Author: Scott William Carter

Games Writers Play #21: Ripped From the Headlines

gwp“Writers are, pretty much thieves, stealing ideas from other people who didn’t have the foresight to write them down, and then from the people who did have the foresight to write them down.”  — Lemony Snicket

Probably the number one question I get asked — especially by people who aren’t writers — is where I get my ideas.  The truth is, ideas are a dime a dozen.  They can come from anywhere.  It’s what you do with those ideas that matters.  One of the common mistakes that a lot of beginning writers make is thinking that ideas are a finite resource, that if you think of a good one then you’d better protect it fiercely because you don’t want anyone “stealing it” from you.

In actual practice I’ve often found that the ideas that I find most precious, the ones that I hold onto the longest, turning them over in my mind, shaping and molding them, don’t often turn out as well as the ones I think up on the spot.  I think this has something to do with letting an idea go where it takes you rather than trying to force an idea into a preconceived box.

Here’s a technique that I like to call “ripped from the headlines,” to borrow Law and Order’s tagline, that can help you think up ideas on the spot: Use a newspaper headline to generate a story question.  Don’t read the article.  Just use the headline to ask questions.

Instead of an actual newspaper, head over to a news search site like http://news.google.com and type in something like “burglary.”  You’ll come up with a bunch of articles.  Choose one that raises questions in your mind.  Trying it now, here’s one that jumps out at me:  “Teenagers Arrested In Marina For Burglary.”

Who are these teenagers?  What were they doing in the marina?  What were they stealing?  Don’t settle for the first answer that comes to mind.  Push a little further.  Maybe one of the teenagers was stealing a rare comic book from an artist everyone thought was dead, a guy living on a small yacht, and the other teenager was trying to stop him.  Maybe this crime leads to an unusual friendship.

Who knows.  You can go anywhere once you have the headline.  It’s just a place to start, and sometimes that’s all you need.

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One of the ways I can justify writing these “Games Writers Play” posts for free is by putting a donate button at the bottom of these posts.  If you find them useful, even a small donation of a couple dollars helps justify my time.  If you can’t donate, please help spread the word by linking to these posts.  Thanks!
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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

Dinosaur Diaries Collection Now Available in Kindle Format

ddcover1

My short story collection, The Dinosaur Diaries and Other Tales Across Space and Time, is now available for the Kindle, as well as in several other electronic formats.  If you’re not into the dead tree version of books, here’s your chance to own eighteen of what I consider my best short stories — seventeen of which appeared in places like Analog, Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and Ellery Queen, as well as one story original to this collection.  It’s $6.99, which amounts to less than fifty cents per short story.

If you want to own the printed version, you can buy it on Amazon here.  Of course, you could also own both.  There’s no one stopping you.

Games Writers Play #20: Give Up TV

gwpUnless you’re living in a vortex where time doesn’t pass — hey, I do write science fiction now and again — all of us have the same twenty-four hours in a day.  Part of being more productive as a writer certainly has to do with different tricks and techniques to increase the quality and quantity of our output when we actually sit down to write — improving our discipline, expanding our creativity, the things I’ve largely been focusing on for the past nineteen games.  But what about just finding more time?

If you’re serious about becoming a professional writer, there’s no way around it:  It’s going to take a huge time commitment.  If you want to dabble and play at it, treating it like a hobby, you can do that on an ad hoc basis, but that’s just not going to cut it if you have lofty ambitions.  You’re going to have to put in many hours of practice.

If you want more time, take a hard look at where your time is going now.  What can you give up?  One of the things I’ve mostly given up is television, which is a pretty big time sink for most of us.

Try giving it up for a week or a month.  You might be amazed at how much more writing you get done.

Now, I’m not one of those people that claim that television is bad for you, or that there’s nothing on, or that it’s a mind control device used by the government to keep us from rebelling.  I actually think there’s far more good shows than there were ten years ago.  There’s also more terrible shows.  There’s just more, which is why we have a bit of both.  If you’re a discerning viewer, you can find some great stuff out there.

But here’s the thing.  Time is a finite resource.  We’re all going to run out of it eventually.  My problem is not so much finding enough time to write, though I can always do better.  My problem is that with a day job and two young children, it’s tough finding the time to read. And television, as good as it can be on its best days, is not reading.  If you want to write teleplays, watch scripted television.  If you want to write screenplays, watch movies.  If you want to write short stories and novels, you must read short stories and novels.  No way around it.

So my point is to set priorities.   Giving up something bad for you, as hard as that is, is much easier than giving up something that’s good for you.  Because, you know, consuming more story, in whatever form, can’t hurt.

However, if you’re not finding enough time to write or read, you might have to give up something else to find it.  Television is a great place to start.

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One of the ways I can justify writing these “Games Writers Play” posts for free is by putting a donate button at the bottom of these posts.  If you find them useful, even a small donation of a couple dollars helps justify my time.  If you can’t donate, please help spread the word by linking to these posts.  Thanks!
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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

New Story in Analog: “The Android Who Became a Human Who Became an Android”

I have a new story in the July/August 2010 issue of Analog, my second featuring my intrepid interstellar private investigator, Dexter Duff:   “The Android Who Became a Human Who Became an Android.”  And yes, I really do like long titles.

The first story featuring this character, “The Bear Who Sang Opera,” appeared last year in Analog.  It’s set in the same “Unity Worlds” universe as many of my other science fiction stories.  Since my writing often veers toward dark and brooding, every now and then I like to write stories like this as a way to change the pace — stories that are meant to be just good fun.  I really like Duff and plan to write more stories featuring him.

Anyway, here’s the opening of the story.  If you want to read the rest, buy a copy of the issue.  You can even now get it for the Kindle.  Or at Fictionwise.

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The Android Who Became a Human Who Became an Android
by Scott William Carter

The last time I saw Ginger, she was sporting two breasts instead of three.  Personally, I thought her breasts were perfect before, but I know that with some guys you could never have too much of a good thing.

AFFJul-Aug-2010Cover-300When I stepped out of the shower, she was sitting there on the edge of my bed, decked out in a silky red number with a slit up the side that showed plenty of her long legs and a plunging neckline that definitely revealed too much of a good thing.  Steam wafted out from the bathroom and rose from my bare skin.   I was naked except for the towel around my waist.  Outside my tinted floor-to-ceiling window, a constant swarm of Versatian hoverpods hummed and whizzed past, everybody in a hurry to get somewhere on a planet where everybody supposedly came so they didn’t have to hurry.

“I need your help,” she said.

No hello.  No how have you been.  No sorry for breaking your heart, emptying your credit account, and taking off with your ship and your entire twentieth century holodisc collection. The last time I saw her, I was stepping into a shower.  Now, five years later, I stepped out of one and there she was.

“You have a strange sense of irony,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Never mind.  How’d you get in here?”

She shrugged.  “Bribed the desk clerk.  I’m pretty sure he thought I was a hooker.”

“You are a hooker,” I said.

She made a tsk-tsk sound.  “That was another life.  I’m a respectable woman now — married to one of the richest stepdock manufacturers in the known universe.  And you can kindly stop staring at my breasts, thank you very much.  It’s not that uncommon.”

“Sorry.  You know, I am working here.  I didn’t ask for you to barge in on me.”

“You’re working?  In a place like this?”

“I’m checking the security system for the hotel.”

“Ah,” she said, and waved her hand dismissively.  “Since when does Dexter Duff stoop to grunt work like that?”

“A lot of things have changed since you ran out on me, Ginger.”

— continued —

[Want to read the rest?  Buy a copy of the July/August issue of Analog, which you can usually find at Borders or Barnes and Noble.  You can also buy it online for the Kindle or at Fictionwise.]