Where Do You Get Your Ideas? | authorjenniferquail

"Where Do You Get Your Ideas?"

"Where do you get your ideas?" "How do you think up these things?" "I could never come up with ideas like that." Every writer has probably heard things like that, with "Where do you get your ideas?" the most-asked question after "Can you read my manuscript?" (No.) Common answers include "Everywhere", "A dream", "classified ads in the back of newspapers," "meme generators" (just me? Okay then.) This is easier than trying to explain the chain of thought that takes you from running to the store because you're out of canned dog food and suppertime is only two hours away (an epic crisis in dog world) to contemplating how exactly Elaine and Alan are going to get out of being lost on a mountain with shapeshifters chasing them, or do vampires from Joszef's world mark sundown from astronomic or nautical twilight? In my head, this progression of thought works perfectly. Trying to explain it out loud is like the time my friend and I were sitting in the school park and tried to backtrack our conversation to figure out how we wound up talking about Muppets. (It made sense at the time, I promise.)

Part of me wants to ask back, "What do you think about that you don't get ideas?" I honestly don't know. I don't understand the thought process that, for example, reads a book and just . . . reads it. Accepts everything on the page at face value, without wondering "But what if this happened instead? What if another character [quite often one not at all dissimilar from me] was in this, too? What if the bad guys have a point? Whatever happened to THAT character after the end of the last book?" I know that I'm not really enjoying a book or a movie if I don't think about what I might have done, or imagine myself into a role in the story. It's not a big leap from there to actually writing it down.

Like a lot of writers today, I started writing fan fiction. When I was seven, the first story I ever wrote down was a (very) short rendition of a dream I had about me, my friend, and the ponies from Misty of Chincoteague.

Little girls and ponies: a match made in heaven since forever.

After that, I started writing my own version of The Saddle Club, starring me, my best friend, and our brothers. It even became the source of my first all-nighter, staying up until one in the morning squinting at the bright blue screen of WordPerfect 5.0 to finish the incredibly above and beyond "short story" I'd decided to write for a fifth-grade assignment (featuring hole-punch binding, a title page, and illustrations by my mom.) Not long after that, I was introduced to science fiction, via audiobooks of Asimov's I, Robot and Anne McCaffrey's Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, and I branched into reading books aimed at adults. One day at the barn, while my brother was having his turn on the horse (from ponies to horses) I noticed that my mother was reading a book with "Star Wars" on the cover, but with a title I didn't recognize. "Oh, this? It's a new Star Wars book. You can read it when I finish." That was Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire and my introduction both to the world of Star Wars fan fic and to the idea that just because a character is an antagonist does not mean he has to be unappealing, or even always wrong. (If you enjoy my tall, dark and snarky yet cultured characters like Val, you may thank Grand Admiral Thrawn. In fact I begin to wonder about the whole glowing vampire eyes thing, too.) My first attempt at serial fan fiction, TIE Fighter, is still available on FanFiction.net (and still not finished. Hang in there.)

Around the same time, I also picked up Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October and Allen Drury's Advise and Consent. I know, a little light reading. I also watched the first "live" state funeral I'd ever seen (President Nixon's). I followed this up with William Manchester's Death of a President: November 22, 1963. Morbid? Sure, but funerals are great drama, and state funerals are great drama on a great scale. Somewhere in this , two characters emerged, politically-ambitious people in Washington who fell on opposite sides of the political spectrum, Democrat Alan Graves and Republican Elaine Gates. Yes, the main characters have survived genre shifts, age changes, and so many drafts they don't make computers that can read the original discs any more, with their names and their general backgrounds intact. Alan has always been an orphan from California with a less-than-desirable family background, Elaine has always been a wounded Navy vet from Michigan.

Val and Nadia? That's an entirely different story, and Nicodemus, as usual, gets the short end of the stick. In college, while not majoring in impractical things like English and dealing with creative writing professors who in one case didn't allow "genre" stories and in another didn't understand why I wrote main characters who were lawyers and politicians--why wouldn't an archaeology major write about , say, archaeologists (because real archaeology is for OCD detail freaks who like tedious meticulae, not adventurers who fight Nazis for treasure) I blew off steam by, among other activities, watching afternoon TV like reruns of the original "Dark Shadows" (Mom on phone: "What are you doing?" Me: "Sitting in the apartment watching Dark Shadows." Mom: "You can't be in college watching Dark Shadows, I watched Dark Shadows in college!" Me: "Just shows there is never anything new on TV.") Or playing on-line e-mail or messenger RPGs that involved vampires. And realizing "Wow, for people who are eternally young for the most part, never get sick, never age, as a general rule are financially comfortable at worst, and the only trade-off is a liquid diet most don't even have to kill for . . . damn, they whine a lot." While I'm not an Anne Rice fan, I admit that Tom Cruise saved the entire movie of "Interview...." for me with his "Still whining!" line. So I began poking at ideas for vampire stories. The first result was the vampire detective (because of course) who would eventually become Joszef Kiraly, Gentleman and Vampire, and his paramour Juliet, who have gone through more cliche iterations in half the time than Alan and Elaine have in twenty years. Suffice to say, he's an Austro-Hungarian vampire! She's a Metis loup-garou! Together, they fight crime! More about them later.

Seriously. I'll explain later. I blame the prednisone for one of his early iterations and the story that came of it.

I also dithered around in another of those ill-advised 'write what you know' attempts based on my grad school experience, which involved a lot of time sitting in museums by myself. Especially the very big, very empty, very stereotypically dark and convoluted anthropology department at the Natural Museum of Natural History. This, naturally lead to thinking of stories, and since I was on a vampire kick anyway, I wondered at what would happen to some poor young intern, not coincidentally rather like me, if one of the orignal owners of an item in a museum showed up looking for it. So Nicodemus walked into an office in the NMNH. Yep, Nico was the main character of his own story. As I 'borrowed' him for some messenger/chat based RPGs, and expanded on his universe (which involved government secrets and magical beings) he accquired a comrade who was an older vampire, more experienced, more cynical, and (because it suited the universe for him to be contrarian) an ancient pagan. How I settled on "Valentinian" as a name, I don't remember, but for a very long time, that was the only name he had. I don't recall how I settled on a personal name (equivalent to our first names) but with Roman names, there aren't a lot to choose from. "Marcus" was innocuous and one of the most common. When picking a family name, I inadvertently made the character who'd become Val a member of a very old family which, by the time he'd come from, was on the downswing as far as political power went, inadvertently setting up motivations long before I knew I'd need them. The characters remained in this setup for a while--Nicodemus a more stereotypical morose-hero vampire, Valentinian his much more down and dirty, willing to do the bad stuff sidekick.

Then, because Nico was of course romancing the heroine, Val needed a girlfriend.

Enter the most vaguely-defined, spur of the moment character, a combat-skilled mortal (for now) with a Russian name and a penchant for knives who had her own ruthless streak, but who was fully aware what Val was and still as fanatically devoted to him as he was to her. From the minute Nadia arrived and changed Val's character dynamic, poor Nico's days as protagonist were numbered.

I don't remember why I decided to resurrect Alan and Elaine from character limbo. Joszef and Juliet weren't going anywhere, and the vampires-in-DC story wasn't working on its own. While they weren't quite the people they are in the final version of the novel, Alan and Elaine were transposed back to D.C. and politics, and the antique store that had shown up in one of the failed university-English drafts of their story was transfered to Old Town Alexandria, one of my favorite places to visit in the D.C. area.

I love Alexandria. So many old buildings, weird alleys, and way, way too many antique stores.

The antique shop needed owners, and somehow, Val and Nadia seemed like the logical choices. And as a frequenter of antique shops, antique malls, thrift stores and yard sales I liked the idea of an antique shop as a cover for not only a vampire and his thrall but as a place where magic items like books could just quietly hide away, waiting for the right owner to come along. After another false start, Alan and Elaine got aged down, and Elaine lost several years of recovery and rebuilding time since her injury. Then, rather than a coy approach, I simply had Nadia and Val run into them (figuratively in the latter case, literally in the former.)

The same trip that produced the above photos also changed the ending of the book. I had an idea, from looking at maps and memories from grad school, that I wanted to use Congressional Cemetery rather than Arlington National Cemetery as the scene for the big showdown. Walking the cemetery clarified a lot of things, from the mechanics of how to get there from the Metro to Elaine doing a reverse of my experience with a washed-out slope. (Elaine has the coordination to at least fall down the hill in the dark. I managed to fall up it in broad daylight.)

Congressional Cemetery (above and above left) is full of vaulted tombs. The "family row" is both the cover of the book and the site of Elaine's battle in the mist. Arlington Cemetery has some off the beaten path spots. A chance wandering when I went looking for President Taft's grave took me past Robert Todd Lincoln's massive sarcophagus (left). Alan and Nadia hide out here during their decoy mission.

The final version of the book involved a lot of random brainstorming (my friend Laurie is infinitely patient and humors me talking about the imaginary people who live in my head a lot) and feedback from test readers. Some scenes involved a lot of rewrites (including one where I still would go back and change it if I could) and one character had his life spared and a whole new character arc created because of Aaron Allston (in every draft except the final version that became Strange Roads one character didn't survive. Aaron made a suggestion that lead to one sentence that changed said character's role completely.) In some cases even just sitting on a train and staring out the window lead me to character traits or out of a plot block. In others, it involved watching kids' programming on Disney XD. I'm sure there's part of the process I'm missing, because, as I said, if I'm remembering the timing right, I created Alan and Elaine in 1994. But as a general overview, that's where I get my ideas!

Aren't you glad you asked?

Coming Next, "Know Your Vampires."