Tag Archives: Finding Inspiration in the Writing Life

If you’ve spent any length of time in a fan fiction community, you’ll probably know what a “songfic” is. If you haven’t, a songfic can most easily be described as a story interspersed with the lyrics of a song. It’s the fan writing equivalent of a movie soundtrack.

You’ve seen scenes in movies, TV shows and even commercials where a song plays in tandem with visual images. Sometimes the lyrics of the song narrate the events on screen. Sometimes the music helps to create a certain mood or underline a theme. Or, sometimes, images and music that don’t seem to match can provide a striking and powerful contrast. (Examples include the “Mad World” commercial for the original Gears of War video game, or when “I Can’t Stop Loving You” by Ray Charles plays during the destructive climax of 2001’s anime film “Metropolis.”)

Songfics aren’t allowed on certain fan fiction web sites for copyright reasons. But it’s natural for people, as creators, to use music for inspiration: to imagine certain songs as the theme songs, soundtracks, or end themes for our novels, stories, or characters. And this impulse isn’t limited to fan fiction.

Carrie Vaughn’s urban fantasy Kitty Norville series, about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio show, includes a playlist of songs at the beginning of each book that help set the “flavour” of the story to come. James Roberts, writer of IDW’s “Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye” comic series, tweets a selection of songs that inspire and inform the newest issue right before it comes out. Stephen King has used song lyrics as epigraphs in his novels or in the text of his fiction (with permission from the copyright holders).

If you’re not Stephen King, the legalities and potential fees involved in directly quoting songs might be prohibitive for you. Still, songs are excellent potential sources of inspiriation. Familiar music can help you get “in the zone” while you’re writing. Sometimes a song can help you imagine the kind of mood, emotion or situation you want to portray in your story. And sometimes a verse or even a line can spark the idea for a story.

The first story I published, “Blood Runs Thicker” in the ebook edition of “When the Hero Comes Home 2” by Dragon Moon Press, was inspired by a single line in a song.

Jim says some destinies should not be delivered…

The song is “In Thee” by Blue Oyster Cult.

Every time I heard this line – and I’ve been listening to this song for years – I wondered about this line. Why “shouldn’t” they? “Should” is a value judgment, compared to “are” or “are not” which are merely statements. The song goes on to suggest that these destines are delivered just the same as those that “should be.” What would be the difference? What would it mean to have this kind of destiny?

“Blood Runs Thicker” is the story of a reluctant war hero who became famous in the service of a cause she doesn’t believe in, in a failed attempt to save the person who mattered most to her. It’s also the story of her best friend, who finds himself forced into a choice of his own: helping his friend salvage what’s left of her life is going to come at a heavy cost. The hero has received one of those destinies that should not be delivered, and now the narrator finds himself pulled into the aftermath of that deliverance.

Songs can be excellent sources of inspiration. Songs can help form ideas for characters, moods, or as in the above example, even plot. But songs don’t have to be direct quotes to provide inspiriation. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the role of music in culture and how playing a certain kind of music helped me build a world for a story.

Inspiration

July 9, 2015

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Amanda McCarter Author's Perspective Living Deliberately Self-Awareness Starting a Career Submissions Superstars Writing Seminars Writers/Illustrators of the Future No Comments

A Guest Post from Amanda McCarter

I had a lot of trouble deciding which inspiration to write about. My whole life is full of inspiration, from bedtime stories, to family TV time, writing exercises in school. The list goes on. It took a lot of consideration to whittle it down. I suppose what’s most important is the moment I decided to take writing seriously.

Most of us have probably had that moment reading a best seller where we had to scratch our heads. The prose was clunky, the dialog awkward, the plot simplistic. But the writer, whether we liked it or not, had done something. They had caught the attention of millions.

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code gave me one of those moments. It was a fun, quick read. I enjoyed it so much, I took a college course dissecting it. I tried to read it again for the class, but the magic was gone.

I was taken aback by how boring the book was. The first read was great, but once I knew what it was about, I couldn’t bear to read it again. It was painful. And I thought, I can do better than that.

Of course, I didn’t. Dan Brown in a good author. He wrote a fantastic novel. He caught the imaginations of people around the globe. I knew I had no hope of doing anything close to that, but it did plant the seed of something.

Years later, after a failed marriage and a move to a mountain town, I found myself alone with a crappy job and struggling to pay bills. I remembered a contest I found in high school, looking for scholarships for college.

L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest, a contest for beginning science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers with only one stipulation. The entrants could not be previously published.

Writing was something I could do. I’d written a few fanfics over the years. They were somewhat popular. But I knew someone else’s universe would never get me anywhere and I wanted to be paid for my stories. So I wrote a short story, sent it to the contest, and promptly forgot about it.

Months went by. I didn’t even remember entering. Then, one day I got this strange little letter in the mail. I hadn’t won Writers of the Future. I had, however, made it to the quarter finals (now just called an honorable mention). This meant the judge had finished my story, but it was still lacking the strength of something saleable. My story was in the top ten percent of entries.

I was excited. I told everybody. I called my mom, told my co-workers, my friends, anyone who would listen. I made it to the quarter finals in a writing competition. I could write.

Well, sort of. I had a long way to go. I still do, but that little note from a complete stranger saying that I did what the majority of contestants couldn’t on my first entry meant a lot. It told me that I had something. It motivated me to keep going.

Over the next several months, I continued to write. I wrote my first novel. I wrote a lot of bad short stories. Some good ones. I found a writing community in the Writers of the Future forums. I joined a critique group. I came to understand that being a writer meant writing every day, submitting stories, and constantly striving to get better.

As time went on, I learned to draw from my favorite authors; Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey, Frank Herbert. I took classes and seminars on how to be a better writer. I learned how to craft a character and form a setting. Those quarter finalists became semi-finalists. I started to self-publish my better stories and novels. Editors started giving me personal rejections.

Two years ago, I did the best thing I could for my career, prompted by my long time writing colleague, Brad Torgersen. I needed a wider group of writers, further along on the path than my current writing group. I needed more inspiration and motivation. I went to Superstars Writing Seminar.

It was a huge amount of inspiration and motivation. I got to hear from long time professionals in the field, new professionals just figuring things out, and outsiders looking in and their observations.

I won’t say it was a game changer, but it was definitely an eye opener. I started doing things differently. I saw my career differently. It became something much more tangible and will continue to do so.

I suppose, in some respects, I owe my ex-husband for my current situation. I probably never would have taken that timid step forward of submitting a short story to a contest. But I think I owe that stranger who gave me my first honorable mention more. She gave me the confidence to keep going and I will always treasure that.

About the Author:
Amanda McCarter grew up reading the works of Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffrey, Frank Herbert and dozens of other fantasy and science fiction writers. As time went on, it occurred to her to write her own fantastic stories of faraway places and distant lands.

Encouraged by her mother and her family to write, a one time hobby became an obsession and a passion. An obsession she hopes to one day make full time.

Currently, Amanda lives in Tulsa, OK with her boyfriend, a snake, two cats, and two dogs. When not dreaming of faraway places and distant lands, she spends her time knitting, reading, and playing video games.

Commonalities in our Journey

July 4, 2015

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Abby Goldsmith Conventions Ideas & Plotting Interacting With Fans Interacting With Professionals Motivation Self-Motivation Starting a Career Storyline Submissions The Writing Life 1 Comment

A Guest Post by Abby Goldsmith

When Nathan Barra asked me to write a guest post about why I write fiction, I hesitated. It’s a good question, and one that I haven’t pondered in years. I’ve been stuck in a rut. Not writer’s block, but paralytic self-doubt, questioning everything about why I chose to pour so much of my life into a career as a novelist. I’ve watched others rise from amateur to best-seller within less than half the time I’ve been struggling to get my novel series published. I lag behind most of my peers, editing and rewriting and editing and rewriting. I’m in danger of becoming a bitter, grizzled veteran.

Self-doubt is a cornerstone of every novelist’s life, I think. When I talk to other aspiring novelists, I hear commonalities in our journey. Most of us grew up with a love of reading. Most of us received praise from readers who adored our stories. Most of us bashed our heads against the harsh realities of the publishing industry, which seems to be shrinking from corporate mergers. From there, our paths diverge in two directions. Either we give up and quit writing novels, or we get published and continue onwards.

My path feels like the most extreme version of that. Rather than hiking a trail towards success, I’m navigating a storm-tossed sea, hurled about by towering tidal waves. The praise I receive is enough for a lifetime. My failures are EPIC. As for the part where I either get published or quit . . . I’m sailing between those routes, unable to get my novels traditionally published, unable to give up and quit. I’m preparing to self-publish a completed six-book-series, and I’m nearly paralyzed with the fear that it will all go wrong.

Most people, even committed writers, don’t base every major decision of their life around the dream of becoming a bestselling author. I suspect that most of my peers would have quit after more than decade of setbacks. Why am I so driven?

Childhood. That’s surely where most addictions and personality disorders form, and I suspect it correlates with dysfunctional families. I won’t detail how troubled my childhood was. Suffice it to say, I needed an escape. So I walked for hours, listening to music, inwardly cheering as my characters delivered justice to their enemies, or proved their worth to those who doubted them. Stories were my only way to feel powerful and in control. That feeling was better than anything I could get elsewhere. I was addicted.

By the age of twelve, I’d completed two novels, a series of short stories, and a trilogy of comic books. A literary agent working with Random House, unaware that I was a child, read my first manuscript and sent a scathing rejection letter, including the phrase, “It sounds like a mentally challenged person wrote this.” Upon learning my age, she offered to edit my manuscript and promote me as a child author, but I’d already taken her first letter to heart. I decided that my stories were unfit to be shared with anyone. They collected dust in shoeboxes.

In college, two of my student films were selected out of hundreds for special recognition, and received high praise in international film festivals. I began a promising career as an animator. With my confidence boosted, I dared to share chapters of a potential novel with an online critique group. Their reactions astounded me. Everyone in the group wanted to read more. They tore each other’s work to shreds, and rightfully so, but my work was exceptional.

After years of being ashamed of my writing skill, I reversed direction all at once. A dam burst. Within the space of one year, I completed a 520,000 word manuscript, a 59,000 word manuscript between drafts of the big one, and an unfinished 70,000 word novel. My boyfriend thought they were amazing.

Still worried that my skill was amateur, I asked for readers with trepidation. Part of me expected scathing rejections. Instead, I received a flood of support and praise that changed my life, and affects me to this day.

A programmer in New Zealand read all my manuscripts, and said, “SEND MORE!” A teenager in Norway did the same, telling me that he’d missed classes to read them under his desk at school. A woman I never met emailed me to say, “Whatever gift for storytelling exists, you have it.” The artist of my favorite web comic offered to endorse my novels, after reading. A coworker at my office tentatively agreed to try the big one. He began reading it in his cubicle. The next day at work, he said, “I got no sleep. I stayed up all night turning pages! You’ll have no trouble getting published, so stop worrying.”

And I did. From that point forth, I’ve considered myself a talented storyteller, although my prose and craft needed seasoning, and there are always aspects where I can improve. Literary agencies and publishers rejected those early manuscripts due to the usual bouquet of amateur issues: Point of view head hopping, passive voice overused, weak verbiage, and other problems that are familiar to career-minded writers.

To improve my craft, I went to the Odyssey Writing Workshop. George R.R. Martin liked the first chapter of my big novel, Catherine Asaro privately praised my short story, and I felt as if my skill would leap ahead light years after all I learned from editor Jeanne Cavelos. Encouraged, I scrapped the 520,000 manuscript and rewrote it from scratch, as two separate novels. They’ve each been whittled down to the 90,000 to 105,000 word range.

I wish I could say that all that effort led to success. It hasn’t. At least, not yet. The massive rewrite deadened the beginning, and I’ve had a hellish time trying to get it to appeal to the traditional publishing industry. On top of that, I’m no longer the same person who wrote the original rough draft. Fifteen years have passed. I believe I understand why epic saga authors, such as Patrick Rothfuss, struggle to finish. When a story has the weight of a magnum opus … when it feels too massive to do it justice … when the task requires decades of your personal life … well, I can only speak for myself, but there’s a damned lot of pressure to get it right. A project that huge only happens once. Humans don’t live long enough, or have enough energy, to do it twice.

I will write other novels. I have other big stories to tell, after I publish this series (the first two books are the rewritten rough draft from fifteen years ago). But this epic will always be more special to me than any others. It’s the story that began in my teens, and spanned my twenties and thirties. It’s the one that shaped the course of my life.

I write because I believe in my power to tell stories that amaze people, and leave them to reevaluate their world-views.

About the Author:
Stories and articles by Abby Goldsmith are published in Escape Pod, Fantasy Magazine, Suddenly Lost in Words, and several anthologies. She’s sitting on six unpublished novels, preparing for an epic debut. http://abbygoldsmith.com

Fan to Writer: An Online Meeting with Rowling Herself

July 2, 2015

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Conventions Guest Posts Marketing Motivation Networking Professional Behavior Publishing Starting a Career The Writing Life Work-Life Balance 2 Comments

A Guest Post by J.J. Bennett

Back in 2001, I had knee surgery. Looking back now, I’d say that it changed my life. It was December and a friend suggested I read the Harry Potter books to pass the time being stuck in the house while I was healing. I’d always loved reading, but it seemed silly to be reading children’s literature as an adult. My friend assured me that it was just what the doctor ordered.

My husband read aloud day and night to the family and I and we became some of Rowling’s biggest fans. I spent time on chat boards dreaming up what the next book would hold and how it would play out. The site I frequented was HPANA, a site which was one of the first out there for all things Harry Potter. I lived on that site for years. As a stay at home mom, it was one of the only things I had as an outlet.

On a certain day, I was posting on a board when someone started giving all kinds of strange information not included in any of the books thus far. I couldn’t imagine how this person was getting all this crazy information. This was just six months before The Half Blood Prince came out and this other poster was telling me to think about the relationship Snape had with Lilly. All I could think about was what relationship? I quickly posted asking how on earth this person got this information and where they could document such a thing when a moderator messaged me that I was speaking with Rowling herself.

From then on I realized how writers could interact with their fans online and how stories could become deeply engrained in people and I loved it. As time moved forward and Harry Potter ended, I still frequented the site and became friends with a young man who had many of the same interests I did. It was this young man who became my inspiration as a main character to my story. Without the entertainment of Harry Potter, I yearned to fill that void in my life and found it by writing my own work.

My oldest daughter became engrossed with the Twilight scene and explained that I really needed to read the series. My husband wasn’t too keen on the idea of spending the last two weeks of his summer vacation with his wife buried in books. So again, he said he would read them aloud so we could spend time together. The writing wasn’t the best ever, but the connection Meyers had with her audience was strong and I could relate with that. It was then, that I felt like if Meyer could do it, then why couldn’t I?

After my father was diagnosed with cancer, he made me promise him that I would finish my novel. I knew I couldn’t go back on any promise I made him and after he passed away, I knew it was time to get serious and worked hard to learn as much as possible about writing. I started blogging, creating a social media presence and followed key internet master, agent, and writer Nathan Bransford. I followed trends, read as much as I could and started going to writing conferences in San Francisco to meet Bransford himself.

I looked to my home state of Utah for more support and quickly found other writers like myself. I found inspiration while working in a middle school library buying books for students, writing grants for new programs, and creating relationships with kids who I felt a strong connection with. I enjoyed my time there and I felt like I had something to offer them and became excited to share my story with others.

In 2010 I had my youngest child. I was torn between wanting to spend my time writing and being a mother to a new baby. I felt like this challenge was given to me for a reason and made the choice to put my writing on the back burner until my little girl was older and in school. I’m not a person to half-ass anything I do. So, the best option for me was to move forward with things I could do from home. During this time I’d been raising four kids and running a household with a husband who worked out of state. Much of my time has been lived like a single parent juggling kid’s schedules and projects between writing conferences where I now found myself helping other writers through a group/website I founded called The Authors’ Think Tank. Hosting podcasts, blogging, and traveling to events started taking up much of my time and I started wondering if I’d ever finish what I started with my novel/series.

I took a leap of faith and a wad of cash in March of 2014 and paid Michealbrent Collings to do some editing work for me. That was really hard sending off that MS. That was the longest two weeks of my life. After getting the edits back, I wondered if I should even keep on writing and I took six months to let things percolate inside my brain. Doubt and frustration in myself grew and I didn’t know where to start editing when I had over 450 comments to tend to absorbing and adjusting from. Plot issues abounded and I knew even after I handled the comments, I still would have a monumental task ahead of me.

Currently I’m deep in edits. I’ve put together a marketing team and have a group of people ready to support me once I’m done. I have an agent who is ready to look at it when it’s ready and a family eager to support me. I have one year till my daughter is in school and I look forward to what the next part of my life will hold. It’s been a long road (as many describe) to publication which I haven’t yet obtained. Patience and development are needed in this field. I’m okay with that. Hell, it took Harry Potter seven books to finally defeat Voldemort! No story without trial is a good one. My advice to any writer is this—Stop looking at other writers and comparing yourself. Your story is not like another’s. Some stories take more time than others. That’s okay. The important thing is to keep moving forward. You’ll get there.

About the Author:
Jennifer Bennett or J.J. Bennett has worked as content manager for Wise Scholar and writer for Zyndio, and online marketing firm. She has published articles by Ind’Tale magazine and numerous guest blogger posts in the writing community on the topic of writing and social media. Jennifer founded The Authors’ Think Tank which has grown to over 1500 writers and authors including many New York Times Best Selling Authors in all genres. These authors as well as Jennifer, contribute to both the website and podcast. She currently is working on her YA novel titled “The Path.”.