cold. If they have colds, I have the flu. If everyone has the flu, I’m at the doctor’s. The problem with getting that sick, that often, is you get bored really stinking fast.

Being a child in the 70s, I didn’t have video games until Pong came out, and I could play that for only so long. Television was only worth watching for about two hours a day, and then only on some days (except Saturday morning cartoons!). Books, though… they worked 24/7.

One particular illness sticks out in my memory. I was in fifth grade and down sick with what I was told was the “Russian Flu.” I was miserable sick-except when I was reading. When I was reading, I was in another world. I could literally forget about my own problems! I would be so engrossed, the rest of the world ceased to exist. That was a godsend.

That was also my first real introduction to the idea of a series, where the story continued on into the next book. The world didn’t come to an end when I closed the book, there was another one waiting!

I read Patricia A. McKillip’s Riddle Master Trilogy, Piers Anthony’s Xanth Trilogy (back when there were only three), a trilogy collection of Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter books, and three or four of Alan Dean Foster’s Pip and Flinx series. When I ran out of new books, I re-read The Hobbit.

It was quite an eclectic mix, and I read them all in a little over a week. And then I went looking for more. Everything I could get my hands on. Up until that time, I had been a “reader.” I had read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in fourth grade. But now, after doing so much reading, so intensively, I had become addicted. I had become a biblioholic. I had to have more!

I raided my mother’s bookshelves and then headed for my grandfather’s. I came away with armloads of Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Kenneth Robeson, Frank Herbert, and more.

Some sucked me in, others not so much. I was searching for authors with a specific talent-the ability to make me forget I was reading a book. I was actually trying to recreate what I had experienced while I was ill.

Yeah, I read the things the other kids were reading. The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and the like. They were good, but… they didn’t transport me into another world the way I wanted.

I wasn’t in the game to read about little problems with kid brothers, or mysteries about missing toys. I wanted the Hero’s Journey. I wanted books that let me see Star Wars in my head. (We couldn’t just buy it and watch it anytime we wanted back then. Not to mention that, if I remember right, Star Wars was around $100 when it came out on VHS five or six years after theatrical release, and a brand new book was only $3.50.) I wanted books that let me live a different life.

And I found them. I found a lot of them. I started with authors I already knew could make a movie behind my eyes, and I got everything I could by them. I read Piers Anthony’s older sci-fi stories, and then I followed all of his new series as they came out. I followed Alan Dean Foster’s Pip and Flinx adventures all the way until 2009 when he finally wrapped it up. I’m still waiting for David Gerrold to finish The War Against the Chtorr series. (I’m not holding my breath, though…) Along the way, I found Robert Asprin’s Myth series, Lawrence Watt-Evan’s Ethshar books, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, among others.

I worked sixty hours a week while attending college full-time, and I still made time to read. I would exchange books with co-workers. I gave away my copy of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy just to convince someone to read it, and then I went and bought myself another. I did that three times.

After I graduated, I carried my book du jour to work with me and read it during my lunch hour. At first my new co-workers laughed at me, but by the time I left there were close to a dozen people doing the same thing.

Why? Because books are magic. A well-crafted book made by a talented author will cast a spell over a reader and transport them to a new place, a different time, another life.

That’s what I was looking for when I was sick. A different life. And those wonderful authors gave it to me, even if it was just for stolen moments at a time. They gave it to me. And as I lay in that bed so many years ago, a thought drifted through my mind, a thought that stayed with me the rest of my life: I wanted to return the favor. I wanted to write something that could bring as much joy to those authors as they were giving me.

Ideas began bouncing around in my head after that. When I worked physical labor, I would entertain myself by thinking up stories. When I drove long distance, I would stay awake by imagining new places, new worlds, and new people. Eventually, I found that nearly anything would give me a story idea.

And soon, very soon, I will finally move beyond my apprenticeship and craft a story that repays my heroes. I will inspire the next generation, and honor the previous. I will write because I read, and it was wonderful.

* * *

Sam Knight refuses to be pinned down into a genre. If the idea grabs him, he writes it. Once upon a time, he was known to quote books the way some people quote movies, but now he claims having a family has made him forgetful, as a survival adaptation. He can be found at www.samknight.com and contacted at sam@samknight.com.

Toy Story: Little Ponies and the Birth of a Writer

May 3, 2013

mary

In the early eighties when I was six, I was obsessed with My Little Pony. The colourful plastic horses had just appeared on toy store shelves and I had made it my life’s mission to collect them all.

One day I found a big cardboard box and incorporated it into my pony games. Sunbeam, the unicorn, thought that as the only unicorn in Ponyland (translation: the only unicorn I owned so far), she should be the queen of the ponies. When the other ponies disagreed, Sunbeam hatched a plot. She asked Snuzzle if she would like to be a rock star, and set up a concert (with the cardboard box as the stage). All the ponies came out to see the show.

Surprise! The show was a trap. The cardboard box flipped ninety degrees and trapped the other ponies inside. Sunbeam proclaimed herself queen, with Snuzzle as her assistant.

Snuzzle was sad. She had wanted to be famous, not to hurt anyone. Sunbeam got angry and threw her into the pit (box) as well.

So Sunbeam was queen. But she was queen all alone, with no friends. Worse, with all the other ponies in captivity, their special powers (indicated by their symbols) stopped working. Soon, Sunbeam’s sun power had turned Ponyland into a desert.

Desperate, Sunbeam freed the other ponies, and stepped down from her position as queen. The other ponies’ powers caused the flowers and clover to grow again, the stars to shine again, the rain to fall again. And, in time, the ponies would learn to forgive Sunbeam for her mistake.

(Not bad for a six year old, hm?)

The next day in school, my class was given an assignment to write and illustrate our own books for a project called Young Authors. I knew right away what I wanted to do. I was so happy with the plot I had made up for my pony game that I decided to write down the story. Entitled “Sunbeam’s Sad Show,” it was chosen as one of the best three in the class, and I was able to attend a special writing conference with children from other schools.

It took me ten years to discover that what I had created was something called “fan fiction” and that I was far from the only one using characters from toys, cartoons and books to make my own stories. It took me another ten years to learn that those people who were lucky enough to be paid to create the official tales of licensed characters were called “tie in authors.” But it took very little time at all for me to recognize that telling stories in writing was not that different from acting out stories with my plastic figures.

Writing, at its best, is still play to me. I create a world and populate it with characters. I set up scenarios and let them play out, watching to see what my characters will do, how they will interact with one another, how they will face the challenges ahead of them, whether or not they will succeed, and what will happen to them then. My goal is to create a tale as compelling to my readers as the world of the little ponies was to me, long ago.*

(*Full disclosure time: Anyone with a collection of 300+ little ponies is still pretty darn compelled by that world.)

Monsters & Librarians

May 2, 2013

Colette Black

Colette Black The Writing Life No Comments

It’s Saturday morning. Cartoons are over. For whatever reason, Mom hasn’t found us for our weekly chores. Huddled under our old polyester blanket, the edge poised at our brow, my brother and I plus some occasional neighborhood friends, watch the large white letters flash on the screen of our old console TV. “ADVENTURE THEATER presents….” This was the place where my love for sci-fi horror grew. We watched the original “Planet of the Apes,” “The Blob” (Click the picture on the right for the blob song.), “Godzilla” vs EVERYTHING, and even “Abbot and Costello Go to Mars.” I lived for these kinds of shows, soaking it in like a sponge cake soaks up sauce. I believe these movies are the influence responsible for the comment I’ve heard so many times regarding my horror short stories:

“The writing is similar to Stephen King. You must have read a lot of his books.”

“Um…No, I haven’t.”

The only Stephen King book I’ve read is “On Writing,” where he talks about his early childhood influences. The same shows I watched on my TV screen, he saw in the theaters. Freaky,yet cool, it shows the power these early-childhood entertainments have on us. Still, though these films were my influence, my introduction was a movie I doubt Stephen King, or probably any other writer, has ever seen.

Tarantula

In a small town in southern Utah, where my grandparents TV only received one station which only aired occasionally, that one station showed the 1955 “Tarantula” many times. And every time the tarantula chased a crowd of people across the desert, someone would point to the screen and say, “There’s grandpa! He’s one of the extras.”

That was my true introduction, and from that point on, throughout my childhood, I watched monster flicksl, even if I had to close my eyes and pull the blanket over my head. Is it any surprise that one of my favorite recent films is “Super 8?” J.J. Abrams took the classic monster tale and created a beautiful modernization set in the monster-movie glory days. And is it any surprise that my first short story sale was a horror about a woman who turns beetle and terrorizes an airplane full of people. It’s in my blood, and it shows up in my fiction, in some way or another, almost without fail.

Now, I mentioned librarians in the title, and though it’s completely off topic, I have to give a special thank you to my junior high librarian. Most of the districts in my state no longer pay for certified librarians, or even full-time librarians, which I think is sad. When a shy seventh-grader asked for more animal books, instead of giving me the same Black Stallion-type content I’d been reading my entire life, my school librarian opened a whole new world to me with “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” That was my introduction to fantasy and it sucked me in as horror sci-fi film had ten years earlier. And do I enjoy a combination of the two? Yes. An author who writes some amazing sci-fi horror meshed with old-time fantasy, is David Farland. His “Runelords” series and “The Golden Queen,” are absolutely brilliant, and though one was relegated as sci-fi, and the other as fantasy, I think an argument could be made for both fronts with both books.

So, to the amazing artists, monsters, and librarians who have influenced my life and my dreams, I can only say again, “Thank you.”

Origin Stories

April 30, 2013

Evan Braun

Evan Braun The Writing Life No Comments

Ask a group of twenty-three writers why they write, and you’re going to get twenty-three different answers. I should know, because that’s exactly what I started doing a week ago in preparation for this month’s Fictorian Era coverage.

Specifically, I wanted to know what kind of pop culture stories really inspired them. Almost everyone had something in particular that lit a fire under them, whether it be a movie, a television series, a video game, a series of novels… or whatever. And I got some pretty eclectic answers, ones which I never could have expected. Saturday morning cartoons are represented, as are popular lines of kids toys. For others, pop culture didn’t factor into the equation at all.

I half-expected to get a dozen or more people wanting to wax eloquent about the magical influence of J.R.R. Tolkien, and yet I was pleased to discover almost no overlap. Like I said, all the posts you’re going to read this month are very different from each other. Yes, you’ll read about Tolkien, but you’re also in store for posts about Robert Heinlein and C.S. Lewis, Godzilla and Planet of the Apes, Star Wars and Star Trek. We’ve even got some Harlequin up our sleeves. How about Dean Koontz? Yep. Not to mention Stephen King and Robertson Davies. Not familiar with that one? You will be by the time we roll into June.

Even though our influences are divergent, the resulting passion and drive is pretty much universal. Almost everyone I approached to write for the blog this month said yes without hesitation, because it’s a subject that is near and dear. It turns out that our individual origin stories are the stories we are most eager to tell.

Because every writer has an origin story, the point when they transformed from a Regular Joe or Jane into a storytelling superhero. The details may be different, but the narrative is the same. So join us every day this month (except for Sundays), pull up a chair, and reminisce about the stories that have changed us and made us who we are. If you’re anything like me, reading the words of your fellow writers will make you nostalgic.