So, looking for inspiration, I checked out what was with the moving dancer doodle who spelled out Google on Google’s homepage today. Turned out it was in recognition of dancer Martha Graham‘s 117th birthday. Graham actually died in 1991, at the age of 96, but there you go.

The age thing got me over to a story about British actress Harriet Walter, who, at 60, is still going strong in more ways than one. Not only has she been made a Dame (of course to Raymond Chandler she’s always been a dame), but she’s getting married for the first time, to a man one year her senior who is also marrying for his first time.

But the thing she said that hooked me was her comment that romances are rarely written about older folk because “Romance is about investing in the future – with older people there is less time for happy ever after.”

I love it. I think she’s dead wrong about why fewer romances with older people are written, but the comment sparks some thoughts about emotional investment, romance, and age.

I also throw in a story Dr. Daniel Siegel tells in his book Mindsight about a 92-year-old man discovering true emotional feeling and connection with his wife for the first time, and the idea of “never too late” comes galloping to the forefront.

So…an old man in a retirement home — let’s call him Jerry. He’s staring at walls, realizing his kids don’t particularly enjoy coming to see him anymore, and that he’s too feeble of both mind and body to really explore anything new. He’s contemplating that if he wanted to end it at his age, he could probably just lie down at night and will himself to not wake up again. His thread of life is that thin.

Then Myrna arrives at the home. She’s a good decade younger than him, but more advanced in her Alzheimer’s. Can’t remember even simple things she’s told. Seems to have trouble telling faces apart. But she’s full of life and good spirits, often humming.

And when she passed close to Jerry one day, something in the way he looks at her seems to draw her eyes and she stops. She stops moving. She stops humming. And she focuses. Says something like, “Aren’t you the handsome one!”

A moment later she’s shuffling on, Jerry forgotten.

But he hasn’t forgotten her. She begins to haunt his dreams and obsess his waking time. Until he realizes the thin string attaching him to life has become a cord of excited purpose.

And… Well, you go write the story. I see it as happy. No miracles of recovery. Just little miracles of occasional clarity and love. Not a long time of happily ever after, but an important and intense one.

So there.

If you’ve been following along with my story idea blogs, you’ve probably figured out by now that my story ideas often come out of my current preoccupations. (And if I’m not overly preoccupied with something, I can always pull a story out of the news, which reflects the world’s preoccupations.)

So, current preoccupation – nobody knows anything. This is obviously an overstatement, but it often seems true.

Take, for example, the war in Afghanistan. The rebels and the generals all have their ideas about why things are going the way they are and what can be done to shift the flow of events. But at least half the time they’re wrong, and the war continues it’s erratic course.

Or any given election, or economic turn, or environmental initiative, or how to write a sure-fire good story…

Yes, we have scientific findings and experiments, and they’re pretty cut-and-dried…until we run another experiment that shows a whole new twist we missed the first time.

Where does that lead us in creating a story? Well, in science fiction and comic books, our desire to have a better handle on knowledge and how things work leads to wish fulfillment devices like Asimov’s psycho-history or the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richard’s, world’s smartest man, who can solve virtually any problem simply by focusing his prodigious intellect on it.

But let’s take the reverse tack. How about, instead of wish fulfillment, we go the nightmare route. Nothing is constant. The rules of physics and psychology change constantly and erratically. Chaos rules.

How would we do a story about that?

If we wanted to go conceptual, literary even, we write a chaotic story that the reader can barely read. Interesting exercise. Lousy reading experience. There are enough lousy reading experiences out there already.

Let’s try anchoring our story with a character who is constant, thereby giving the reader someone to hang onto. Let’s say she’s thrown into this chaotic universe by stepping through a portal, warping through a dimensional rift, or getting zapped here by a malevolent wizard. She only manages to stay sane because she has a highly developed tolerance for ambiguity (which obviously makes her a Democrat vs. Republican), but because she’s a human as we understand human, she looks for patterns.

Does she find them? For the purposes of character growth and advancement, I think she does. Otherwise she just falls into a despair and that sucks. Not my type of story. But what’s critical is the type of patterns she finds. Do they depend on her psyche somehow, thereby making the theme of the story something like about discovering how you shape your own world? Do they cycle in a big, fractal-type loop, thereby making the theme some meditation on micro-events always somehow reflecting or causing/being-caused-by their macro context?

Here’s where the storyteller goes wild!!!! Whoopie!!!! Which approach will work best? Who knows? Who? Why, nobody, of course. Nobody knows anything!

Okay, not everything happens. And not all at the same moment or even the same day. But as April comes to an end, there are a lot of things about to happen that have been built up in the news as COMING SOON! or ALMOST HERE! and let us tell you all about what’s going to happen in so much excruciating detail and speculation that the actual happening will be an anticlimax.

To start with, the royal wedding. Friday. Oh, come one, don’t pretend ignorance. Even Americans know that Prince William and Waitie Katie are finally getting hitched. Pageantry and pomp. Signs of another era and hints of fantastic realms that never were.

Next is Canada’s general election. Like the States, it’s the right vs. the left, except that in Canada we actually have three major federal parties (right, left, and center-left), a separatist party (Bloc Quebecois) that shows up in the capital to yell how the country’s stupid, and a minor party that’s trying to concentrate its diffuse popularity (millions of Canadians but not concentrated in any one riding) enough to win its first ever seat. That’s the Green Party, by the way. They want to save the planet. Can you believe it?

Third is income tax day. Up here it’s April 30th.

Fourth is some writing obligations I have that were scheduled months ago.

So what if…the most important thing that could happen to a character was being overshadowed or interfered with by all sort of other important happenings due to occur on the very same day?

Hm. Even as I write it, I realize it’s been done a thousand times before.

Story about a wedding? Lots of zany things happen, way more than would ever happen at your average wedding.

A Bar Mitzvah? A graduation? A death? A funeral? The last day of a job? The first day? Arthur Hailey made a career of doorstop novels that followed a bunch of different lives whose most important events are all realized (usually through some crisis like a crashing plane or elevator) all on the same day.

Still, there’s something about the purity of the simple concept of many big external events upstaging something significant for one small character. And in short story form, you get to work with just the purity of the idea. So take a small character, say, a small, quiet gay man who’s been in the closet his whole life but has decided, after endless agonizing and pressure from his gay friends, maybe from his parents, to come out and announce himself to the world.

He chooses his venue (pathetically small? or somehow hugely symbolic?). He carefully chooses his date. He knows it will change everything about his life and the lives of those around him. But — and here we have to have been careful to layer in hints of the alternative event(s) that are going to upstage him — when he finally steps forth, all these other things happen so no one — not one person — actually hears a thing his says.

Then just find something clever to say that wraps up the moral about the consequential nature of any one person at any given point in time.

And we’re done.

You know, with Libya, Iran, Egypt, et al. going through their violent rethinks of who they want as leaders, it’s easy to forget how fortunate you are if you live in a country where leaders and governments are changed by a peaceful vote of the people. I’m talking Canada for myself. And if you couldn’t guess, we’re in the midst of a federal election campaign.

(Note to Americans reading this: Up here national elections don’t happen on a fixed schedule. There’s a maximum term of five years, but the party in power will jump the gun if they’re riding high in the polls. Or the opposition parties can force an election if they can force enough “non-confidence” votes on an important matter in Parliament. The election right now was triggered because the ruling party was found in “contempt of Parliament” for withholding information that they were supposed to release to the opposition parties.

So now we each get to vote for one federal representative, called a Ministers of Parliament, who will represent our riding. The party with the most elected MPs usually forms the government. The leader of that party, elected by registered members of that party in a leadership campaign that may happen rarely, become Prime Minister, our version of President.)

Yet when election campaigns become little more than mud-slinging contests, the electorate gets pretty cynical. Attack ads may help get your candidate elected, but democracy as a whole suffers. But the process is fascinating. You see candidates getting the boot or losing their ridings because of old Facebooks posts. You hear about dirty or irresponsible financial dealings that had a candidate declare bankruptcy multiple times. You have votes for the sexiest candidate, hear radio announcers calling candidates crude names, start wondering in general about the venality of the human race or large portions thereof.

And hey, if there aren’t as many stories in there as you want to make up, I don’t know where else there would be. People like David Baldacci have built their careers on them.

But we’re doing short stories in these posts, so how about we focus on one first-time voter? She’s finishing high school, which she’s found a bit of a drag because she’s really bright and didn’t toe the line on the standard social and achievement expectations. She’s accepted into a good university and looking forward to starting as much because of the smart people she expects to meet there as anything. Then this election is triggered and she realizes she’s old enough to vote. She sees this opportunity, even more than going to university, as her chance to finally step out of her adolescence into her burgeoning adulthood.

So there we’ve got a character and a setting. Of course, we’ll want to give the character more specifics if we decide to do this story. We’ll want to know her attractiveness, her family, her political and social and other views. Particularly since, starting with a character to launch this story, we’re probably mostly going to be interested in her personal growth and revelations. It’s a character piece. We want to understand and feel for/with her.

All we need now is the conflict. It could be something big, like some political dirt that for some reason becomes known only to our girl. But that sounds hokey to me. If I were doing it, I’d probably center her conflict on her feelings of wanting to be grown up and explore what that means in terms of the responsibility to vote. Does she need to vote strategically? Should she stand up to her friends or family who claim that voting for any of the candidates is wrong because they’re all liars?

I see it as a pretty earnest story where she goes from one position to the next, honestly struggling, until she finally makes some kind of radical choice like a faked assassination attempt or joining one of the campaigns and doing something outrageous like dancing naked to draw attention to some issue.

Honestly, for a piece like this, I’d have to start writing it and see where the character, as I started to hear her in my head and think like she thinks, took me. Some call it “writing into the mist.” Others call it “flying by the seat of your pants.” I personally think it’s just a way to cope when you don’t see the perfect ending so you trust your imagination will find it, or one that’s at least interesting.

It usually does.

Whew. The plan was a to do this blog once a week on Wednesdays and here it is Saturday. It’s been that kind of week, with home renos, family demands, and mostly a push I’m in right now to prep a couple novels to go up as e-books.

The writing stuff, especially, has a way of distorting time perceptions wildly. Without my kids’ school schedules to keep me aware of the days of the week, I suspect I’d readily get lost in whatever time frame my novel’s operating in versus the one I’m supposedly operating in. (My wife’s schedule doesn’t help much. Long hours, many weekends.)

So the short story idea? A writer progressively trapped by the time flow of the novel he’s writing. At first it just affects his ability to relate to the outside world – he misses a couple appointments, he shocks his wife with his get-to-work intensity on a Sunday morning. Then it seems to be having more profound effects as his changing the timing of events in his novel, compressing or expanding the time they fit within, affects the flow of time in his own life.

To make it work, you’d have to set up a number of real-life schedules and scheduled events, maybe even emphasizing how the writer’s external life has a lot of regularly schedules demands. Maybe he’s a diabetic who has to take regular insulin shots. Maybe he has a serious heart condition and needs to take regular pills for it. Give him a deadline for turning in his manuscript and/or meeting his editor to discuss his next series. Throw in a random disaster like his wife being in a car accident.

Then muck with the time. Lots of fun. And hey, writing should always be fun. Add a meaningful setup about scheduled time in the beginning for a payoff at the end, and pow. You’ve got yourself a story.

I’m reading the draft of a friend’s novel right now which is notable for two things: 1) excellent writing, and 2) length. I mean, this guy rarely writes short, but he’s outdone himself this time. Worst thing is that because of point 1) up there, I’ll probably have to read the whole damn thing. It’s a lot easier to skim bad writing.

Thinking about it, and discussing the issue with my wife, led me to wonder about a story’s “natural” length and whether such a thing exists. There’s no question that some subjects like war and politics, or generational sagas, just seem to demand longer works because to really get the feel for such sweeping topics, you need to see a lot of sides of them and feel like you’re inside the bigness.

But simpler stories may also demand length because the complexity of the plot or characters, to be fully understood, just takes a lot of elucidating.

Anyway, I’m not really commenting on whether longer is good or bad (though in today’s electronic market, I’d argue the trend is towards shorter works). Mostly I’m just noodling with the idea and considerations because they interest me, which is the first sign they might make a good story somehow.

Consider, my protagonist (who’s nothing like my friend) has an editor who loves his work, but wants him to write her novel idea #2 that he pitched to her. That one she’s sure she can take to her editorial board. So after years of struggling for recognition (and ignoring the obvious step of self-publishing writers can follow today), our guy, who we’ll call Bobby, sits down with idea #2 and begins. For the sake of the story, we’ll say it’s a standard thriller idea – say, the real person behind the Oklahoma City bombings and maybe even 9/11 was never correctly identified, and now he’s planned his most heinous attack yet – the triggering of a nuclear warhead in an unidentified major city of the US.

Bobby chose this idea because he’s done loads of research on nuclear explosives and thinks he can pull off the technical stuff. But as he writes, he gets caught up in the politics of the FBI who’ve been alerted. Then by the personal lives of the White House staff who get involved. Then Bobby feels the story doesn’t have enough umph and decides it has to be multiple nuclear bombs in five different US cities. Which of course necessitates researching and writing about the response teams for each of the cities as they become aware of the threat. And all of their families must be brought to life so we get the emotional impact. And he should probably add some backstory on the evil mastermind, which will involve the terrorist’s political upbringing, probably foreign, and that country’s politics and social structure and belief systems. Which raises the whole faith issue and demands Bobby add a character from the clergy and maybe some other religious stream, like shamanism.

And so it goes, spinning out into more and more silliness, until Bobby is trying to write the entire country, indeed the entire world, because this is his BIG CHANCE, and he has things to say.

Probably throw in a girlfriend who gets emotionally abandoned during this process, or maybe a wife and kids. Probably make it extreme, so that as his manuscript approaches a thousand pages with no end in sight, he’s going truly off the deep end.

Final kicker might be someone who comes out with a book on the same subject in the meantime that’s standard length and hailed as a masterpiece.

Ah, the cruelties of the creative mind!

So…back from a series of health problems that finally centered in on an incorrectly diagnosed abscess. Can you say threatened septicemia? But after an operation and a whack of antibiotics I’m my old chipper self.

What it did bring to mind was a game my teenage daughter and her friend were playing the other day – who would still be alive if we lived in an age before modern medicine.

Our family got decimated pretty quickly. I would never have had this abscess because I probably would have died from one of my two bouts of pneumonia many years ago. My wife would have died from blood loss giving birth to our son. Our son would have died from a threatened liver infection that we caught in time a few years back. My daughter may or may not have made it through a string of minor infections she had as a child.

And does that give me a story this week? Naw, not really. Nothing jumps out at me though I could probably force it by doing something like picking up on the private lives of any of the health care professionals I was in contact with these last two weeks. (And God bless Canada – our health care system may be glacial for non-urgent matters, but when you need care now, it steps up to the plate fast.)

But instead, let’s just peek at the front page of the paper. More on Japan’s radiation scare. A bit on the death of Elizabeth Taylor. And cherry blossoms in bloom on Yew Street in Vancouver. Also this piece I read in a news magazine last week about new breakthroughs in fighting age-related cellular breakdown.

So…let’s say that Ms. Taylor, having successfully fought off her congestive heart failure and begun a new series of age-reversing drugs that has her contemplating a return to the big screen, visits Tokyo in the earthquake/tsunami aftermath.

Stick in images of cherry blossoms struggling to bloom.

Liz helps the displaced and homeless, using her returning youth and vigor to work alongside rescue workers, using her charm and ageless beauty to inspire the weak and soften the hard-hearted.

But I want to make this a story with some pathos because all that death and dying contrasted with spring and a rescued, rebeautified Elizabeth Taylor, just calls out for that.

So how about one of the children she’s helping is a young Japanese girl who keeps wanting to leave the rescue station Liz had helped set up and run. Finally Liz goes with her to help the girl find her parents and they end up in a shattered town near the burnt-out nuclear reactor in Fukushima. The parents had sent the girl to her grandparents immediately after the earthquake. The grandparents died. Now the parents are dead too. And Liz, after wandering around the restricted area looking for them with the little girl (Liz’s charm will get her anywhere!), contracts radiation poisoning which is ironically worsened by the youth therapies she’s taking. (The little girl’s fine.)

Liz will be dead in days, but she’s truly lived and gets to watch the budding cherry blossoms before she goes.

Ahhhhhh.

One way into a story that I’ve mentioned before is place, setting, environment. Let’s take, only to show the way this can go, that most cliched of settings/environments – a rainy day.

Note that a rainy day isn’t enough by itself. We have to ask ourselves, why is this rainy day different from every other rainy day?

Maybe it’s because of where it happens – a rainy day in Arica, Chile (look it up), a rainy day on Mars, a rainy day at the bottom of the ocean. Each one of these would require you to imagine a whole different world or an unusual chain of events that made the rain significant and suggested some kind of characters who might be in conflict because of it.

Maybe it’s because of when it happens or how long it’s been going on.  (As a North Vancouver resident, I can tell you that four straight weeks of rain can have an emotional impact.)

Or maybe its just that you imagine a rain that is, by its nature significant. Because it’s acidic? Prophetic? Filled with microscopic biomes?

Because I’m thinking mystery right now, for my story the rain is a cover that influences how a murder goes down in an unexpected way and the strange clues it leaves behind. I see a struggle, an attempted rape where the rapist slips on the wet mud and falls on his own knife. But he’s not dead until the would-be rape victim grabs him and rocks him back and forth on his knife, driving it in deeper until it severs an artery.

Okay, some interesting things about the clues could come out of that, but the real key will be the almost-victim’s psyche, why she reacted as she did, what she’ll do now. If it’s noir, she’s screwed. She’ll be running from her conscience (or not? Maybe she was happy with what she did.) while some detective questions her, falls in love with her, and ends up emotionally screwed himself.

If you want a feel-good ending, you could have her come to terms with it and maybe even gain reader sympath as she finds she was actually targeted and the main person targeting her is still after her. Now she has to survive and, if you go the thriller route, stop the bad guys and maybe fall in love and rescue someone along the way.

And all this out of a little rain…

My last post diverged a little bit from straight story ideas to talk about how to do something with that idea once you had it – how to actually move from some vague idea for a story or desire to write one, to actually getting it going. The nuts and bolts, if you will. You can find that discussion here.

I finished it with a promise to discuss what makes a story satisfying for a reader. It’s the difference I’m sure you know well from watching movies or reading books and short stories, between finishing the experience with and “Ahhh” or a “Neh” or even a “What the–?”

As consumers of stories, we expect to have our questions answered, our raised hopes fulfilled or cleverly tweaked, our investment in a character paid back.

So on the simplest level, to finish a story, look to the beginning and ask yourself what questions you raised or what problems you presented to your protagonist. Can you answer them? Solve them? Do that in some clear way and you’ll have satisfied most of your readers at a basic level.

But what of theme or meaning, I hear you ask. Good question. Because to satisfy your reader on a deeper level, the kind that actually makes readers remember your stories, your resolution of questions and problems has to be of the real questions and problems, even if those weren’t presented clearly up front in your story.

Say I’m telling a simple story of boy who wants to ask a girl out on a date. At one simple level, if he succeeds in asking her and getting her to say yes, I’ve answered both the question (Will he succeed in getting her to go out with him?) and the problem (He’s fighting a massive shyness/competition with others/indifference or antagonism form the girl.)

But he asks and she says yes. Are you satisfied? Maybe. If the story obstacles were simply set up and he had to work hard to get past them, the simple triumph may be enough.

More likely, though, you’re going to want to take away something more than simply – keep trying and you’ll succeed (an example of a well-worn and quite serviceable “theme” for many stories). Maybe in finally learning to ask, he learned something about himself – a personal growth theme. Maybe he learned something tongue-in-cheek clever or cynical about dating practices – a social morals theme. Maybe the reader learned something about the characters that they themselves couldn’t see.

You see the running line here? Somebody learns something. It may not be something new or even positive. But there will be something the unfolding of the story imparts about the world other than just A happens, then B happens. The thing imparted is your theme.

What theme is most satisfying for what story largely depends on the story’s genre and reader expectations. In romance, for example, you can weave in just about any kind of  theme as long as the predominant one at the end supports love and a happily ever after.

In mystery, the theme might be personal or social, but should, in all but the most noir tales, support some kind of restoration of public order (e.g. bad guy is punished) thems.

In westerns, save the town. In fantasy, save the world. In SF, save the universe.

In mainstream, literary, etc., the field’s pretty wide open, though there seems to be a tradition in literary fiction to explore the darker, less hopeful themes of the world.

Which is not to say you can’t break the rules and explore your own themes, the ones most meaningful to you, in whatever kind of story you’re writing. The key is just that the story provide something, give shape and meaning to a world around us that sometimes doesn’t seem to have it. Life can seem random; fiction should not.

Something to think about as we discuss story ideas in the months ahead.

The title of this blog is “ideas everywhere you look” and I do mean that literally. There’s a story in those stray hairs that won’t stay in place, from the color of the sky today, from the first thing a stranger on the street said (or didn’t say) to you, and of course from everything you read in a newspaper or magazine or see on a screen.

But as I’m reminded by my daughter, who has an assignment in her English class to write a historical short story and was wailing, How do I start?“, the movement from stimulus to story isn’t all that obvious sometimes. I’ve been trying to show the thinking process by example with these blog posts, but my daughter’s complaint made me think I should maybe share something a little more basic.

Okay, here are my basic thoughts on what constitutes a short story because an understanding of the basic elements implies a place to start. (Note that other writers and readers may disagree with my thoughts here and that’s fine. If they suggest another way in that works for you, go with it.)

Stories require:

1. A CHARACTER. Usually a specific character or characters. Usually at least one that we can relate to, understand, empathize with enough to at least want to know how they’re going to deal with their problem (see number 3. below).

2. IN A SITUATION. Meaning time, place, environment. Without this, we usually just have talking heads or people in a place so undescribed it might as well be a void – a surprisingly common occurrence with beginning writers.

3. WITH A PROBLEM. Think conflict, with another character, with nature, with him or herself. Why? Because conflicts/problems demand action to solve said conflict/problem, even if that action is only hard thinking. And it’s that action, that goal-driven behavior, that we usually read a story for. If we the reader relate at all to the character and their conflict or problem, we read the story because we too want to see it dealt with. Sometimes the problem gets solved. (Yay!) Sometimes it doesn’t. (Tragedy!) Sometimes whether it does or doesn’t isn’t ever really addressed because it’s the problem itself that’s the whole point. (Literary!)

3. ATTEMPT(S) TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM. This is sometimes referred to as a try-fail sequence. The character tries to solve the problem and fails, tries again and fails, tries a final time (the climax usually) and either succeeds or fails. The number and size of the try-fails depends completely on the story. Short stories usually have fewer try-fails than novels.

4. A RESOLUTION. Some would argue that no, you don’t need a resolution. It’s more interesting to leave a character hanging. But even that is often a kind of resolution in a well-told story, because the author has taken the reader to a place where that suspension creates a resolution in the reader’s mind, either then or later, when they’ve had time to think about the horrible trick the author played on them. Generally, though, fiction makes more sense than real life. Problems do get resolved for good or ill. Loose ends are tied up. Events have a shape that gives them meaning. That’s what makes fiction satisfying for most people.

So…how does that let you get started? Pick number 1. If you’re fascinated by people’s quirks, come up with a character you’d like to write about – a character you admire or one you despise or one you find funny. Then give them a problem that would test who they are. Make it real by grounding it somewhere.

Or pick number 2., a situation, or 3., a problem. When ideas come to me, it’s usually through a combination of these two. Go back and read my last post. I see a situation like the one happening in Egypt, I read about the problem any given individual has in deciding whether to join in, then I spin it into a character I think I could understand and relate to.

Then, put yourself into your character’s shoes. What would they do to solve their problem? And/or put yourself into the shoes of your character’s problem. What would that villain or group or situation do to really stick it to your hero?

You write those things. You write the various characters’ reactions to those things (they failed so they try something new), and you’re off and running.

Now how to bring it all to a satisfying resolution and what “satisfying” even means – that’ll be next week. Ciao!