Jeremiah Tolbert

Part of my mini­cri­sis last week about writ­ing and get­ting back to it was that I was hav­ing trou­ble gen­er­at­ing the ideas part of the equa­tion. This is almost always my start­ing point; a cool idea that I can at least delude myself is some­thing new that I haven’t seen done before. Or a twist on an old idea. Just, some­thing fresh. Some peo­ple might start with a plot or a char­ac­ter, but I don’t find myself work­ing that way​.My flow is Idea->Character->Plot ->Theme mag­i­cally appears when it all comes together. Theme for me is a mys­te­ri­ous thing that the sub­con­scious puts into the work. It’s like the under­pants gnomes from South Park/​Slashdot meme: Step One: Get Idea, Character, and Plot. Step Two: write story. Step Three:???? End Result: Theme (Profit!).

Lately, I have been try­ing to estab­lish an idea for an over­all mood when I start a piece, par­tic­u­larly in my fan­tasy sto­ries. From my read­ing of clas­sic, non-​​genre short sto­ries, it seems that mood is the most impor­tant thing. Stories can get away with not hav­ing a plot like genre read­ers expect, because the way the story makes you feel is the whole point. I think genre sto­ries are often thought as being about how they make you think. There’s no rea­son they can’t be about both, and I sus­pect the most suc­cess­ful sto­ries are ones that do both.

I think I’ve been work­ing on the mood/​how the story makes you feel thing for a while now, but I came to it first by try­ing to be funny. Later, I broaded my emo­tional hori­zons, you could say. I think “The Yeti Behind Me” (Published in the Fantasy Sampler) is my most suc­cess­ful story for cre­at­ing a mood. Followed by an as-​​of-​​yet unpub­lished story called “Maggie’s Man.” But even early work like “Girl with the Sun in her Head” had some of this. It wasn’t inten­tional then, but it ended up in there any­way, and I’m sure that’s part of why it sold.

I don’t know why, but I have real trou­ble try­ing to put a mood into a more sci­ence fic­tional piece. For some rea­son, when I work in that mode, think­ing about things like emo­tional con­tent is much harder. The ana­lyt­i­cal very eas­ily over­pow­ers the emo­tional for me. It’s some­thing I really need to work on, because I would like to write more sci­ence fic­tion than I do.

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Tags: My Writing, process, SF, Short Story