Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

beginnings

Creativity: generating with What If? and Why?

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What if she was real a moment ago?

It is the What Ifs that writers bring into reality. What if kids had to fight  to the death to earn a position in society? What if everybody was altered to fit into one of five personality types?  Questions and possibilities are what we build our stories on.

Questions make us search for answers, for back stories, for the first domino to fall and the last. And that search creates stories. This is nothing a writer does not know. But it is another way to dive into the creative moment.

  1. Who is the woman who lives in a cave in the earth caring for mushroom gardens and why is she there?
  2. Beneath the fallen roof which leaned precariously against crumbling rock walls, lay a child, clean, unmarked, sleeping peacefully. Who put him there, for whom does he wait, and why does he rest so well, so safely?
  3. When the man crouched down to look into the toddler’s eyes, he backed up recklessly and lost his footing, yet still he scrambled away from her, his gaze never leaving her face. Why?
  4. A snuff box lid, engraved with delicate swirls about a blue cabochon, is canted against a plain, smooth gold container. Who does the box belong to?  Why is it here, open, empty?
  5. The house slumps in the dark shadows of a long night. Occasionally, a ghostly glow moves behind the windows as though someone is using their cell phone for a light. What do they search for and why the lack of electricity?
  6. Over there, among the autumn-pruned rose bushes, something glints like a butterfly’s wings. Only it is a brightness almost too glaring for one’s eyes to stay focused on. What is it?
  7. The mud reveals the outline of footprints, pressed to impart only the front portion of the foot.  Whoever stood here wore heavily shod shoes with a deep tread as if they were cut from tires and reshaped to be the sole of some large man’s shoe. Who stepped here uninvited, unwelcome, on tiptoe?
  8. What if a teacup arrived in the mail without any indication who sent it. Who could it be from?
  9. What if over night every single person found that when they closed their eyes, they could still see what was before them.
  10. Today the phone rang and when it was answered the person on the other end said, “Finally. I have been trying for an hour to reach you.  I must talk to you about the absolute worst day I have ever had.  Sit down and just let me talk. You don’t have to say a word. I just want you to listen.” The voice is unfamiliar.
  11. Dr. Who’s tardis showed up in your kitchen blocking the doorway to any other part of your house.
  12. The young woman reached for her water bottle and took a sip. Not water. She sipped again just to be sure. It made her think of pineapples. 
  13.  

Alright, those are mine. You come up with the last one and write about it.

Learning from the masters series: Connie Willis drags you into the deep end

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Reading a Connie Willis novel is like drowning.  Her very first paragraph is a rip tide that lets you get a breath just often enough not to drown you.  You spend a lot of time treading water, but the liquid feels so lovely against your skin, a blood warm suspension, and you pray for breath and continued immersion in the same bubble rising to the surface.  No ground beneath your feet, but somewhere along the line you learn to stay above water, gain a sense of where land is and strike out in an Australian crawl that you didn’t know you could do.  At about the time the book ends, your toes feel the roughness of sand and sea shells and you wade to shore.  Welcome to Willis style writing.   What will you do, probably what I did.  Go dive into another Connie Willis book.

What in heck does she do?  The problem is you can’t just sit down and read one of her novels to learn something.  Two tiptoes in and you’re out of your depth in story.  So I am grabbing a bucketful from All Clear you can’t possibly fall into, but you can shove your head in and peer about.

Bucketful — take a deep breath and kick:  By noon Michael and Merope still hadn’t returned from Stepney, and Polly was beginning to get really worried.  Stepney was less than an hour away by train.  There was no way it could take Merope and Michael–correction, Eileen and Mike; she had to remember to call them by their cover names–no way it could take them six hours to go fetch Eileen’s belongings from Mrs. Willett’s and come back to Oxford Street. What if there’d been a raid and something had happened to them?  The East End was the most dangerous part of London.


There weren’t any daytime raids on the twenty-sixth, she thought.  But there weren’t supposed to have been five fatalities at Padgett’s either.  If Mike was right, and he had altered events by saving the soldier Hardy at Dunkirk, anything was possible.  The space-time continuum was a chaotic system, in which even a minuscule action could have an enormous effect.

Dry off your head.  Now think about what she did.  First she threw a bunch of names and places at you.  Then she set up a problem; where are Eileen and Mike who apparently go by other names, real names?  They have been gone too long.  Five people dead?  London and Dunkirk on the same page and practically the same breath.  Why is the East End the most dangerous part of London?  Raids?! Altering time?  Space-time continuum?  Well, if you like time travel that last bit wasn’t so hard to swallow.  But there is so  much to wonder about that you have to keep swimming just to find out what is going on.  And then it is too late to get out of the water.  You are in for the duration.

With all that tossing of names, places and events, you would think you’d feel over run with information to process. But that is not the case. There is the intimate connection you have formed with Polly who is worried about her friends and their safety in time which does not appear to be playing by the rules.  All that in two paragraphs.  Better read it again.  You only had a couple chances to get a gulp or two of air and probably missed something.

Ready again?  Six hours, they’ve been gone.  What has Polly been doing while they were gone?  Padgett’s? (Those with experience in London know, but the rest of us need more information.)  Hey, that’s only an hour away by train, wouldn’t she know by now if there had been a raid?  When is this anyway?  How did she know so precisely that there were no daytime raids on the twenty-sixth?  Clearly you must read for a while before you get the answers you need.  Better pack a life vest.

That’s Connie Willis.  She dives in and never lets the water grow smooth.  There will be a break or two, but the waves are still coming, though you can float on your back for a bit until things get rough again and they will. Gotta love a writer who knows how to throw the reader in and make them love the drenching.

The variety of the story beginning — 57 and counting

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start with something & keep writing

What better post to discuss beginnings on than In the beginning….  Where to start the story?

  1. Start with any word that comes to mind — the beginning is just that: a place to start.
  2. a character talking to another character
  3. the character talking to the reader
  4. the character talking to the self
  5. start when things went wrong
  6. start when things finally went right
  7. begin with the ending
  8. begin with an argument
  9. describe an image
  10. the main character meets someone new
  11. a favor is called in
  12. start with an article of clothing and have your character put it on
  13. describe what the main character sees
  14. describe a smell
  15. start with a cup of coffee, a glass of juice, a piece of toast
  16. have him place groceries down before the cashier
  17. describe everything but the visual in a scene
  18. start with a woman crying
  19. start with a man laughing
  20. a fretful child
  21. blow something up
  22. knock something over
  23. land a plane with difficulty
  24. have the car skidding out of control
  25. drive around the circle of a town’s central square looking for a parking spot
  26. stand up from being knocked down
  27. have the cat licking its paw seated next to a severed hand
  28. roll up a garden hose, water spraying everywhere
  29. wake up to the sound of a dog barking 
  30. have him pack his clothes into a grocery bag
  31. the family scrambles to exit a house when a car pulls into the driveway because it is not their house
  32. pull a ticket from beneath the windshield wiper
  33. a stack of papers on the desk,and an empty out-box
  34. run out of staples and cry about it
  35. the chair leg breaks
  36. pick at a sore
  37. dye her hair another color and put on clothes that don’t quite fit
  38. a pipe burst in freezing weather
  39. the car breaks down 500 feet from the entrance to the drive way
  40. the car loses power while your character is driving down the highway
  41. lock their keys in the car
  42. the character checks every day under the car for rattlesnakes.  One day one is coiled beneath.
  43. step in a mudpuddle
  44. step off the curb and be struck by a bicyclist
  45. set a stone in a cobbled walkway
  46. draw money from the bank
  47. the loan goes through
  48. go looking for a new car
  49. quit his job
  50. walk away
  51. run away from something dangerous
  52. run away from someone who loves her
  53. break a promise 
  54. bury a pet
  55. talk to God, tell him how things are going since last the two talked
  56. ask your character a question and write down what she answers
  57. have your character describe someone he doesn’t like