Ghosts

I’m often asked where I get my ideas…
Okay, the truth is, I’m really not asked that very often at all, because very few people even know I’m pursuing this crazy path, but let’s just say for the sake of argument, I’ve been asked at least one or two times. I’ve said in this space before that when I was younger I thought for sure I would write fantasy and sci/fi (damn you George RR Martin, for all but putting a bullet in my half-completed fantasy magnum opus), but as I’ve gotten older and really started taking my writing seriously, those are about the last genres I’ve considered.

Sure, I think I have a pretty decent horror story bubbling around, but all of the work I’ve done in the last 3 years has been contemporary (I guess), and a lot of it has been drawn (loosely) from news stories that I’ve seen. I love taking echoes of true events or situations – many of which read as if they could only be fiction – and using those as a starting points.

I guess, in a way, my stories are just ghosts of real life events.

TAIGA (which, in its raw, imperfect form, you can read HERE) was based around a news story from Ohio. A SHARPER DARK was drawn from a magazine article I read back in Los Angeles, and the starting point for my current WIP, BADLAND, believe it or not, are the crimes of Drew Peterson.

What I do is clip and save anything that catches my eye and store those articles in labeled folders. Eventually, I hook on a character (as opposed to a particular plot or idea), and then try out that character in a variety of situations, often circling back to one or more of the articles I’ve already saved. I’ve found that I love to write about “good” people making “bad” decisions, and “bad” people occasionally seeking and finding redemption – even if only for a moment (and I often think of my “bad” characters as really just badly flawed, rather than straight-up villainous). There are so many real life examples of both these things that I rarely have to mine my own creativity for a plot line – they jump out at me from the newspaper and the TV news all the time. And I rarely have to reach for the purely fantastical, although the drug-fueled visions of Chief Deputy Duane Dupree in BADLAND aren’t wholly of this world. For me, the real magic is creating the characters themselves – making living, breathing beings that (I hope) a reader can relate to, and then putting those characters in situations that a reader might subconsciously recognize.

It’s just telling ghost stories, after all.

One other thing this week, I’m going to be part of Kate Brauning’s street team for his upcoming debut, HOW WE FALL. You can learn more about that HERE. Kate is an agency-mate of mine, and I’m going to enjoy supporting her through a process of publishing her first novel – a process I hope to experience myself soon.

Oh, and if you haven’t read Peter Straub’s GHOST STORY in a while, do yourself a favor and pick it up.