Home Stretch For Hearts of Tabat

J.M. McDermott’s Nirvana Gates, a novella set in the world of the Fathomless Abyss, is now available for the Kindle and the Nook. If you enjoyed Tales from the Fathomless Abyss, you’ll be happy to find more set in that world.

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about the project so far is the way different people use the same material. I’m working on finishing up the next novella in the series, A Cavern Ripe With Dreams. I think I’ve mentioned it before; it’s heavily influenced by H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House,” William S. Burroughs’ Junky, and Joe Lansdale’s The Drive-in Chronicles. Here’s the teaser from the beginning of it, which went out with Nirvana Gates.

An early memory. Was it his earliest memory or simply the earliest thing he remembered remembering? He wasn’t sure.

One morning his father woke him from a nightmare. He was still young, perhaps eight. His father squatted on his heels besides Bill’s bedroll and shook his shoulder. When he woke, shuddering and gasping from dreams of strangle-fingered demons, feeling his breath still in jeopardy, his father didn’t say anything, just beckoned to him.

He followed at his father’s heels, towards the world and the great tube that the city clung to. At the end of each tunnel the space widened considerably, leaving places where shelves and ladders and catwalks could be stretched. And beyond them all you could see the abyss itself, stretching downward and upward into darkness.

The air was full of something. What was it?

His father said, as Bill moved to the railing to see what was happening, “Sometimes the world opens and things fall in. Rarely do you see them. This is something you will remember all your life.”

The air was full of tiny, floating things. He stretched out his palm and kept it motionless long enough that one drifted to be trapped in his palm. A seed, a brown seed, and attached to one end a tuft of hairs, fine and feathery, carrying it along. Carefully he raised his hand, examined it more closely. The seed was so small, but ridges and swirls marked its surface and up close, it was no longer brown, but shades and gray and green and red that somehow blended together to create the impression of brown from just a few inches farther away.

He closed his fingers around it, meaning to keep it, but it was so small that it wafted away even as his fingers moved.

He’d only seen things fall into the abyss. But these, so light, sometimes moved upward or downward, sometimes tugged sideways as though snatched by invisible hands. Thousands and thousands of these, swirling through the air.

He and his father gathered a painstaking handful, picking them from crevices. Other people were doing the same. How often did you get something like that without cost, like a gift from the universe?

They picked up seeds, but they also stood for hours, watching it. Almost everyone in the city came to see it, even if their children had to carry them. People did not speak much, simply watched, as though storing it up. He grew bored and watched their faces. None of them looked at him. Even the other children seemed too self-absorbed to return his gaze, to notice that he was watching them. His mother arrived and paid them little attention, instead going to speak to the city council and offer her opinion of the event. Bill and his father stayed where they were and paid her no mind.

At last he saw the cloud beginning to thin and his father stirred. “You may never see another thing like that,” he said, regretfully. “Some people live lifetimes between Openings. Others see dozens, maybe more. You never know.” He took Bill for breakfast from a vendor, bitter tea and roasted bulbs that tasted of smoke. As they ate, fewer and fewer of the seeds fell but there were still some, hanging in the air.

He slept dreamlessly that night.

When he went to the edge again, the seeds were gone and the air was blank. Not a trace of them remained, even the tiniest fragment had been taken. For the next year everyone tried to grow the seeds into plants. They tried different levels of moisture, or heat, or light from the sunstrip, but nothing worked and the seeds remained inert. He wondered what they would have produced. He wondered how they had come here. What decided when the world would open up and take something in? What lay outside the closed opening?

What decided when it would open and close? It implied some sort of conscious force, he thought, but then again there were random things in the world, things that developed without purpose.

What was Bill’s purpose? Did he have one?

Last night we had the final session of the Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction class, which is the session where we talk about everything except writing: stuff like going to conventions, and how to submit stories, and how to treat editors and what about audio markets and all that sort of thing. And I’d meant to include a section about plotting stories, because I’d taught a new class the day before, the Moving Your Story From Idea to Finished Draft class, and as often happens had come up with some new things to say about stories from thinking about one specific aspect, but there just wasn’t enough time. So I want to talk a little bit about it in a blog post.

As always, everyone’s writing process is different and the only one I can speak with authority about is my own. So perhaps this will click for you and perhaps it won’t. I hope it does.

Certainly, there are stories that arrive complete. They appear in my head and all I have to do is write them down. This is most likely to occur during the night, meaning I can rise, go to the keyboard, and bang it all out quickly. For example, “Pippa’s Smiles” arrived complete and ready to go, though it had its roots in some thoughts I had been mulling over about gendered narratives. Unfortunately, though, that’s not usually how it works.

For me, stories can start in a number of ways.

• They can start as a concept or idea: What if ghosts could fly into your mouth when you yawn? What if people could go back and live their lives over and over? What if some people could acquire psychic powers?
• A story can start with a particular character. That may be someone glimpsed on the street, or a historical figure that I find interesting and want to write about. Victoria Woodhull is a American from the 19th century who I have used more than once as a character.
• It can start with a particular scene that emerges vividly in my head. I may not know who the characters are, or why they’re there, but I know what it looks like.
• It may start with a particular theme. A recent story, “Elsewhere, Within, Elsewhen,”started with me thinking about how people accumulate layers of grudges. I decided that I wanted to literalize that metaphor and the story came quickly when I began exploring that idea.
• I have on occasion decided that I want to work in a genre that I have not tried before. That’s as valid a place to start a story as any. If I’m doing that, I often try to figure out the genre conventions and decide which I want to violate. A recent piece I finished, for example, is one where I decided I wanted to try writing a piece of horror fiction that drew heavily on very visceral, physical details.
• Often my starting point is another story by someone else. Many of my stories are replies to other pieces that have influenced me: Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea; Robert Heinlein’s “The Menace From Earth”; O. Henry’s “The Pimaloosa Pancakes”; and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”, among others.
• A story can also start with a piece of research. I used to write encyclopedia articles and when I ran across the story of Jumbo the elephant being purchased by PT Barnum, I knew I had to write something about it, because the details were just so fabulous and Jumbo’s eventual fate so moving. That ended up becoming “The Towering Monarch of His Race.”
• A story may begin as a deliberate attempt to break a rule or guideline. I wrote “Whose Face This Is, I Do Not Know” as a reaction to one of my Clarion West classmates saying how much he hated stories where the author has a character look in a mirror in order to describe what the character looks like. I started thinking about a story in which the main character had to keep checking their appearance, because it was constantly changing.
• A story may even start with a particular title. That’s how “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said” came about. All I knew about it was that there was a manticore somewhere in the story.

Those are all perfectly valid ways to start stories, at least for me, and I’ve used all of them at least once. The question that we explored in the class is what to do with each of those in order to start figuring out the story. One way is always to just sit down and start writing, doing what Samuel R. Delany calls “writing to discover.” Sometimes that works well. Other times it may not. My trick is to usually try to figure out the characters, if I don’t have them, and particularly the main character. The most important thing to discover about that main character is what they want, because that drives their actions and helps you figure out how the story will move along.

Knowing the character and what they want helps you discover how they are being prevented from getting what they want. Once you’ve got that, you’ve got some conflict that will help drive things along.

Part of what to do next depends on your own individual process. If you are someone who cannot write the story until they know everything that will happen, then you need to figure that out, while another person may just need a initial few facts in order to sit down and start writing in order to figure out what’s going on. Personally, I would begin thinking in terms of scenes. Get a list of those together and don’t worry about the order for now. You can always rearrange them once they’re written. This is one reason why increasingly I have been drafting stories in Scrivener; that software makes it very easy to move scenes around.

How does your process differ? Have I overlooked any possible ways stories can start?