Stories build worlds and worlds build stories.
As writers, we can mirror or record the world around us with accurate, historical accounts of past events. We can create our own worlds of science fiction, fantasy, or a portal to a different universe. Yet, even if the world we create is unworldly as we know it, there’s a thread of humanness in the characters, even if they look nothing like humans. Our imaginations are endless, but our humanness only knows what we’ve experienced in ourselves or witnessed in others. The human condition will always be a part of the worlds we create, fictional or real.
When I got the inspiration to write my first novel, I knew the world first. The visual inkling was from a dream—a strand of poinsettia garland draped across cleared away dirt. Easy enough to remember upon waking. No complicated or twisted plot to recall. Luckily, I had written a description of the graphic on a piece of yellow-lined paper not knowing what I would do with it. A recommendation to all writers: Keep pen and paper by your bedside, in your car, on your desk, anywhere nearby!! Don’t delay capturing imaginative thoughts! They can vaporize and be most difficult to conjure up again.
First came the world. I placed the dreamt visual in the vast state of Texas. My only experience of Texas had been an airport layover in between flights to Los Angeles. Yet, I knew instinctively that the Lone Star state was my story world. And I couldn’t go on without establishing that first before creating the characters that inhabited it.
The poinsettia was sitting on top of something. An underground shelter seemed like a logical choice. Within the next few weeks, I researched information about bomb shelters. I ran across an old article from a Texas newspaper about a family with the last name Christmas. They lived in a bomb shelter for three days back in 1955 as a government experiment to reinforce the notion of surviving a nuclear blast. Aha! That’s it! The poinsettia garland in my dream is sitting atop a bomb shelter….decorated for Christmas. It’s like the Christmas family was pointing me in the right direction with combining the two themes. And that’s all I had initially. But the idea of 1955 stayed with me. It gave the bomb shelter some purpose and meaning. The fifties had a heightened sense of vulnerability to the effects of nuclear power still haunting the world ten years past the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Then came the characters in full force. But only after I established the world in which they lived. There was the fourteen year old in 1955. But why would she decorate a bomb shelter for Christmas? Then comes the next layer. Conflict. World + Characters + Conflict = Story. The conflict here was an argument with her mom. What would drive the angst ridden teen to hide in a shelter away from her family? I hearkened back to 1955 and the trends of the time. I visited a Christmas museum and was enlightened by some of the fads throughout the decades. By the mid-fifties, the aluminum Christmas tree was all the rage. But my teenager hated artificiality, so she convinced her dad to allow her to recreate Christmas in the bomb shelter he was so proud of constructing. Essentially, she played her dad to get some sort of one up scenario against her mom. To heighten the conflict, I knew my fourteen-year-old was an only child. The stakes were higher. No distractions of other kids and their wants and pleas. Now I had a tight family power struggle…conflict!
Also, I knew from the get go that the story would have a fantasy element. It was spawned from a dream, right? It made sense to me. I kept thinking of the 1998 movie Pleasantville, a teen fantasy, where siblings alternate between their own world and one of a 1950s sitcom. I would have two worlds—present and past. Voila! Now I had battling teens, one from the 1955 and the other from sixty years later. Their worlds collided in the fully preserved Christmas bomb shelter. A supernatural meeting ground! Once I established the world, the characters fleshed out with all of their strengths, weaknesses and human condition! Conflict arises when you know the characters and what choices they make. If you don’t know your characters, how can you have conflict? Yes, external forces a catalyst, but the inner-conflict is where the story lives!
My characters are still with me and have more stories to tell. They have lives. I know that sounds crazy, but I know them, even when they surprise me. I wait for their surprises. The writer creates the conflict, but the characters tell the writer how they get through it. You should know your characters to the core. If not, they can become stiff and uninteresting. If they surprise you, that’s part of who they are! Unpredictable! Some characters don’t know what they are capable of until they are faced with conflict. They become cowards, heroes, or something they never expected of themselves.
All of this is part of discovery, the scary and thrilling journey of being a writer of stories. It’s not easy, but rewarding beyond measure. Your characters are waiting to tell their stories. Don’t disappoint them. Happy writing!