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Guest Post: When Serious Books Come from Silly Places, by Lila Bowen (aka Delilah S. Dawson)
My first book was based on a sex dream after binge watching too much Buffy. I have a book inspired by a photoset of an amusement park I found on tumblr and another one that started with, “I just really want to see Princess Anastasia murder everybody.” One book was even triggered by a South Park episode. There’s a trick to turning silly ideas into stories, and it involves getting drunk.
Not dangerously drunk, not destroy-your-liver-and-relationships drunk. Just a little drunk. I find that lowering inhibitions is the first step to spinning any idea, no matter how strange or ridiculous, into a book. New writers especially can be intimidated by the brainstorming process, as if there is one perfect book waiting to be discovered and all other answers are wrong. Fortunately, there are infinite books waiting to be written, and a million monkeys with typewriters given the same story prompt would create a million different books. Most of them would probably be about bananas, but one might be Hamlet. That would be the monkey who embraced the strange. And who was probably drunk.
So, as evidence, here’s how I turned my own silly ideas into traditionally published books.
Wicked as They Come
Idea: I had a dream in which I woke up naked on a stone altar in a birch forest and was found by a hot dude in a top hat and breeches who spoke like Spike from Buffy.
Story generation: He’s not a vampire, but he’s not quite human. Okay, so he’s from a world where some people and most animals are blood-drinking predators. Instead of the blood-drinkers as the ruling class, the humans ghettoize them and develop steampunk technology for travel, including trains and dirigibles. He’s outside of society—maybe he’s the ringmaster of a traveling circus. Who would be an interesting love interest? A woman from our world, and she wakes up… on a stone altar, naked, with this hot dude staring at her.
Ships in 1-2 days.
Hit
Idea: I saw the “Human CentiPad” episode of South Park. The next day, my iPod required me to agree to a new terms of service, and I realized that I could’ve just signed my life away to listen to Taylor Swift.
Story generation: What if a credit card application changed the wording so that you were signing your life away? “User agreement may be terminated at any time for non-payment” easily becomes “User may be terminated at any time.” So debtors are the new big game. Who’s the predator? We need someone who’s in debt and forced to be a bounty hunter, someone sympathetic and relatable. How about a poor teen girl in Georgia? She loves yarn bombing and now has to take on a hit list of 10 names or else… her mom dies. I need a secondary character, though. What if there’s a witness to her first kill, and she has to take him with her because he’s on the list, too? And then she picks up a fat Labrador?
Wake of Vultures
Idea: I was watching Lonesome Dove and wished there were heroes who weren’t white guys.
Story generation: Who would be the least likely person to be a hero in 1800s Texas? A woman. Half black, half native. Bisexual. Dresses as a man. Now, how can I push her into becoming a hero? The answer is clearly VAMPIRES. But the mean kind. And wouldn’t it make sense if the whores in the bordello were vampires and drinking from the cowpokes instead of going to bed with them? And what if the vaqueros were chupacabras? And the outlaw gangs were werewolves? THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING.
I polled my writer friends to see who had published a book based on a ridiculous idea, and here are some of the answers:
John Scalzi’s Redshirts is about the expendable redshirts of Star Trek, while The Android’s Dream posits that an intergalactic war can be prevented by the use of sheep. Hellbent by Cherie Priest is about an OCD vampire and a box of magical penis bones. Meljean Brook based Riveted on what would happen if an erupting volcano could shoot a rocket to the moon. Mythbreaker by Stephen Blackmoore is about what would happen if an idiot junkie was the Messiah. Molly Harper’s Nice Girls Don’t Have Fangs starts with the heroine mistaken for a deer, fatally shot, and turned into a vampire. Meridian Six by Jaye Wells is based on a red porch light Jaye drove by one night; she decided it was a vampire underground railroad, naturally. John Hartness has written an entire series to fill the dearth of fat vampires in literature, not to mention redneck monster hunters.
As you’ll notice from this round-up and from my examples above, the silly idea is merely the seed from which the book grows. The writer’s job is to build on that seed with a compelling protagonist, a gripping plot, luscious prose, and a theme that resonates with the reader. The silly idea is just the beginning. The rest of the book, I assure you, is serious work.
Wake of Vultures is available now.