Writing Fiction

Where do you get your ideas?

Via The Globe and Mail: Why the best ideas spring up in the shower. Excerpt:

Certain things are best done in the shower. Getting clean tops the list, of course. And, for some people, singing. For me, spontaneous thought. 

Indeed, although I have a fully furnished office and research space dedicated to inquiry and innovation, a surprising number of my better ideas emerge somewhere between shampoo lather and rinsing off the soap. 

Could the aroma of my generic hair product have a mysterious brain-boosting effect? Probably not. 

Research suggests instead that my insightful showers likely have more to do with a mind allowed to wander than the impact of a steamy fragrance. Compared to other daily activities, the shower is one of the few times in which there are few external demands and little need to exert a high degree of concentration on any aspect of the task at hand. Jogging, doing the dishes and riding the bus to work are other examples.

In the early days of writing my novels, I relied on dishwashing to keep the ideas coming. If I ran into plot trouble, I'd suggest to my wife that we throw a dinner party; I needed more dishes.

Then we got a dishwasher, presenting me with an artistic crisis. Fortunately, walking the dogs works just as well. And it's now time for today's walk #2, as one of my dogs is insistently reminding me. Tip: Get a high-energy dog who needs four or five outings a day. 

Star dreck about Gliese 581g

The Tyee has published my article Who Cares If Some Planet Is Inhabitable? Excerpt:

Back in the 1980s, my editor suggested I write a space opera. I did, but it wasn't easy. For the life of me, I couldn't imagine an advanced civilization that would bother to travel between stars. Better to send just information. Then your interstellar pen pals could grow their own humans from our genome, and you could grow your own aliens right here at home. I did include an interstellar invasion, by a species that was out to convert everyone else to its own religion. In other words, the species was crazy. 

Nonetheless, SF is still full of star fleets, galactic empires, and aliens who are a lot like us. And we still dream of starships spreading human beings to exotic worlds. 

We're kidding ourselves. The Scottish SF writer Charles Stross, probably the best writer in the genre today, has demolished the whole idea of Star Trek-style interstellar travel -- just by crunching the numbers.

Where to put your manuscripts and correspondence

I spent this afternoon in the basement, going through box after box of stuff. Most of it will go straight to the dump, but some will go to the library of my local university, which has been the repository of my work for almost ten years.

So this is a good time to give you some advice for the other end of your writing career: Hang on to your rough drafts, correspondence, contracts, and anything else related to your writing career. Once your publisher brings a book out, the manuscript you suffered to produce will come back to you as "dead matter."

Don't throw it away. Buy a couple of banker's boxes at your local stationery store, and then contact your own university or college and see if it's interested in receiving such manuscripts.

This is not just to clear space in your filing cabinet. As a local writer, you are of some interest to your university. Future scholars may actually want to look at your drafts to trace your development. The material you donate has a financial value, usually set by by a third party who reviews it.

Once the value of your donation is set, the university will send you an official statement of that value. You can then include that statement when you file your income tax, and that should qualify you for a whacking great deduction off that year's taxes. So "dead matter" or not, documents from your writing have a little more to give...maybe more than you actually get from book sales.

This is the way it works in Canada, and I think the US is very similar. If not, please correct me. And don't throw your stuff away.

When SF makes an accurate prediction

Via Mashable/Tech: 11 Astounding Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True. Here's the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke describing the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in 1968:

“When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug in his foolscap-size newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers…Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination…”

I've been re-reading some of my SF novels from the 1970s and 80s, and the technology I predicted for circa 2015 generally looks a bit dated: microfiches instead of memory sticks, and great clunky computers with not a laptop in sight. 

But in Gryphon, published in 1989, I imagined a kind of web, the Database, invented by aliens. Humans would "dive" to search it in a kind of trance, while finding very little they could understand. If I'd predicted Google, the story's plot would have been far different.