Nancy Varian Berberick is the author of eleven fantasy novels and a couple dozen short stories. Her alter ego, Nancy Virginia Varian, (im)patiently awaits the publication of LOST SWORD, her first novel for children.  She is also a Long Ridge instructor for both the Breaking into Print and Shape, Write, and Sell Your Novel. 

 

Where Do Stories Come From?

 

by 

Nancy Varian Berberick

 

 

 

Where do you get your ideas? I hear this question often, from students and readers. It strikes me the way that age-old question about babies must hit parents when their kids start wondering ‘where do babies come from?’. (Well, when a Mommy and a Daddy wish they had another baby ... )

Except with story ideas, sometimes it's not that easy.  They show up in their own good time. Some come sashaying up to my desk, plot, theme, setting, and fully fleshed characters to say: "Write me, baby."  Others take years to arrive, now and then sending little messages ahead saying, "Don't worry. I'm coming. Really.  I'll be there ... any... day ... now..."  Somewhere in the middle are the stories I conjure up from seemingly thin air  because I've accepted an editor's invitation to write a story for an anthology.  These last are the most difficult for me. My head empties of ideas two seconds after I send the  e-mail saying, "Yes, thanks, I'd love to contribute a story to your anthology." The generous four month deadline suddenly looks like four hours and all I hear are echoes in my empty head.

Yet whether a story idea comes sashaying in, schlepping  in, or resists me until I'm scrambling around the keyboard in desperation two days before a deadline, all these ideas come from the same place – the world around me.

Without doubt, your instructor has told you about the importance of keeping a writer's journal. He might also have talked about keeping an idea file. I'm a big fan of the idea file. When I began writing (in pre-internet days) I put everything into it – news clippings, images, song lyrics, snatches of overheard conversation. If it caught my eye or ear, I  pitched it into a big fat accordion file.

I didn't try to impose order on the chaos in there, I treated it like a compost pile. I turned it from time to time, looking through what I had. Now that I'm online, I keep two files – a hard copy file in my filing cabinet for off-line finds, and computer files of news stories, articles,  music or images gathered during my strolls around the internet.

Truth is, my compost piles, electronic and hard copy, often result in batches of frustrating "almost stories" --  ideas that would be actual stories but for the lack of one or two links.  Yet patience is rewarded. When the links arrive, the story comes to life.

What does the process look like when the missing links arrive? Less like stitching together Frankenstein's monster than you might imagine.

I recently wrote a story called "Yeshua's Choice" for a themed anthology. The theme was alternate history, that sub-genre of science fiction where we go to imagine what life would be like if some familiar event in history had not occurred or had been altered. My idea came to me  during the Easter season.  Christian images of death and resurrection were everywhere. When I saw one of the ubiquitous slogans on a bumper sticker, What would Jesus do?, my  thoughts turned toward the Crucifixion and I wondered, What would Jesus do ... if Pilate commuted his sentence?

That's where I stopped, unable to move when I realized all of western history would be different. Everything Christianity gave to the world, all the philosophy, theology and learning; the Inquisition; the stricture to care for one's neighbor as for oneself ... it would all be changed. 

I couldn't possibly write this story within the editorial guideline of 6,000 word – it was entirely too big!

But I didn't want to abandon the idea, not when I'd come this far. I had to refocus, and as I did, I realized that if Pilate had listened to his wife and refused to execute the carpenter from Nazareth whose presence in Jerusalem was stirring up the crowds, well hardly anyone would feel the least change.  "Give them Barabbas," he'd say, and the world would go on as before for everyone but two men: Barabbas, of course, and Yeshua; Jesus,  the man who was born to save the world.

Well, I thought. That's a start.

Indeed.

It was the start of a whole list of questions. Those I posed to my protagonist, Yeshua, as I do when I begin any story: Now what? Where do you go? Back home to be a carpenter, off to take up an itinerant ministry? But ... how do you go on if you know in your soul that if things had been but one jot different, all the world would be a whole lot different?   

I had to figure out what Yeshua would do, then send him off to do it.

So far, so good. But ... what would he do?

I’ll tell you what I did, I talked it out with the other writer in the house. Talked about it in town, on a trip to visit his mother, all the while we were there. One evening he said, "Masada."

Masada? No, no. Defiant, heroic suicide? Sacrificing yourself for the sake of others is one thing, but suicide for any reason ... Nope, can't see it as a path this man would take. Besides, Yeshua would have been seventy years old or older when that confrontation between the Romans and the Jews who'd fled the destruction of Jerusalem happened.

But the name stuck, even as I tried to reject it.  Back home, I turned the compost and I found a little file in my computer about an Israeli fighter jet named Masada. Interesting, but not helpful. I went online and poked around, ending up with a great big file on the computer about the famous confrontation.  Still, nothing gave me a way into the story that would let me write about Yeshua as a man whose life had  changed – but not so much as to look like a right turn off a cliff.

Soon after, we were watching the DVD of the all star concert of  Les Miserables.  I lost myself  in the music and the story until one line jolted me back to my own story – Jean Valjean's weary,  "One day more! Another day, another destiny. This never-ending road to Calvary ..."

This never-ending road to Calvary ...

Well, there it was!

Almost.

I  did some more research online and found the last link that would make the story whole: Recently archaeologists working at Masada found the skeletons of a woman, three children and a man in a cave beneath the fort. After studying the bones, they concluded that these people had probably died at the same time as those in the fortress who had defiantly taken their own lives. The man was 70 or so years old when he died.

Yes, that did give me goose bumps.

So, what would Jesus do? Well, I'm not the one to know, but I could guess. I imagined that if he'd gone home to spend forty years as carpenter, when the times called, the man who healed the sick, the lame, the blind would go where he was needed and do what had to be done. He would do Abba's work.

A slogan, a Christian holiday, a famous confrontation, and a song ... these became "Yeshua's Choice" once I found the links to make an idea whole.

Notes made in files, in journals, snippets of fascinating information found on-line; things as simple, as ordinary as conversations  overheard at the supermarket, at the bus stop, in your mother-in-law's kitchen while you're helping her clean up after Sunday dinner  – that's where stories come from.

Stories are all around you, and they're yours for the taking! 

 

"Yeshua's Choice," written under the pen name Nancy Virginia Varian will be published in Time Twisters by DAW in early 2007.

 

Nancy has done a marvelous job of deconstructing the magic of idea generation here.  And the idea for Yeshua’s Choice, as well as her story decisions, sound marvelous.  Me, I’m buying that Time Twisters anthology.  J

            ---Mary Rosenblum, LR Web Editor