Seeking Uniqueness? Make a Twist

I've been thinking lately about what makes a story unique. I'm working with young people right now, and I hear a lot of ideas from them, many of which bring in familiar elements from stories that I've read, or archetypal plot elements from the classic fairytales, etc.

Just because we've heard an idea before doesn't mean it can't be done in a novel way. But what can we do to make sure that the story we have is unique, and not like others of its type?

Twist!

A lot of the stories we're familiar with come with a set of underlying assumptions about their execution. Settings in which they're expected to take place. Characteristics that their characters are supposed to have. Ways their cultures are supposed to work. Technologies that are supposed to go together.

But why?

There's no real reason why these things have to be maintained as they are. Pick one and change it - not a little, but in a way that will make your story utterly different, so you'll really have to sit back and THINK: wow, how far do the consequences of that change really go? Here are some ways to try.

• Set the fantasy story in a technological setting. Steampunk did this, and look what happened!
• Take an expected technology away. I rarely see this done, but I'm doing it myself: Varin has no visual tech, for cultural reasons (no movies, computer monitors, etc. and a sense that even photography is inappropriate). And what if you did something really radical? Took away fire? Or the wheel? What would happen then?
• Change gender roles. Reverse them, okay sure, but what if you altered them? Ursula K. LeGuin did that by taking away gender in her own way, and bang! You could even have gender roles look one way in one part of your society, and totally different in another part, so long as there are solid cultural reasons behind it.
  
• Change diet. And don't stop with what's on the table, but contemplate the consequences for agriculture, for lifestyle organization, for food culture and values.
• Change character. I usually do this by changing culture, because that then changes the fundamental way that a character thinks - changing the metaphors they use to describe the world, and changing the rationale behind the decisions they make. You want readers not to be able to predict what your character will do? Alter their cultural morality and see what happens!
  

What I'm advocating here is not easy to do. A change as fundamental as the ones I'm describing has lots of far-reaching consequences for your world, for your characters and for your story.

But that's the whole point.

If you can make a twist, and explore its consequences on a larger scale while maintaining the internal consistency of your world and its cultures, believe me, you'll have something different.

It's well worth thinking about.

Getting ideas is a skill

I had a great idea last night. It was a premise idea, so I'm not going to tell you what it was, but I was really excited about it. I called Janice Hardy this morning to tell her about it, and I told her the idea (which she loved) and said I was psyched because I felt like I was getting ideas more often these days. She agreed. Here's how she put it:

Getting ideas is a skill.

This statement speaks to me - I think she's right. Back before I started writing I thought I had only one idea: it was the core concept behind the first novel I ever wrote, and the one which inspired me to create the world of Varin.

Only after I created Varin in great detail did I realize how many stories a single alternate world could hide inside it. I started writing those stories. Then I wondered if I had any other worlds in me and I created the Realm of Words, which appears in my novel Through This Gate (with my agent now). Of course, that world appeared to have lots of stories in it too.

So at that point it was clear to me that worlds could contain multiple story ideas of different strengths, and I started figuring out which ones would make more successful stand-alone stories than others.

Then I wrote Let the Word Take Me, my first linguistics story. That was one that wasn't really connected to a particular world - but it made me realize I could look for ideas in linguistics and anthropology, a very different kind of source. So I ran with that. I have tried to keep my alien-related stories in a consistent universe, mostly because I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel a lot of times (I reinvent it enough just creating my alien societies).

You might wonder at this point if I think this is the only way to get ideas. I don't. I've used story seeds before, and I always try to pull ideas out of everything around me. I've even posted about how one should look for stories everywhere. But I find there's a difference between picking up story elements from everywhere around me, and having a fully fledged idea leap into my head. One that I know from the start, with that certainty in my gut, will be a good story that's worth writing.

It's that that is happening for me more and more often. I'm having Japanese fantasy and Japanese urban fantasy ideas. Last night's idea was a concept best placed in the current day or very near future.

Janice calls this "exercising the idea muscle."

If I were to make any recommendations for other authors or aspiring authors, it would be not just to exercise the idea muscle by coming up with lots of ideas, but to make sure you follow through and pursue these ideas to a full story draft. Only once you've gotten through the process of drafting, revision and critique will you get a sense of how the initial story idea relates to the final product. And that's what will give you the best sense of which story ideas are really, resonantly successful and which are only just fine.

So that means I have to go off now and think about how to draft this new idea.

How Children are Like Aliens

Everyone's heard the expressions: "Out of the mouths of babes," or "Children say the darndest things." That is - and isn't - what this post is about. Fundamentally, this post is about how children can shake us free of the view of life that we ordinarily take for granted - and thereby give us insight into the Other.

When you're grown up, you know so many things that it's easy forget how few things you knew when you started out. Kids have to be taught to wave hello. To greet others. To say please and thank you. To shake hands. When to speak up and when to be quiet. Yes, a lot of this is about manners and politeness. But some of it is also about basic understandings of how the world works, too. We have to learn where rain comes from, what money is, and what banks are, and what they're for. We also have to learn how to acquire possessions, how to arrange them in our space, and what "clean" means, and what "tidy" means (and whether the two are different!). We have to learn how to use the bathroom - where toilets are kept, how to clean ourselves when we're finished (both above and below). The list goes on and on - but when you consider that a baby has to learn how to focus its eyes, and how to hold an object, you realize that any one particular thing is tiny in the face of the enormous list of things to learn.

It shouldn't be at all surprising that children misunderstand. We should all stand in awe of how much they do understand, how easily and how quickly they learn.

Earlier this year, I was asked to compose a bio for the conventions (BayCon and Westercon) that I attended. Deciding to go for humor, I included the following lines about myself and my beloved babes:

"Juliette taught alien languages for three years, then moved on to completing her M.A. in Linguistics and Ph.D. in Education before encountering an entirely new species – children. After several years in the thick of linguistic struggle she has achieved successful communication which bodes well for their future on our planet."

It's not far off. And children, who often lack understanding about the things we've learned to take for granted, can give us valuable hints into how strangers to our societies - aliens or just travelers - might react to the things they experience.

My dad uses an expression that I've picked up: "That's one approach." I use it any time when I see my kids accomplishing a task in a way that I never considered. Hey, it might not be the way I'd do it, or even the way I'd suggest they do it, but it works. I use it a lot.

So keep your eyes and ears open when children are around, even if they're not your own. Watch for instances of misunderstanding, of unusually keen insight, of language error, of social faux pas, or of accomplishing a task by an unfamiliar means. Each one of these can provide a view into previously unseen alternatives, and prove a source of story ideas, or of details for an alternate world, or of behavioral details for an alien.

It's a treasure chest of ideas, waiting for you to discover it.

Getting story ideas

It seems every time I turn around I'm seeing discussions of the question, "Where do you get your ideas?"

Just the other day after my post on hidden stories everywhere, my friend Eric Del Carlo had an excellent thought on the subject, which was basically, "everywhere - just pay attention." This is certainly true of his work; he gets ideas from all over and turns them into cool stories.

But everyone pays attention in different ways. The things that stand out to one person may not stand out to another; the ideas that might come together to layer into a story for one might leave another totally cold.

I got an idea this morning while I was walking my son to school and heard a family speaking Chinese to one another as they got out of the car. When I heard them, I was immediately reminded of the most useful thing I know how to say in Chinese, namely "I don't speak Chinese." It then occurred to me that the phrase I've learned is in Mandarin, but that this family might be speaking another dialect - if I were to say it to them, they'd probably understand, but it wouldn't be what they consider their family's language. And then a connection was made, for no reason I can really explain. I thought of how I'd just recently blogged about the idea of a lingua franca - thinking at the time that I should look for a story to place in such an environment - and began to wonder what it would be like if that language really wasn't the native/comfort language of any of its speakers.

At that moment, I imagined a character. A person who has learned the lingua franca in order to move into a community, and then discovers when he/she gets there that it isn't the "real" language of anyone he/she meets.

It's not a story. Not yet. But it's an appropriate language concept for a story in my Allied Systems universe, so now I'm going to be looking around after this for other ideas to attach to it. Ideas that might tell me who precisely this character is, and what he/she wants, but can't get, because of this language issue. Defining the stakes is critical to having a story to tell, rather than just a situation to describe.

Once I have a sense of stakes I can elaborate more and begin playing with details of alien physiology, environment, langauge and culture. Basically, the million more layers this will need before I can start writing. And I'm pretty sure that once I'm finished, not only will it be a story, but that it will be entirely my own story.

Originality of ideas is always a tough question. Some say there are only ten story ideas in the world (or so). As I read, and watch movies, and go through life, I encounter lots of story ideas that because of the fact that I'm experiencing them, have obviously been done before. I feel lucky to have my bizarre and esoteric (I say this fondly) academic background, because it helps me to have a new perspective on whatever ideas I encounter. Some ideas are clichéd, and hard to revive. But you can't necessarily predict when something familiar will feel old, or when it will feel classic, and a lot of that is in the execution.

Think about what your experience gives you that no one else has - the insights, the perspective, the attitude, whatever it might be - and try to bring that to bear on your search for ideas. An idea someone else thinks is novel may not catch fire for you simply because it doesn't mesh well with the unique heart of your creativity. Or on the other hand an idea that is often considered a bit passé might wake something in you that sends you to your desk to write fiendishly, because it opens up that opportunity for you to show the world what you have that no one else does.

Through it all, keep your senses open, and ideas will come to you.