Write What You Know.
Note: Some of this isn’t going to make sense unless you’ve read the entire Beth-Hill series. Mostly I’m just trying to hash out a thought I had this morning.
So I’ve been thinking about the formation of stories lately, or, rather, how I write them. Not necessarily short stories, mind you, but novels as well, since I’m primarily a novel writer.
This stems from the first draft of Heart’s Desire, and that long-forgotten book on revision that I started and never finished writing.
So.
The first draft of Heart’s Desire was written in response to a dream. In that dream, I rescued a boy my age from a bookstore run by demons. I still remember running out of the bookstore with him, and hiding in my car as a transistor radio sitting in the parking lot began to play ominous music. (Needless to say, the radio didn’t make it into Heart’s Desire.)
That first story was about 17,000 words long. Not quite a novella. It was written in first person, with an unnamed main character who went on to star in three other “Beth-Hill” stories, all of them vague and dreamlike in tone. They were vague and dreamlike in tone because I had yet to get a handle on the shape of the series I was intending to write.
When I start a story, it’s almost as if I have a formless lump of clay with odd little bits poking out here and there, tempting me down paths I might not want to follow. I start with one of the pieces and carefully work my way past the clinging muck, holding the storyline carefully in my mind as I try to figure out the shape of what I’m attempting to write. Kind of like how Ella holds the strands of her webs together in Nightshade. But I digress.
Sometimes I end up with a shard of glass that goes nowhere. Other times, I might end up with a piece of story that just doesn’t fit into what I’m writing. Every once in a while, I can’t find a single savable piece in the whole mess, and it sits on my hard drive until I summon up enough courage to try another approach.
The Beth-Hill series is like that. I started out with the short stories, feeling my way through the world I created. Then I expanded Heart’s Desire into a short novel, ran it through a couple of critique groups, and shelved it. I pulled it back out, rewrote it twice more, and shelved it again.
This last time, I hit the vein of gold I’d been searching for, which uncovered quite a bit more than I had ever expected about the world I had created.
From that first story, and the two that followed, a world evolved. A world not unlike this one, but with a certain telling difference. Magic is real. Your next door neighbor could be a werewolf, or even a dragon. And in Beth-Hill, the number of supernatural citizens far outweighs the number of non-magical citizens. In fact, in the whole of Clermont County, the ratio between super and natural is about 3 to 1.
Beth-Hill, however, existed far before Heart’s Desire. I first came up with the idea of the Beth-Hill series in early High School, where making up stories behind the real stories of various newsworthy items was more fun than homework. The original Beth-Hill was modeled, of course, on my hometown of Bethel. To this day, there is very little difference between the two villages.
Amington, where Karen Montgomery works in Budget Cuts, is Amelia, of course, the next town over. In the middle and to the north of Amelia and Bethel is East Fork State Park, where, in the stories, Darkbrook resides. Somewhere within East Fork State Park is the Hunt’s lair as well. Unfortunately, Williamsburg has yet to show up in the series, but New Hope does actually exist. There was a different town under the real lake, and no serial killer. I did make that part up.
The credo given to new writers (other than Butt-in-chair, of course) is “Write what you know.” A lot of writers tend to think this means that they’re forced to write about a scientist or a data entry clerk or a librarian or a bagger at the grocery store, but that’s not the case at all.
I pull ideas and experiences from everything that has ever happened to me in my entire life. Both the good and the bad are story fodder, folded into the mix that seethes inside my mind until I need to unearth it again. I’ve mentioned this before, but a lifetime of reading a vast array of subjects has helped more than hindered my writing style.
However, I also write what I know. And what I know is small-town life, the stories I grew up hearing (like the ghostly belltower from the church that used to be in the valley were East Fork Lake now flows), the train robbery that may or may not have occurred in Williamsburg (in which the bags of gold were never found), and the tree that stands on our property that may or may not have Ulysses S. Grant’s initials carved into the bark. Among other things.
Somehow, writing about the Wild Hunt just doesn’t seem much of a departure to me from anything else that I have written about or heard about over the years. And sometimes, it’s much more fun to make up stories about things that actually happened (like the witch trial in Bethel, which is a documented fact) than attempt to unearth what really happened, because most of the time, what really happened isn’t nearly as interesting as what you can come up with using your imagination.
I think that’s why Big Fish spoke to me so deeply. Because both of my parents—Dad in particular, with his stories about the Magical Balloon—fostered my love of the story-behind-the-story and opened my eyes to the secret world that hides behind all things. However, unlike Edward Bloom’s son, I grew up believing that some things are just not explainable, and that embroidering a story to make it a bit more… fanciful is not necessarily a bad thing.
You just did not want to see the look on my face after I read Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard and then a biography of Shelley and realized that the part in the book about Shelley’s heart not burning in the pyre was true.
And those grains of truth are what make the story richer and more believable, even if the rest of the story is on the wrong side of belief.
Write what you know, eh? Well, I know that I saw a fairy when I was a young child. I know that I’ve seen ghosts, and heard phantom footsteps walk up and down the stairs. I know that there’s magic in the world, albeit not as much as I would like, and that even now, a part of me believes in ‘the unknown’. (However, I have a skeptical streak a mile wide, as well. An interesting contradiction.)
If you know nothing, learn something that you can write about. If you think you know everything, think again.
Creating a world isn’t the hard part. Ensuring the world will last through revisions, subtractions, additions, and multiplications takes a lot of fancy footwork, but its well worth the effort involved.
----------------------------------------
I got to 8k on TER last night. Uncle Lucas arrived, and it looks like Josiah is going to get a cameo or two in this story. Yay! I have fully integrated the Wild Hunt into the Jacob Lane series! (Actually, Josiah's part might be a bit larger than I first suspected. But we will see.)
There was no assassination attempt yet. Jacob and Ophelia are going to be strongly encouraged to return to their rooms and go to bed. I think they might, just. But 'tomorrow' is another day... ;)
Note: Some of this isn’t going to make sense unless you’ve read the entire Beth-Hill series. Mostly I’m just trying to hash out a thought I had this morning.
So I’ve been thinking about the formation of stories lately, or, rather, how I write them. Not necessarily short stories, mind you, but novels as well, since I’m primarily a novel writer.
This stems from the first draft of Heart’s Desire, and that long-forgotten book on revision that I started and never finished writing.
So.
The first draft of Heart’s Desire was written in response to a dream. In that dream, I rescued a boy my age from a bookstore run by demons. I still remember running out of the bookstore with him, and hiding in my car as a transistor radio sitting in the parking lot began to play ominous music. (Needless to say, the radio didn’t make it into Heart’s Desire.)
That first story was about 17,000 words long. Not quite a novella. It was written in first person, with an unnamed main character who went on to star in three other “Beth-Hill” stories, all of them vague and dreamlike in tone. They were vague and dreamlike in tone because I had yet to get a handle on the shape of the series I was intending to write.
When I start a story, it’s almost as if I have a formless lump of clay with odd little bits poking out here and there, tempting me down paths I might not want to follow. I start with one of the pieces and carefully work my way past the clinging muck, holding the storyline carefully in my mind as I try to figure out the shape of what I’m attempting to write. Kind of like how Ella holds the strands of her webs together in Nightshade. But I digress.
Sometimes I end up with a shard of glass that goes nowhere. Other times, I might end up with a piece of story that just doesn’t fit into what I’m writing. Every once in a while, I can’t find a single savable piece in the whole mess, and it sits on my hard drive until I summon up enough courage to try another approach.
The Beth-Hill series is like that. I started out with the short stories, feeling my way through the world I created. Then I expanded Heart’s Desire into a short novel, ran it through a couple of critique groups, and shelved it. I pulled it back out, rewrote it twice more, and shelved it again.
This last time, I hit the vein of gold I’d been searching for, which uncovered quite a bit more than I had ever expected about the world I had created.
From that first story, and the two that followed, a world evolved. A world not unlike this one, but with a certain telling difference. Magic is real. Your next door neighbor could be a werewolf, or even a dragon. And in Beth-Hill, the number of supernatural citizens far outweighs the number of non-magical citizens. In fact, in the whole of Clermont County, the ratio between super and natural is about 3 to 1.
Beth-Hill, however, existed far before Heart’s Desire. I first came up with the idea of the Beth-Hill series in early High School, where making up stories behind the real stories of various newsworthy items was more fun than homework. The original Beth-Hill was modeled, of course, on my hometown of Bethel. To this day, there is very little difference between the two villages.
Amington, where Karen Montgomery works in Budget Cuts, is Amelia, of course, the next town over. In the middle and to the north of Amelia and Bethel is East Fork State Park, where, in the stories, Darkbrook resides. Somewhere within East Fork State Park is the Hunt’s lair as well. Unfortunately, Williamsburg has yet to show up in the series, but New Hope does actually exist. There was a different town under the real lake, and no serial killer. I did make that part up.
The credo given to new writers (other than Butt-in-chair, of course) is “Write what you know.” A lot of writers tend to think this means that they’re forced to write about a scientist or a data entry clerk or a librarian or a bagger at the grocery store, but that’s not the case at all.
I pull ideas and experiences from everything that has ever happened to me in my entire life. Both the good and the bad are story fodder, folded into the mix that seethes inside my mind until I need to unearth it again. I’ve mentioned this before, but a lifetime of reading a vast array of subjects has helped more than hindered my writing style.
However, I also write what I know. And what I know is small-town life, the stories I grew up hearing (like the ghostly belltower from the church that used to be in the valley were East Fork Lake now flows), the train robbery that may or may not have occurred in Williamsburg (in which the bags of gold were never found), and the tree that stands on our property that may or may not have Ulysses S. Grant’s initials carved into the bark. Among other things.
Somehow, writing about the Wild Hunt just doesn’t seem much of a departure to me from anything else that I have written about or heard about over the years. And sometimes, it’s much more fun to make up stories about things that actually happened (like the witch trial in Bethel, which is a documented fact) than attempt to unearth what really happened, because most of the time, what really happened isn’t nearly as interesting as what you can come up with using your imagination.
I think that’s why Big Fish spoke to me so deeply. Because both of my parents—Dad in particular, with his stories about the Magical Balloon—fostered my love of the story-behind-the-story and opened my eyes to the secret world that hides behind all things. However, unlike Edward Bloom’s son, I grew up believing that some things are just not explainable, and that embroidering a story to make it a bit more… fanciful is not necessarily a bad thing.
You just did not want to see the look on my face after I read Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard and then a biography of Shelley and realized that the part in the book about Shelley’s heart not burning in the pyre was true.
And those grains of truth are what make the story richer and more believable, even if the rest of the story is on the wrong side of belief.
Write what you know, eh? Well, I know that I saw a fairy when I was a young child. I know that I’ve seen ghosts, and heard phantom footsteps walk up and down the stairs. I know that there’s magic in the world, albeit not as much as I would like, and that even now, a part of me believes in ‘the unknown’. (However, I have a skeptical streak a mile wide, as well. An interesting contradiction.)
If you know nothing, learn something that you can write about. If you think you know everything, think again.
Creating a world isn’t the hard part. Ensuring the world will last through revisions, subtractions, additions, and multiplications takes a lot of fancy footwork, but its well worth the effort involved.
----------------------------------------
I got to 8k on TER last night. Uncle Lucas arrived, and it looks like Josiah is going to get a cameo or two in this story. Yay! I have fully integrated the Wild Hunt into the Jacob Lane series! (Actually, Josiah's part might be a bit larger than I first suspected. But we will see.)
There was no assassination attempt yet. Jacob and Ophelia are going to be strongly encouraged to return to their rooms and go to bed. I think they might, just. But 'tomorrow' is another day... ;)
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