"That First Moment of Blinding Clarity"

The title is a quote from a recent pep talk for those in Camp NaNoWriMo this month. The writer asked us to recall the first time we clearly saw the characters of our novel, and, my current work being based on a fan fiction, I couldn't really join in.

I do remember some other moments where I met a character, or a story.

I was riding in the backseat of a car, just about to go over the highway, when a semi-truck crossed in front of us at a stop sign. On the grill were two jaws' worth of vampire teeth decals. I remember thinking that truck must have been its driver's baby. A few articles on steampunk later, the core of Macbay Transportation Services was born.

When I volunteered at the hospital, I ended up doing all of the filing they had ready for me in the main office and was transferred to the wound care centre. There I met my supervisor of sorts, whose name was Marisa. Not the English muh-RIH-sa, mind you, but muh-R-R-REE-suh. As on that morning I was on the lookout for characters for Contestant Zero, I suddenly saw a young woman named Marisa who was very particular about the pronunciation of her name. From that alone, she turned out to be the show's sassy Latina with a heart of gold.

The world of Crumbling hit me at about the second line of "Jesus is Coming Soon" while I was singing with others of my class at a devotional. It was incredibly awkward trying to shove the idea down for the rest of the song.

Later on the day I studied the nomadic section of world-building for my 2YN class, "Gypsy" came on the radio in the car, reminding me of that aspect of the week's lesson. Then "The Boxer" came on, and the plot of Roughhouse was born.

I was contemplating doing some humanisation of Pac-Man on my way to a sporting event. The ghosts were some sort of secret police force (thus their code names "Ink," "Blink," and "Pink") after the Pac-Man, who was attempting to evade them in order to not be caught for drug smuggling. I had just left the car and was walking through the parking garage towards the lift when I saw Pink in the lightless city, landing from a jump with one palm splayed over the ground for balance, her left leg bent, and her right leg straight out, the edge of her heel touching the asphalt. Such a look of determined fury was in her eyes I knew I couldn't change her, even if the story went through quite a few phases before becoming Chasers.

Chemists was born from a dream. Jacob and Scarlet were fleeing from unknown enemies and ended up in a shed, its wooden shelves filled with paint cans labelled "CELESTIAL MATTER" under a blue stripe. Jacob woke up on an aircraft driven by Martin and looked behind the cockpit to see someone controlling water and someone else directing a black, gel-like substance pulsing with jolts of blue electricity into a floating sphere.

Most of the time, I can't remember where I really got an idea, or how I came to elaborate upon it to a point I wanted to work with it. How about you? Have any of your characters stepped forward in blinding glory in the middle of a car ride? Anywhere else?

Thou Shalt Not Judge (Except When it Makes for a Good Story)

Usually, it's not nice to pass judgment on people. You could always be right, of course, but that little bit of victory doesn't warrant jumping to conclusions and probably hurting the one judged.

However.

If you can jump to conclusions without actually jumping to conclusions—form hypotheses without assuming they actually apply—you can end up with some good story material. And the farther you go (or the more ridiculous, depending on your writing specialty), the better.

Let's say you're on your way to work/school, and as you pass the local running track, you catch a glance of a young woman. She's suitably fit and in what you consider to be normal morning running clothes, but she is currently sitting on a bench at the side of the track, sipping from a Starbucks cup. The first assumption you have is that she has either been out running or is getting ready to run. That doesn't explain the whole situation, though.

First, let's say it would be no one would go running with a full cup of hot coffee/whatever on earth else she's drinking from Starbucks. From there, we can take two basic routes.

One, she has not been running with a full cup of Starbucks and is drinking it before she hits the track. Makes sense—but why is she having her morning caffeine on an otherwise empty park bench? Maybe she's just enjoying the morning. Maybe she's pretending to just enjoy the morning. Maybe that other space on the bench had been taken up by her boyfriend, who then left her in both senses of the word. In fact, she doesn't have a habit of drinking coffee—she just left the bench to grab something bready and something sweet to drink to calm her buzzing mind, and she couldn't stand to stay around all of the people in that Starbucks when she's barely able to keep herself from crying. There aren't too many people that pass this way, certainly not many that would pay any attention, so she came back here, to a spot that she can no longer say is her favourite place to run.

Two, the cup is empty. She drank it before she started running, and there aren't any convenient disposal spots along the track, so she had yet to get rid of it when she caught a glance of her best, best friend from high school who stole her boyfriend and, just a few months ago, her job. Said best, best friend is leaving the tennis court in the middle of the running track, and the jogger was on route to run into her. Instead she decided to park it on a bench, pretending to drink some coffee so no one passing by suspects anything, until the best, best friend was gone. If they ran into each other again, the jogger would probably end up beating the crap out of her. That would not be a good thing to repeat.

But perhaps we're not interested in writing high school dramas. Luckily, as you pass the track and turn a corner, you see two men putting up a section of fence: one, who doesn't particularly stand out, squatting to hold the bottom down as another, topless and wearing bright orange pants, drives in some nails. It looks like something a prisoner would wear. But what is he doing in the street, if he is indeed an escaped prisoner? Did he have help? Did one of his helpers sustain a wound that required a little cloth to bind? How did he get out of that one?

Any normal human being would take note of such things, maybe find it odd, but shrug it off and keep moving. Writers, on the other hand, can keep chasing the most insignificant character on the side of the road—not with the car, hopefully, but with crazy trains of thought veering off to wild conclusions worth reading. Just try not to get anybody hurt.

Writing from Music

As opposed to just writing to music.

At an orchestra concert a while ago, I had been innocently listening to the music when Luke (sitting next to me) asked what kind of head-story I had formed from the music. I, of course, had done no such thing, but I gave it a shot for the next piece and ended up with some short concerning a werewolf and a fleeing female (no relation to Dynblaidd).

That was the last song of the night, and my little story wasn't interesting enough to flesh out, but I thought I might give it another try. I've already toyed with an idea concerning "Just a Job to Do" by Genesis (which somehow came on shuffle as I was writing this, just like the original post...), but I think I might check out some more classical-type music. Being without lyrics, it'd be a lot more challenging, but it's worth a shot. If I come up with anything interesting, I'll put up a New Fiction Idea and give credit to the song; if I fail several times, I may just post a sequel to this with the fragments I got from the songs.

Have you ever sought inspiration from music without lyrics? Do you have any songs you'd like to recommend?

These Dreams

I had a bizarre dream this morning, but I can't remember it for anything now. It would have been nice to have the time to write it down.

I've been considering starting a dream journal for a while. My dreams rarely fail to amuse me, but just like my story ideas—or, more extremely than my story ideas—they fade in and out of my mind. I've tried just rehearsing events that happened, but if I don't write them down—sometimes telling others doesn't even do it—it'll be gone by the end of Genetics class.

Dreams are good for a lot more than vague amusement, too. The idea for Chemists came from one of my dreams. The idea for Entrapped came from the dream of a friend of a friend. Even if loads of pons firing is total rubbish, there are some interesting little gems to be retrieved in all of it.

Would you be interested in reading some of my dreams on here? I still have a few fairly recent ones—and the legendary twin squirrels dream—I could put, though I can't guarantee I'll remember anything that comes up later, or have any sort of predictability as to whether I dream something interesting or not. Nor can I say any of it will be worth reading, but it could give one of us some inspiration, I think.

Any recommendations for dream journals? I still have a mostly-empty moleskine (apparently they're a big deal) that I used a bit in NaNoWriMo, and I had been considering using it. I'm probably not going to be able to type everything up here in time, so I'll have to write it down somehow.

Also, I name a lot of my blog posts after songs...