Post Two: “Where do you get your ideas...?”

       . . . is an unanswerable question that, upon sufficient repetition, makes many writers start gritting their teeth.  “Where did you get the ideas for this book?” however, narrows it to something actually manageable, although the answer more reasonably takes the form of “Where I got some of the ideas for this book...”

     In the case of The Sharing Knife, the question actually does have an answer.  I got the initial idea out on my back deck, on a fine summer day in June of 2004.  I had lately sent the submission draft of The Hallowed Hunt off to my editor at Eos, and was enjoying a sort of blank space while waiting for revision requests to come back on the tide, and so was officially off-duty for writing.  I had been feeling especially dead-brained, as I tend to after finishing a novel, when the idea of even looking at more prose, let alone writing any, makes me faintly nauseated.  But it was a beautiful sunny warm day in Minnesota, which is not a gift to be wasted, so I went outside to soak up the sun and not be anyone at all for a few hours.

      (That turn of phrase, by the way, comes from the play Arsenic and Old Lace, when the dotty aunts try to persuade the crazy cousin to be some other president than Teddy Roosevelt, just for a change, “But he stayed under the bed all day and wouldn’t be anyone at all!”  I have days I feel like that.)

      Anyway, I started thinking up a tale to entertain just myself, with no considerations of commercial viability or even artistic merit.  Just stuff *I* liked.  And, rather to my own surprise, my imagination started working again, spinning out this unlikely romance.  This first version had little resemblance to the final, although Dag was even then a one-handed older soldier, and Fawn was a young, short, and troubled runaway.  Their world and the sharing knives were not even a gleam in my eye yet.  And a couple of happy hours went by, I absorbed my dose of needed sunlight (I don’t think I have seasonal affective disorder, but I do like my light), and that was that.

     As is not unusual, I found myself explaining the tale to my friend Pat as we went off to dinner, and all the reasons I couldn’t make it a real novel, even though I’d enjoyed it immensely. I mean, writers are supposed to enjoy their work, but surely not this much?  And she said -- shortened considerably -- “Of course you could.”  And I started thinking about it.  And sure enough, she was right.  (She often is.)

      There followed about two months of intense world-building around my characters and their plot.  A lot of fantasy writers start with their world, and then make up their characters and story so as to explore it; I more typically assemble it all in reverse.  My worlds are created as the characters and story move through them, and don’t pre-exist in huge detail.  (The plot is often very malleable as well, which means that at some phases things are shifting and mutating all over the place.  Which makes me rather nervous to sell a book on proposal, because what if the book turns out to be something altogether else than what the publisher thought it was paying for?)  But some things have to be settled before a tale can even begin. 

      My first key world-building invention was the malices, or blight bogles as my book’s farmers dub them.  They had two sources; one was a meditation, on one of my walks, about the sad lack of Dark Lords in my tales to date, and about the nature of such beings leading to fantasy novel (or trilogy) scenarios of a War To End Wars, which is not how the world in my observation operates; it’s really just one damn war after another.  And the other was being writer guest at Balticon in June of 2004, when they were having the 17-year-cicada outbreak.  Big gaudy bewildered insects raining down from the sky like sleet... which triggered, at length, the notion of a fantasy war that constantly hatches anew, just like the real ones.  The next key invention was of course the malice-slaying sharing knives, which are a sort of canned human sacrifice, and then the culture that had to exist to support them.  The notion of the knives came first; I more-or-less reasoned backward to many other aspects of the Lakewalkers.

     And the opening scene presented itself to my mind’s eye, and I was off.  Although not running, but walking; a lot of the story development took place during my extended walks in local parks.  I’d been trying to increase my exercise to fight the effects of middle age on my fasting blood sugar; I hadn’t expected it to also increase my writing productivity, but it did.

-- Lois McMaster Bujold

Comments

[Carol]

Blessings upon the medicos and their pesky blood sugar tests. (Ah, the joys of middle age....) I'm all for anything that increases Bujold writing productivity!

I always find it fascinating to see how the pieces fall together (or should that be pull together?) to spur a book's development. To the outsider, cicadas and Dark Lords and Iraq seem a very unlikely combo to produce a romance; it's great to get an inside peek at the process.

[Carol Gray-Ricci]

I'm sure the world, or at least your fans, are thanking Pat Wrede for saying "Of course you can do it." I'm so glad this story didn't go into the wastebasket of unusued ideas.

[Harimad]

Carol wrote "I'm all for anything that increases Bujold writing productivity!"

Maybe we should send Herself care packages, so she'd need more walks? Although with another 4 books on the horizon we need to encourage outlines rather than new ideas. (Or have I misunderstood The Process?)

[Archangel Beth]

I have nothing of additional worth to add to what they all said above. (Except to ponder exercising with perhaps a bit more seriousness. Er.)

[B. Ross Ashley]

This is a great insight into the Big Fat Fantasy v. what you write! The real world is not the War to End All Wars, or an End to History, it's just one darned thing after another, and not likely to come to a stop Real Soon Now.

I so have to get to this book!

[Laura Gallagher]

Locusts! (No, cicadas, I see, but my mind thinks of them as locusts) How fascinating. And yes, one of the things I enjoy about your writing is that you don't go in for the overused and undertrue cliches like the War to End All Wars.

[Maryelizabeth]

Thanks for the peek into the creative process, Lois! And appreciation to Pat for her contribution to something we can all enjoy!