Storytellersunplugged

One of questions writers hear most frequently, posed by interviewers, other writers, critics, and fans, is the classical Where do you get your ideas?

I’m a minor player even in the small pool of small press genre fiction, but I’ve heard that question enough times to dread it every time someone starts a conversation about my odd other job. I’ve danced around it so often that I know the steps by heart. For me it’s a simple dance; a shrug of the shoulders and a simply stated I don’t know.

That is not exactly a lie, but it’s not exactly the truth either. The truth is, I don’t know how to explain.

I’ll make a decent attempt this time though, for whatever it’s worth. As always, take it with a grain of salt. Remember, I’m a writer, and can’t be completely trusted. You just never know when I’m pulling your leg.

Where I get my ideas – Mining the Modern American Myth Pool.

There is a great, dark pool of myth buried beneath the thin crust of modern American culture. Thin, I say, because in the greater history of humankind, this wide and sprawling tapestry of humanity and inhumanity called America is a new thing, a speck of dust in the eyes of the ancient gods, goddesses, and demons whose feet rest on the foundation of history itself. The soil of years that lies between us and the legends spawned by our collective past is loose and thin. Keep in mind I’m talking about American legends, not those borrowed from older cultures.

Sometimes all you have to do is stomp hard to break through the crust of reason, knowledge, and technology that fills and defines our world, to make a hole into the darkness below; a pool created and fed by the dead heroes, villains, and battles of our past. A pool that may look like oil in the dark beneath us where it forms, but may actually be blood. Sometimes that pool finds its way to the light on its own, seeping through the spongy soil like the oily tears of some buried monster.

Pretty words and metaphors aside, the American myth pool is shallow, if only because we are so new, but it is also wide and rich with legends and stories just waiting to mined.

Here are a few examples from my own part of the world.

A small riverside ghost town that now sits at the bottom of a lake, the buildings still intact. Where there were once boats and horse-drawn carriages, there are now catfish the size of automobiles.

A subterranean city, hidden and all but forgotten beneath the streets of the town where I live and work, carved out by oriental miners during the western gold rush, and haunted by their betrayed spirits.

A wild man, living isolated in the mountains of Idaho, violent and territorial, only venturing into civilization in the dark of night to steal, food, clothing, and maybe children.

Each of the stories above are at least half-true (maybe even more than half), and there are many more local legends lurking in the myth pool created by local history. It just takes a little digging to find them. Sometimes you don’t even have to look. Sometimes the livelier legends have a way of excavating themselves, pulling themselves, babbling and raving into the light.

You want to know where I get my ideas?

Grab yourself a shovel and start digging. You never know what you’ll find lurking in your own local myth pool.