Madge's Weblog

Origin Stories

I'm still in the midst of rewrites on my novel. I've discovered that I need to add one more POV for the story to function as a mystery, which brings me to the topic of origin stories. Origin stories are probably most familiar to people from comic books. They are the moment when batman becomes batman -- a robbery, a gunshot in an alley... Drama, action, high stakes are the hallmaks of an origin story, but there are origin stories for everyone if you take a moment to think. All characters in a book have their origin story and families have them too. For instance, thinking about my own family, there is a family legend -- as in I'm not sure how much is embellishment and how much is the truth -- we were told about my grandfather and the great depression. Here's a Miller Family origin story for your reading pleasure.

My grandfather, his brother and his parents had to leave their farm because of the dust bowl. They got down the road a bit and were discussing where to go. My great-grandfather wanted to go to Texas where they had other family and thought there would be work. My grandfather wanted to go to California. They stopped the car, got out and had a fistfight on the side of the road. My grandfather won the fight and they went to California. Eugene Miller (my grandfather) met and married Ethel Godfrey (my grandmother) in Berkeley, California. If my grandfather hadn't won that fist fight my grandparents would never have met, my father wouldn't have been born and I wouldn't be here today tapping away on this blog entry. There you have it, a real-life origin story, with drama, action and high stakes.

Thinking through your own origin stories is a great way to come up with ideas for your characters. I've thought of a few really good ones for mine just by rearranging personal and family stories to suit.

On Endless Revisions

Wow, its been a long time since my last post.  Crazy long. What the heck have I been doing in that time?

Mostly just revising this:

 
 

Don't get too excited. It isn't a published book.  That's just my revision copy.  Since my last post I finished my half draft and then did one complete revision to complete the first draft.

Calling it a .5 and a 1.0 are the ways I trick myself into not editing as I write the first draft.  A little odd, but it works for me.

I'm in the midst of revising a couple  of scenes in it that just weren't working for me.  I've also figured out that one of my main characters turned out not to be so main after all.  I'm turning this blog into a bit of a revision diary to show what works for me in the process of revision.

This week I'm focusing on filling holes.  When I couldn't remember I name, place or needed to do further research, I inserted XYZ.  Why XYZ?  That way I can use the find function to easily locate all those spots.

Where are they now -- writing edition

I haven't posted for awhile, mainly because I am very focused on finishing Lia and the Soldier.  I've been moving along at a good pace for the last two months.  I've averaged about 3,000 words a week.

I just got back from spending a week at Viable Paradise, which started the short story thoughts churning again.

There's a lot to digest about Viable Paradise.  I'll be blogging about that later, when I've recovered from hurricanes, small planes and pilots doing paperwork.

David Willey of Cape Air was my pilot flying out to Martha's Vineyard on Saturday, September 20th.  My thoughts are with his family.

I had a great time at Viable Paradise.  The staff, instructors and my fellow students were fabulous peeps.  I feel very privileged to have attended.  Hopefully, I'll do them all proud.  Note to self -- adverbs are bad and no Mary Sue -- damn it all to Oort ;-)

Flash Fiction: Hibernation

Below is my flash fiction story Hibernation.  It is archived on EscapePod as a podcast, but is no longer available in text form so I thought I'd post it here.

As with everything on my blog it is under a creative commons license -- see sidebar for specifics.

HIBERNATION
By Madge E. Miller

Two Alaskan Kodiak bears joined a small circus where the pair appeared nightly in a parade, pulling a covered wagon.  The fact that they had joined the circus was not so strange; the circus life was very popular even for the better class of bear.  The strange thing was that they were both primitive mutes.  This alone elevated or, in the opinion of some bears still angry about the Great Russian Dancing Bear Revolt of '06, lowered them to the level of freak show attraction.
 
Studious black bears and thick-headed grizzlies paid top dollar to sit under the antique big top tent to watch the twin Kodiaks pull the brightly painted wagon.   They paid even more to sit in the front row for a freak-show performance.

The Kodiaks were cleverly placed as the last act.  That meant the cotton candy, hot dog, and popcorn sellers could work their magic on the bored crowd of bears and the rare human family.   By the time the show had worked its way from Zelda the bearded lady to Ator the muscleman, the audience was in a sugar-amplified frenzy of excitement.

The Kodiak’s act always began with dinner.  On some nights, the two bears fished for salmon in a huge metal tank.  Other nights they rooted through trashcans or broke into cars to ravage picnic baskets.  Then they would lumber around the stage on all fours, taking turns standing on their hind legs to make huge scratches on a fake tree.  All these actions were performed in an eerie silence as the Kodiaks made not even one grunt or growl.  This silent display of wild early bear behavior left everyone awed.

Afterwards the audience gossiped about the Kodiaks.  Were they tragic victims of their environment?  Kodiak Island bears were well known for in-breeding and eating food found in garbage dumps.  Perhaps they had been abandoned in the wild and grown up away from the care of the bear community.  Did they even have names? 

Whatever the reason for their lack of speech and primitive behavior, the other bears were fascinated by the twin Kodiaks, and the ringmaster was certainly cashing in.  He worked the Kodiaks from early morning until late at night, forcing them to do eight shows a day with no rest days.  By the end of the touring season, the twins were very thin and clearly showing signs of extreme exhaustion.

That winter the ringmaster settled the troop in a small warehouse in Las Vegas.  The Kodiaks had their own special cage room with plenty of straw and special climate control.

The first group to travel to Las Vegas for the show was shocked by the price of the tickets.

"Fifty dollars," said a small bear in a three-piece suit, "that's highway robbery!"

The show's barker arched his bushy gray caterpillar eyebrows and held out his hand for the money.

Grumbling, the small bear and his friend - a large grizzly - filed into the theater, along with the rest of the sold-out crowd.  Thanks to a few well-timed fierce looks from the grizzly, the two managed to commandeer seats right in the front row, next to a sign announcing in bold letters "QUIET PLEASE".

The lights came up slowly, revealing the Kodiaks.  They weren't their lively lumbering selves, but instead lay curled into a furry mass, sleeping.  Their soft snores echoed through the auditorium.

The bears in the audience began whispering excitedly, respectful of the requested silence in the face of the ancient ritual of hibernation.

However, the two bears seated in the front row began to loudly speculate on this behavior.

"I thought we'd see something more exciting," said Frank, the grizzly. 

"This is quite exciting," responded Edward, the black bear.  "Great Grandpa often said that hibernation was one of the great mysteries of life."

"I don't see anything very mysterious.  We all sleep." Frank's rumbling bass echoed in the room, causing their fellow audience members to glare at the two loud-mouth bears.

"But we don't hibernate.  The theory is when our brains evolved past a certain level we could no longer drop into the deepest level of sleep needed to slow the metabolism."

Edward droned on with his tedious explanation of ancient versus modern bear behavior, despite several loud attempts to shush him.

Just as the ringmaster and two burly human roustabouts started down the aisle to remove them, a piercing voice shouted, "Would you be quiet.  We're trying to sleep!"

Stunned, the audience stared at the two talking Kodiak bears--one of whom had his paw over his snout, eyes wide in shock. 

The ringmaster wracked his brain trying to come up with a way to salvage the situation when the second Kodiak turned on his brother.

"Why'd you have to go and mess things up!  This is the best gig we've had since we quit school."

With a roar he pounced on his twin and the two wrestled fiercely, eventually falling off the stage and into the audience, which scrambled out of the way of the struggling Kodiaks.

When they were done, not only was the ringmaster's scam in shambles, so was the auditorium.  Stuffing from the seats was still floating down from the rafters a week later when a wrestling promoter, who had paid $15.99 to download an illicit video of the fight, called the twins and spoke with their 'manager', the ringmaster, about a nationwide tag team pro wrestling tour.

Two Alaskan Kodiak bears joined the wrestling circuit, where they appeared nightly in a ring wearing tights and a cape.

Story Idea: Juxtaposition of Action and Reaction

California is in the throes of more than a thousand wildfires (seriously, I'm not exaggerating) a few of the news stories have given me some ideas for characters and plot threads.  My favorite is the story in the San Francisco Chronicle about the Zen Monks at Tassajara.  Reading it gave me some ideas about taking an action or plot point and making the characters reaction the opposite of what is expected.  In addition there are some good hints in the article for ways to make the reaction more realistic to the reader.

Fun with Word Clouds

I found a site that I could use to generate a word cloud with my Hibernation story, since the IBM site didn't work as well.  The website is called Wordle.  The site describes itself:

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like."

The word cloud of Hibernation does give me a new perspective on the story and actually surprised me with a couple of the words that show up 'big'. This is a bit of writerly procrastination -- but its still fun.  Here's my Hibernation word cloud

Fun with Data Visualization

I came across something fun today and decided to play around with it.  IBM has a website up where you can upload data to be sorted into different visualizations.  It works for both text and numbers.  I uploaded a flash fiction story of mine called Hibernation that I've had published a few times and is up as CC licensed content on EscapePod.

One of the visualizations lets you search for words and sets them up as a word tree.  I really wanted to see the story as a tag cloud, but for some reason that function wasn't working for me.

Here's the tree of the word Bear

Fantasy Wildlife or Villain

Idea inspired by Cuttlefish embryos post on Boing Boing

What else could hatch from a translucent shell?  Could this be added to a scene to up the eerie factor?

Before cuttlefish embryos even hatch, they look through their translucent eggs to learn to identify their future prey. Researchers at the University of Caen Basse-Normandy put crabs in a tank with cuttlefish eggs. Once the cuttlefish hatched, they were released into a tank with both shrimp and crabs. The cuttlefish that previously saw the crabs through their eggs had a taste for them. Cuttlefish that weren't exposed to the crabs as embryos preferred to eat the shrimp.

Ideas are a Dime a Dozen

I've never had a shortage of story ideas, just a shortage of time to actually sit and write the story.  I've found that the thought of investing my time in an idea makes only the ones I'm most interested in bubble up to the top.  What happens to the other ideas?  They just sit around in random notebooks and files on my computer waiting for me.

This brings me to an interesting point.  One of the blogs I read for work, TechDirt, pontificates ad nauseum, on the fact that ideas are really only as good as their execution.  Of course they are specifically referring to technology and business, but the same principal holds true for story ideas as well.  In the spirit of "open source" I will be posting story ideas on my blog.  Feel free to take any of them as inspiration for your own work.  I might or might not use any of these ideas in the future.  Note that my inspiration often comes from articles or snippets of conversation so that's often what you'll see with only a bullet or two of notes about what I found interesting.

Revising and Expanding

I am in the process of expanding a short story into the proper length for a young adult novel.  The story is one I completed back in 2000, but the original seed of the idea was a story sketch I wrote in 96.

Its been interesting to me how fresh the story and the characters still are in my mind.  Even though I am creating new characters and adding a subplot, the existing characters still easily move and interact in my head and on paper.  I was worried about meshing the old and new together, but the process has been very seamless.  One of the things that has worked well for me is that I'm adding onto the beginning and the end.  I'm not changing much of the existing short story, simply using it as the core to build around.  I know at the end I'll have to go back and add a thread in the middle to tie it all together, however, the process is going so smoothly I'm going to leave that to the end.  Books don't have to be written in chronological order and this is one case where the ability to jump around has been a big benefit.