Storytellersunplugged

by John B. Rosenman

A long time ago, there was this gorilla I knew. I was out of work, and the gorilla was similarly unemployed. At least he appeared to be, for every time I went to the Minneapolis zoo, all 800 pounds of him would be waiting for me at the cage bars like he didn’t have anything else to do. I swear the guy hadn’t moved an inch, and his expression was always direct and unchanging. “You poor jerk,” his brown marble stare seemed to say. “You still haven’t got a job, do you?”

I used to stare into those brown orbs, trying to make Mr. G look away. Never succeeded or even came close. For hours I tried to stare him down, wondering all the time, “What the hell’s going through your head? What are you thinking? What do you think of me? What are you trying to do?” I guess I was a little like Captain Ahab who obsessed about that great white whale, wondering what made it tick and if it had chomped off his leg because it was pissed off or just because it was doing its stupid, meaningless whale thing. Anyway, I’d stare and stare and after a while, I’d try to become that fucking gorilla. I WILL BE YOU! I thought. I WILL GET INTO YOUR FURRY HEAD AND BECOME YOU. I CAN MAKE THE IMAGINATIVE LEAP, I CAN!

Well, I never succeeded. Just as well of course, since I don’t know what I would have done with his 500 pound female companion. But my experience did have one tangible result. I wrote a poem:

GORILLA

Wrapped in a bulging sack of fur
The gorilla stares
Down my winding mind,
Unblinking.

He is grotesque.
In primal maze a memory stirs.
I lift a musty arm
To paw a marble eye.
Words are vines untangling.

The gorilla climbs
Through my combed hair,
Gathers a jungle around my mouth
to swarm in sun,
Suddenly

I am hunger
leaping at hairless flesh
to tear blood wisdom
from its tongue.

Okay, it ain’t great, but my point here has to do with the way I get my ideas. They come straight from Schenectedy. No, forget that. Bad old joke. What I should have said is that most of my ideas tend to just jump out at me, often completely unpremeditated. That’s the way I wrote “Gorilla.” I just sat down and . . . scribbled, let the pen have its way.

George Guthridge has a much more systematic method for generating stories, a brilliant nonfiction idea machine that has resulted in professional sales for both himself and his students. His articles (actually a series) are posted on this site, and I encourage everyone to check them out. I don’t have anything quite as good or elaborate, but I thought it might be interesting to share my “method,” to the extent that I have one. Please note that not all my stories have their genesis in such a spontaneous, unplanned, non-cerebral way, but most of them do.

One place I like to hang out is Barnes & Noble. There’s a huge one in Chesapeake, VA which I haunt. What I do is walk around, sometimes with a cup of java in my hand, and let my eyes roam. Often titles will ignite something inside me. Once I saw a book whose title was The Calm Technique. Bam! At once a similar but significantly different title leapt into my mind: The Death Technique. It’s about a man who’s able to will or cause his own decomposition and liquefaction – in other words, appear to die and rot. Lord knows, how one glance at that title inspired such a ghoulish tale. No wait, I think I do know. My horrific instincts simply “decided” to create the ghoulish opposite of a “Calm” technique. Look for it in HWA’s Dark Arts anthology.

I guess my main point here is that sometimes you should get in touch with your own inner gorilla and learn to love him. Open yourself up to inspiration and take chances. Trust your subconscious and avoid analysis and excessive thinking. Go with the flow and toss your safety net. Forget about outlines, scripts and character thumbnail sketches. Make it up as you go along.

Sometimes I haven’t had to make much up at all. Recently I opened a book of stories – at Barnes & Noble of course – and a story just leapt into my head. It was more or less fully conceived, though I didn’t read even one word in the book. Turned out to be one of my better stories too.

Some stories I’ve written have had bizarre origins.

 One day a sentence flashed across my mind: “I’m sitting in hell listening to Barry Manilow records when the call came.” I had no idea in hell what it meant, but I used the sentence to begin a pretty good SF novelette.

 Similar to that, I made up a word, “Dreamfarer,” which I used as the title and inspiration for a whole novel. Okay, the novel sucked, but the title itself
was great.

 One of my students became a little obsessive. She started to stalk me a bit.
Did I mention she didn’t have good eyesight? One night she pulled up outside my house in her trademark chartreuse van. My wife was upset but I wasn’t. Hell, I had a great story idea about a guy who’s terrorized by a girl who drives a chartreuse van, and I went right upstairs and wrote it.

Back in ’87, I published an article on this subject. I called it “Stories Without Ideas,” and I thought I’d close with some excerpts.

. . . Readers might be interested in a phenomenon that’s happened to me more and more in the past few years: Stories come to me WITHOUT ideas.

“Where do you get your ideas?” I believe the answer to this question is endless because the creative process may be a mystery to the writer itself, submerged in a subconscious realm he can’t fathom. But to me, that’s part of the fun, the fascination, and the glory, for to bring something out of nothing is as godlike as any of us mortals are likely to get. So, fellow writers – pay heed to those unorthodox, sometimes barely perceptible nudges and flashes. It just may be a story knocking!