Last night, I dreamed an entire short story, from beginning to end. When one of my daughters woke me at 7am, I took my notebook to the kitchen overlooking the sea, and made as many notes as possible.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been thus inspired. Many of my short stories owe their genesis to ideas or images salvaged from dreams.

Writing in the latest email newsletter from Tor/Forge Books, Cory Doctorow says:

“All creative endeavor begins with just fooling around, not doing much of anything, just noodling and letting the different parts of your mind talk to each other. Science and art and invention spring forth when we do the unexpected and so coax our brains into letting some imaginative combinations of ideas and concepts jangle together.”

This is so true. I find time off to be as important to the creative process as time spent in front of a keyboard. Reading novels, listening to the radio, watching TV – they all have their part to play in replenishing the imagination. The mind needs distractions in order to make connections. It’s like a muscle: after working hard, it needs time to recover and grow. The unconcious mind needs time to play with the pieces of information it collects, to turn them around and around in order to see how they fit together. This is why some of the best story ideas I’ve ever had are the ones that struck me while driving on the motorway or getting into the bath.

Astronomers have unveiled an amazing 360-degree panoramic image, covering the entire southern and northern celestial sphere. And guess what? It’s the image of a galaxy seen edge-on, up close and personal.

Click here for the full story.

I get lots of story ideas. They occur to me while I’m daydreaming in the shower or sitting on the bus. But few of them ever make it onto the page. They just don’t fire my imagination. The stories I actually write tend to start life as little more than a character sketch and a vague notion of setting, and the rest falls into place as I write. To take a story from my collection as an example, when I started writing “Flotsam” all I had was the name of the main character (Toby Milan) and an image of a container ship converted to house climate refugees. The remainder of the story flowed from there.

I’m not one of those writers who meticulously plan their stories in advance – although having said that, I did produce a three thousand word outline for the novel I’m working on at the moment, but that’s very much the exception to the rule.

I have a file in my office, full of ideas for great stories I’d like to write someday but can’t. The raw idea isn’t enough, and inspiration is a slippery thing. You can’t plan it, and it often hits you in the most unexpected ways. You can’t force it – at least, I can’t. I’m in awe of writers who sit down and say things like: “Today I will write a story about alienation”. I can’t do that. My stories start with something small, like a first line or a character’s name, and build from there. When I start writing, I often don’t know what the finished story’s going to be about. I have to hack away at it to discover its shape. Sometimes the theme that emerges will be one I’ve touched on before, other times it will be something entirely new.

Studying literature teaches you how to write. If you want to know what to write, you have to study people.

I have a photo pinned to the cork board above my computer monitor. It is a picture of me aged 3 or 4 years old, drinking cocoa with my father in the back yard of the house we lived in at the time. We’d been digging the garden together.

My father died when I was eighteen years old.

Now that I have daughters of my own, the picture means more to me than ever. Looking at it, I feel a deep sense of loss – but also a strong determination to be as good a father to my girls as he was to me – and I wonder which pictures of me they will look back on in the years to come?

I’m fascinated by science but when I write, I write about people. I write about characters reacting to the situations in which they find themselves. In an interesting article on his website, Jeremiah Tolbert pretty much sums up my own attitude to writing the science in science fiction:

(The thing) I take exception to is the notion that you need to be deeply conversant in anything.  I think you just need to do research to the point where what you have to say doesn’t break the suspension of disbelief and I think that’s a long ways from being a polymath. You don’t need to be an expert on anything but people.

Read the full article here: http://tinyurl.com/5k6448

See also my earlier article, Near Future SF *is* Possible

Sometimes the power of the subconscious amazes me. Last night for instance, I dreamed I was writing the plot outline for a 100,000 word SF noir murder/mystery novel set on Earth in the near future. The dream was so vivid that when I woke up this morning and wrote down as much of it as I could remember, I ended up with a workable 2,000 word outline. It’s a little rough around the edges at the moment but it’s definitely got potential.

“the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”

- John Steinbeck

1. Never tell anyone the plot of your story until you’ve finished writing it. Once you’ve told your story, even in outline, some part of you relaxes. The story-telling urge is fulfilled. You’ve seen your audience react to it, and actually writing the story then becomes something of a chore, like you’re repeating yourself. It’s much better to keep the urge alive, driving you on until you’ve got the story down on paper, and you can then present it to the world in all its glory.

2. Write first, edit later. You can go back and polish the first draft once it’s finished. The important part is to get the bare bones of the story down on the page. Editing comes later. If you spend hours working and re-working every sentence, trying to get it perfect before moving on to the next, you’ll never get anywhere – which is one of my biggest problems and one I have to consciously work against.

3. Think long and hard before you use a word other than “said” to attribute dialogue – and don’t modify it with an adverb if you can help it. Words like “whispered”, “hissed”, “screamed”, “blurted” should be used extremely sparingly, if at all. “Said” is much better. It doesn’t get in the way. Using a word other than “said” can sound clumsy – especially if you then modify it with an adverb like “suspiciously”, “urgently”, “happily”, “grimly”, etc.

4. Write the story one scene at a time. If you’re going to eat an elephant, you have to do it one mouthful at a time. In the same way, you can’t write a whole story or novel in one go. Break the narrative up into a series of important incidents, and then write a scene describing each incident.

5. If an editor askes you to make changes, make them. Don’t be precious about your masterwork. If an editor has taken the trouble to write to you to suggest making a change to your story, it means they’re really interested in it, and usually (if you’re sending your work to reputable editors) they’ll know a damn sight more than you do about what sells in their particular market. If they suggest a change, make it.