Magic—not spells and hurled fireballs, but that inspiring combination of wonder, awe, and excitement that drives artistic creation—is, for me, born on the edges of things. Edges mean boundaries and borders, tension and change and flow. In the landscapes of fiction the rise of desert into mountain, the uneasy meeting of the cleared and settled with the primeval forest, the hint of island shadow on the horizon of the sea, are the sorts of places that suggest Story. They are zones of transformation where things can or might or should happen, the places where change is found, and change coming for good or ill to a character or to their world is what drives stories.

A lot of my favourite stories, the ones I read when young and which fuelled my desire to tell stories myself, start off with edges. The Shire of The Hobbit (never so named in it, of course) is a domesticated land on the edges of a great unknown, but the unknown forces its way in over the borders, prowling on the fringes of collective hobbit awareness. Wolves came out of the wild in a hard winter; goblins were fought by heroic ancestors; “lads and lasses” used to run off into the blue for adventures, and dwarves now pass through, travelling on their own mysterious business, while in The Lord of the Rings itself strangers begin to cross the southern border and like distant thunder, there are rumours of unease in the wider world, though the sun still shines on the bucolic idyll of Hobbiton. In Sutcliff’s The Lantern-Bearers, Aquila lives in an edge time and an edge place. Rome is withdrawing from Britain, the empire is failing, the barbarian raiders are settling and staying. The frontier of civilization is retreating like the tide, and an era is coming to an end. The kingdom of Damar, in McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown, has beyond its frontier an unknown land of strange and dangerous magic, out of which the hero Aerin’s mysterious mother appeared. Taran, in the Chronicles of Prydain, lives with his elderly guardian in a cottage surrounded by forest, where a straying boy can be pursued by a monstrous huntsman out of myth and rescued by a legendary hero only a few miles from the safety of his home. The known and explored universe in Cherryh’s Chanur series is revealed to share a frontier with unknown aliens; that discovery disrupts the balance of power, creating new lines of tension between the several intelligent species of ship-captain Pyanfar’s known world. In Glen Cook’s Black Company series, the political world is on an epochal edge, an empire breaking apart.

The heroes of these stories that played such a role in forming the compost out of which my own stories began to grow are on the edges themselves. Bilbo is not, at first, an edge character, but he becomes one by daring to cross over the boundaries of his illusory safety. Afterwards, he never fits properly into his former place again. “… Bilbo was cracked, and Frodo’s cracking,” says Ted Sandyman: Frodo is already regarded as odd, not quite fitting into his proper place as a moneyed gentleman of the Shire, and he is restless, hearing the call of the road. Aquila, a British-born Roman officer whose family is generations removed from Rome, stands on an edge between places and times and between duty and family. Aerin is born on the edge, child of a suspected foreign witch, never accepted, never her father’s heir. Taran, a foundling ambitious for heroism, stands at the edge of himself, always looking outwards to become something more. Pyanfar finds herself an edge person whose decisions push her out of her place and into a role where she stands between species, negotiating a new balance of power. The mercenary physician Croaker is on the edge, ever observing and recording the history happening about him, standing back from it all, until he falls into the heart of a disintegrating world and pulls the company with him into a long transformation.

In my own writing, it’s the characters who exist on the edges who most fascinate me and fire my imagination. They’re the wanderers who are not wholly of the societies through which they pass, or the outsiders not entirely at home with or accepted by the people amongst whom they must live. Wren, Rookfeather, and Kokako of the Torrie books, Maurey and Nethin from The Warlocks of Talverdin, and Moth, Mikki, Holla-Sayan, and Attalissa of the Blackdog world are all edge people, by choice or by circumstances or both. Of the nine above, only two, Wren and Kokako, are entirely human, and that’s another edge that drives my imagination when I sit down to write. By being outside of humanity, even if only a little, they are immediately set apart, and by being apart, they become the observers, the restless, the ones who will most likely be the first to notice the shadows on the horizon and decide to investigate, or who will be that shadow on the horizon themselves. It’s characters such as these who kindle my urge to find out more about them by telling their stories. In setting out to discover them through their stories, I have to build and explore their worlds, which leads to adventure, history, politics, gods and goddess and demons, battles with enemies and solitary struggles with the self in the dark, but in all my fantasy novels, it starts with that one character on the edge of being something else, and a horizon, a frontier, that must be crossed. That’s where magic lies.

About the Guest Author

K. V. Johansen

K. V. Johansen was born in Kingston, Ontario, and is the author of numerous works for children, teens, and adults. She predominantly writes secondary-world fantasy but is also the author of some science fiction, picture books, and two books on the history of children’s fantasy literature. Johansen has an MA from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Her lifelong interest in ancient and medieval history and the history of languages has had a great influence on her writing and world-building. Aside from travelling to the Republic of Macedonia in 2010 to receive the first-ever “International Ana Frank Award for Children’s Literature [in Macedonian]”, меѓународната награда „Ана Франк“ за најдобра книга, for the Macedonian translation of Torrie and the Snake-Prince, Тори и принцот-змија, she has not done anything terribly interesting or adventurous in her life; she’s been too busy writing. Her most recent book is Blackdog, an epic fantasy for adults published by Pyr. She lives in New Brunswick, Canada, with a wicked white dog who, thus far, has not evinced any sign of being a shapeshifter, though if slipper-stealing constitutes evidence of a demoniacal nature, he might quality.

For me, there are two different kinds of inspiration or perhaps levels of inspiration. We can ask what moves a writer to write at all. We can also ask where he finds the seeds for particular stories.

My desire to write came from an early love of stories and a belief that I could spin tales of my own. I knew I had an active imagination and a knack for language, so why shouldn’t I follow in the hallowed footsteps of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. G. Wells, the first two writers (aside from Dr. Seuss) I remember reading?

Later, I found out there was some tough slogging to be had by treading in those footsteps. A writing career was hard work and demoralizing, too, when rejection slips and bad reviews flew my way and a new release failed to find an audience.

But I also learned that on those days when it’s going well, writing is satisfying and sometimes even fun. And, I heard from readers who liked my stuff. Together, those two things, combined with pure stubbornness, kept me going through the bad moments and keep me banging away at the computer still.

The inspirations for particular stories can come from many places and be specific or otherwise. I like learning about science, particularly astronomy and astrophysics. Given that most of my work is fantasy of one sort or another, you’d assume that little of that information turns up in it, and you’d be right. But I think the pure wonder involved in contemplating the collisions of galaxies, M theory, and stuff like that expands my mind and imagination.

I enjoy learning about pretty much anything, really, history in particular, and that’s information that sometimes does inspire a specific story idea or plot development. The results can be far more interesting and original than relying on genre tropes alone.

Fiction sometimes inspires me in a more specific way than the simple love of stories I alluded to before. My novel Pathfinder Tales: Called to Darkness pays tribute to my first literary hero Edgar Rice Burroughs. I analyzed how a Burroughs novel works and tried to hit similar beats and achieve a similar tone in a story all my own.

Similarly, I might not have come up with my “Brotherhood of the Griffon” Forgotten Realms series if I didn’t admire the historical adventure novels of Bernard Cornwell. His books help get me excited about the possibilities of a mercenary company fighting in Faerûn.

And when I read the urban fantasy of Simon R. Green and Jim Butcher, I realized, hey, I like this genre, and I bet I could write it. I cross-pollenated the conventions of the form with my love of poker and came up with Blind God’s Bluff.

Speaking of cross-pollination, if a writer has an understanding of multiple genres, he can sometimes come up with something good by combining them. I’ve read a lot of mysteries, and that’s no doubt why I used a whodunit as one of the major plot threads in The Rite. The Black Bouquet is both a sword-and-sorcery story and a caper novel, while Queen of the Depths is simultaneously heroic fantasy and a spy story.

So, okay. I guess that covers what inspires me. Well, except that I left out making the rent.

About the Guest Author

Richard Lee Byers

Richard Lee Byers is the author of forty fantasy and horror novels including Called to Darkness, his first Pathfinder novel, Blind God’s Bluff, the start of a new urban fantasy series, and Prophet of the Dead, the latest in a series of books set in the Forgotten Realms universe. He is also the creator of The Impostor, a post-apocalyptic superhero series, has published dozens of short stories, writes a monthly feature for the SF news site Airlock Alpha, and contributes to the Night Bazaar, the Night Shade Books authors’ blog.

You could say I had my great “awakening” in the summer of 2004. That it coincided with an early mid-life crisis isn’t just a nice bit of dressing to the story, it is an integral lump of dirty coal burning in my cast iron stove.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

A good awakening doesn’t happen without a pit of fuel to drive inspiration. Whatever it is that strikes the flint nestled in your brain matter at an influential moment in your life will spark the fuel that motivates you creatively for many years. For me, it was The Exorcist, the Rapture, and the combined works of H.G. Wells and Jack London.

I was born the son of a coal miner deep in the hills of southeast Kentucky. I have many memories of my father coming home, covered head to toe in coal soot, holding his black aluminum lunch pail in one hand and his battered orange safety helmet in the other. Often he worked 14 hour shifts in the deep mines, and often these occurred on Friday night (movie night!). Friday evenings, Mom would take me to the local video store and we would choose a rental. My mom was a big horror fan back then (this was the early 80s, a great time for horror). Some selections I remember include The Howling, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Night of the Demons, The Thing, Dawn of the Dead, Alien, Aliens, and Teen Wolf (ugh).

Looking back, I’m glad she had the good sense to say no to movies like Cannibal Holocaust and Salo. Who knows how messed up I would be otherwise?

Those Friday nights hold some of my fondest memories. They also hold some of my most terrified memories. Night of the Demons was a particularly rough one. But by far, the hardest movie to deal with as an eight-year-old kid was The Exorcist. This segues nicely to . . .

. . . being an eight-year-old kid who attended service three times a week with his grandmother at the local fire and brimstone Southern Baptist church. Three times a week for every year of my life until I left for college, I sat in frightened silence as a screaming, angry preacher convinced me I was going to hell, that I must accept the Lord into my heart, because it was all going down soon, brother, the Lord was coming back in the great Rapture to send the sinners to the lake of fire.

While not watching the living horror at church or the acted horror on the television screen, I sought solace in a small library of books my parents, inexplicably, kept in a junk drawer in their living room. There was a treasure trove of classics. Several H.G. Wells novels. Jules Verne. Jack London. As you might imagine, I was a sheltered child, and Mr. Wells, Mr. Verne, and Mr. London were my connection to the outside world.

Now we can return to 2004. That’s the year I turned 30. I’m now 38, and I’m still traumatized by the event. I hit 30 and an early mid-life crisis hit back. (Other factors were in play, such as working a dead end job and the rapid loss of my lovely red locks). I remember sitting at my desk, holding a pen over a yellow legal pad, trying to think of ways I had made a positive difference in the lives of anybody (discounting immediate family and spouse). That pad stayed empty, and this bothered me greatly.

My creative inspiration comes from those Friday nights with my mom, reading H.G. Wells with a flashlight under the covers, and parceling out the good parts of the preachers’ sermons. You can take a quick look at the Apex Publications catalog and see all three in play with books such as Dark Faith: Invocations, Machine, and An Occupation of Angels.

I am inspired to publish, edit, and write by an overwhelming need to see that blank yellow legal pad filled with pages and pages of notes. I’ll be the first to confess that I’m no saint; I absolutely want to make money, lots of it, while filling those pages. But I’m the type of person that draws comfort knowing that life has meaning, a purpose, a quantifiable goal beyond that which requires faith in an omnipotent god (all hail Lord Cthulhu!). The last eight years, running Apex Publications has given me this.

And until I run out of pages or the ink in the metaphorical pen goes dry, I hope to continue.

About the Guest Author

Jason Sizemore

Born the son of an unemployed coal miner in a tiny Kentucky Appalachian villa named Big Creek (population 400), Jason fought his way out of the hills to the big city of Lexington. He attended Transylvania University (real school with its own vampire) and received a degree in computer science. Since 2004, he has owned and operated Apex Publications. He is the editor of five anthologies, a Stoker and Hugo Award loser, an occasional writer, and usually can be found wondering the halls of hotel conventions seeking friends and free food. He currently has edited three titles for Apex: The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine, The Book of Apex: Volume 2 of Apex Magazine, and The Zombie Feed Volume 1.

I am a 90s baby (1990 to be exact). When I think back to my childhood, I have flashbacks of waking up at 6 am to watch episodes of Sailor Moon, X-Men: The Animated Series, and The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Growing up, I would go through tons of videogames, anime, and other “nerdy” forms of entertainment. I was one of those kids you would find on message boards creating poorly drawn Final Fantasy fanart or sheepishly clogging the manga and comic book aisle of Barnes & Noble.

Yeyo: The Mother

My sister (who is now a writer/performer/producer/BAMF) and I would ingest these stories to inspire our own narratives. We created dozens of games. Our favorite was “Alex & Samantha,” which paralleled our own lives, but in this world colors were a bit more vivid, magic was a bit more tangible. We even had our own doorbell that would melodically coo out our names. Alex and Samantha did everything from competing in Olympic Marathons, to preparing concert setlists, to experimenting with alchemy for our spells (that meant mixing our father’s cologne with flour, water, and cheap jewelry) .

I would tell “Samantha” that we had to save the world and harness our special abilities, and she would respond, “Yes, okay! But we can only save the world after going to class and practicing our dance routines.” Alex and Samantha were students, performers, magicians, and warriors. Any role was possible as long as we had our imagination. I didn’t realize it back then, but these were my earliest lessons in honing my craft as an artist. We were creative children to say the least, and our ability to play has kept our sense of wonder alive to this very day.

Erykah Badu

In recent years, I find myself exploring the same characters I used to worship as a child, and asking why I was so drawn to them. These characters were usually strong women, mystical children, or those who were underrepresented and oppressed. They were all different faces of the same story—of the same hero (or let’s be real here: of the same diva) .

Lately, my childhood “diva worship” has evolved into a full-blown exploration of contemporary mythmaking. With my illustrations, I love exploring classic archetypal characters and ancient mythologies. However, I am most excited when I start to unearth my own personal mythology by finding new faces within old archetypes.

I Was Here – World Humanitarian Day 2012

These new faces allow me to define and reclaim different pieces of my identity. It is as though I am meeting myself at the gates of the spirit realm to unravel my mythopoeic self. In this realm there are tons of characters living in a vast nebula of creativity and wonder. They are simply waiting to appear in this reality. So the physical process of creating new work is the crafting, stirring, and molding of this nebula to form new stars, constellations, and galaxies.

When it comes to the actual physical process of creating new illustrations, I have a very systematic approach to sort out the chaos. Typically I start by collecting reference images and doing stream-of-conscious sketches. These sketches are very loose, and are mostly about motion and raw visceral energy. It is akin to freestyle dancing or authentic movement where I allow myself to just move and live on the page free of judgment. Then I create thumbnails based on those nebulous scribbles. When I find a thumbnail that works well, I create a more refined sketch. From there I work on the value structure, and then move onto color. As the image becomes more refined, I allow myself to play with parts of the image through detailing, noodling, and really dancing throughout the picture plane. So essentially the process is a journey that allows me to go full circle.

All of the wonder and curiosity from my childhood is the root of my inspiration. Many years have passed since those days of running around the house shirtless while yelling different incantations and spells. But I still find myself playing, and allowing my wonder to steer me into imaginative worlds.

About the Guest Author

Odera Igbokwe

Odera is a recent alumnus of Rhode Island School of Design (Class of 2012). As an illustrator and performance artist, Odera explores storytelling through color, mythology, African dance, and of course, divas. With his degree and diverse skillset he hopes to create interdisciplinary work that addresses the sacred and assists in unlocking the mythopoeic self. When Odera is not exploring the spirit realm, he is busy saving the world as a contemporary Sailor Scout or furthering his knowledge in Beyoncé Studies.

At conventions, you might hear discussions of whether a writer outlines a novel or prefers to write “by the seat of her pants.” Much as I love hearing the word “pantsers” uttered thirty times in an hour, I prefer George R.R. Martin’s description of writers as “architects” or “gardeners.”

The great thing about being an architect is that you have a blueprint from the start. You know where things are meant to go. Outlining makes it easier to lay pipe for character development and plot or dialogue callbacks. Outlining makes it less likely that you’ll write yourself into a dead end or need to discard whole chapters in revision.

The horrible thing about being an architect is that you lose some of the pleasure of discovery, which gardeners face with virtually every scene. To a pure gardener, an outline can be a cage. Where’s the fun once you already know what’s going to happen?

In my heart, I sometimes wish I were a gardener. But because I often write for shared-world settings, it’s better that I’m an architect. My editors need to know where I’ll take the characters and how they’ll interact with the established systems of the world: magic, culture, politics, and more. The editors must also play traffic cop to ensure that we various writers don’t contradict each other. To a shared-world editor, an outline isn’t just helpful, it’s mandatory.

Fortunately, outlining and “pantsing” aren’t mutually exclusive pursuits. While I prepare massive outlines, I still find plenty of fertile spots to do a little gardening both before and during composition.

Planting Characters
Even before the outline, the architect’s first opportunity for a bit of gardening starts with the characters. Almost all of the characters in my Forgotten Realms or Pathfinder novels are ones I created. While much of the pleasure of discovery comes from sketching them out at the start, there’s plenty to come during composition. Every time they speak, I enjoy the discovery of both their inner lives and their relationships to others.

Sometimes I also include prominent figures from the setting or ask permission to include another author’s character. In those cases I’m not seeking discovery so much as trying to represent the characters as faithfully as possible—I suppose it’s a bit like writing Spider-Man or Raylan Givens on Justified. These characters usually enjoy immunity from permanent change, but with some novels you never can tell: Sometimes I have permission—or orders—to whack one.

Going Rogue
While I stick to the map most of the time, I don’t hesitate to take a detour if I realize it’ll make the journey more exciting. If a chapter I outlined to open with a fight feels abrupt, during composition I might reverse it to build suspense before all hell breaks loose. If I feel the manuscript is coming up with way too much exposition, I might shift from the outline to create a dialogue or action scene instead. In either case, that revision gives me a sense of discovery even though I know I’m still headed for the same final destination.

My most common deviation from an outline is to combine or delete chapters. To some degree I do that because the manuscript is running long, but sometimes it’s also to diminish redundant or repetitive scenes. I’m finding the shortcuts that I couldn’t see from the map.

And of course sometimes I just come up with a better idea than I had while outlining. If it isn’t radically different, I simply go with it. Only once (so far) has the editor disliked the new route, but removing it was a matter of deleting paragraphs, not whole chapters.

Little Things
My favorite discoveries are often the tiny details. Lately those have included gestures and phrases in my Pathfinder Tales novels. For instance, a woman concerned about her pregnancy draws the spiral of Pharasma over her swelling belly to ward off death. Low-born characters from Cheliax “shoot the tines” as a rude gesture. Those who worship Lady Luck might grumble, “Desna weeps,” when thing don’t go their way, or they might draw her wings over their hearts when facing danger—like when cheating at cards.

In my latest Pathfinder Tales novel, Queen of Thorns, I enjoyed extrapolating certain cultural and magical aspects of the elves and gnomes of the setting. Elves are no more all the same than humans are, and while the common folk celebrate the Ritual of Stardust, the aristocrats host a Midsummer Masquerade complete with “trees” that produce wine served in goblets formed by the tears of ensorcelled trolls.

More discovery came while exploring the details of how worshipers of Calistria celebrate her three “stings”: lust, guile, and revenge. When Radovan first meets the inquisitor Kemeili, he enjoys a taste of two of those right away. My “discovery” came not in the form of invention but in application: finding ways not only to show off the established setting but also to connect them to characters and their hidden motivations.

All too often I hear self-professed “pantsers” complain of having trouble getting started or of getting stuck halfway through a great story. And I know there are times when a dedicated outliner faces a scene that seemed great in outline but later feels absolutely worthless. No matter whether you think of yourself as an architect or a gardener, consider mixing those philosophies to enjoy the best of both worlds.

About the Guest Author

Dave Gross

Dave Gross is the author of several recent Pathfinder Tales novels, including Prince of Wolves, Master of Devils, and Queen of Thorns. His Forgotten Realms novels include Black Wolf and Lord of Stormweather, among others. His stories have appeared in anthologies ranging from Realms of Dragons to Tales of the Far West, and more recently in Shotguns v. Cthulhu and The Lion and the Aardvark. He has edited magazines including Dragon, Star Wars Insider, and Amazing Stories. While he continues to write novels and short fiction, he is also the lead writer at Overhaul games, developers of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition.

Check out “Killing Time,” a free Pathfinder Tale, as well as a sample chapter from Dave’s latest novel, Queen of Thorns.

“Assist the new without sacrificing the old.” This line from Thomas Mann is something I feel in my bones as I write, and I think every writer has to come to terms with the notion, whether it’s confronted consciously or it squirms up unrecognized from beneath the surface. For some, the word “tradition” can connote tired and worn stodginess, but for me it’s the living root that taps the well of creativity, a sort of metaphysical channel to my long-gone peers from the past.

When I was completing The Song of Kwasin—the concluding novel in a historical fantasy trilogy started by Philip José Farmer back in the 1970s—I had some big decisions to make. One of the most important was whether to write in a more modern style and to avoid many of the literary conventions common to novels of the mid-1970s that have since fallen into disuse. I weighed both sides, since at the time I didn’t know whether the novel would sell as a standalone volume or as part of an omnibus of the series. I knew many twenty-first-century publishers wouldn’t grok a book written in the style of 1976 that also unapologetically drew on styles over a hundred years old.

But I stuck with the feeling in my gut: that to respect the work I was about to undertake, I needed to revel in what had gone before. I knew all too well the literary roots of the Khokarsa trilogy. At a young age Phil Farmer had come to love the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard, and so had I. These two authors were the primary inspirations for Hadon of Ancient Opar, Flight to Opar, and the outline and partial manuscript Phil had provided me with so that I could complete The Song of Kwasin. Phil, I knew, had adopted his own gritty, more realistic style in the first two novels, and yet still somehow managed to capture the essence—the fun and wonder—of the pulp tropes employed in the adventure tales of Burroughs and Haggard. Moreover, Phil’s approach subtly mixed SFnal elements with the fantasy of these authors, but did so in an artful way that did not overbear the traditions that inspired the Khokarsa series. So while I worked on the novel, I knew I not only had to account for the pulp tradition, but also for Phil’s New Wave SFF innovations with it. To do this I looked to the body of Phil’s work, in particular themes and sentiments he had used throughout his literary career. I explored how Phil had already laid the groundwork to interplay these elements with the traditions established by Burroughs and Haggard, sowing them into The Song of Kwasin where it seemed most likely they’d organically take root.

Of course, my own innovations grow alongside Phil’s in the book. I don’t know if the modern reader (or even I) can see them, since we’re often blind to the conventions and styles of our own times. But I know they’re there, and that a future reader some thirty-five or forty years from now will be able to see them plainly. Writing is a dialogue that takes place over centuries. As the conversation turns, new topics and feelings and questions and insights arise, all of which are born out of what has gone before. Move the conversation forward, but don’t forget what’s been said.

That’s one of the things that inspires me most when I write: the opportunity to converse with the literary giants of the past, and the potential to carry on the conversation they started into new realms. Who knows how long our species might carry on such a dialogue, or where it might lead? I honestly don’t know. But meanwhile I’m having a grand old time chatting.

About the Guest Author

Christopher Paul Carey

Christopher Paul Carey is the coauthor with Philip José Farmer of Gods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa, and the author of Exiles of Kho, a prelude to the Khokarsa series. His short fiction may be found in such anthologies as Tales of the Shadowmen, The Worlds of Philip José Farmer, and The Avenger: The Justice, Inc. Files. He is an editor with Paizo Publishing on the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Chris and his wife Laura live in Seattle, Washington.

The whole idea of inspiration fascinates me. In my quiet moments, I believe that I don’t have much of an imagination. So many of my stories and characters spring from my own life that I often feel that I’m not so much “writing” as I am “transcribing.” Also, I consider myself a spiritual person, thus created in God’s (the ultimate Creator) image, thus I could say that the Holy Spirit is my Muse. So in a sentence, life is my ultimate inspiration and writing is my mission.

When I wrote King Maker, the first book in what would become my Knights of Breton Court trilogy, it sprang from those two things coming together. I was a volunteer at a ministry called Outreach Inc, which works with homeless teenagers. I was teaching a creative writing class and was encouraging the kids to imagine themselves in different settings. It became quickly apparent that they could barely imagine themselves surviving to next week. Life had stolen their ability to dream . . . but they still had stories to tell. I threw out the line “you could be anything you want, princes, princesses, knights” and that stuck with me. What if they were, right where they are? From wanting to share their stories, my novel was born. That’s the way it typically goes with me. My stories spring from my life in a bunch of different ways:

-My identity: We all have those existential moments of wondering “Who am I?” Wrestling with that question plays itself out as a theme in many of my stories. From my short story, “Family Business” (Weird Tales), where I contemplated the idea of being “The Other” within my own family; to “Warrior of the Sunrise” (The New Hero, vol. I), where issues of race, spirit, and family collide.

-My faith: Matters of religion and personal faith fascinate me and form a good part of who I am. They play in my imagination and pop out in interesting ways, such as my novella, Orgy of Souls (Apex Books), as I wrestled with the idea of the role faith plays in how we choose to live our lives. Or the idea for my anthology series, Dark Faith (Apex Books).

-My tragedies: Writing is my therapy. Writing allows me to put some distance between me, what’s going on, and what you are feeling. I am able to examine it from a variety of perspectives (not just what the main character is going through but how it impacts those around her/him). I can talk things through using my characters, dig deep within and plumb their hearts and hidden feelings and truths. My story, “Rainfall” (Cemetery Dance), springs to mind as a recent example of this.

-My children: nothing delights and stirs your wonder like listening to your children. As I hang out with them and their friends, I feel the need to memorialize this time in words somehow. I can literally feel the mental gears turning as I think about how to capture their lives and spirit in story.

As writers, we give up our lives. We cut open our emotional veins and bleed all over the page for our readers’ entertainment. There is a certain amount of fearlessness and abandon as we put ourselves out there, exposing ourselves. We are the court jesters speaking truth to power.

I am surrounded by reminders of who the ultimate Author is. In some ways I see myself as joining in His creative work and mission whenever I create a story. I am also keenly aware that I’m often working out my spiritual journey as much through my art as through my faith. Life is wondrous, even the dark sides of it, and there is a beauty not only to Creation but in the act of creation.

Most importantly, I live an interesting life. I meet people, encounter strange situations, and have weird dreams. We all do. So pay attention to the life that you’re living. There are stories all around you just waiting to be told.

About the Guest Author

Maurice Broaddus

Maurice Broaddus has written hundreds of short stories, essays, novellas, and articles. His dark fiction has been published in numerous magazines, anthologies, and web sites, including Cemetery Dance, Apex Magazine, Black Static, and Weird Tales Magazine. He is the co-editor of the Dark Faith anthology series (Apex Books) and the author of the urban fantasy trilogy, Knights of Breton Court (Angry Robot Books). He has been a teaching artist for over five years, teaching creative writing to elementary, middle, and high school students, as well as adults.

I can’t plot out my short stories ahead of time; I like to discover them as I write. Just start with an image and see where it goes. That, for me, is what makes writing wondrous.

Wonder is generally seen as a good thing, of course, though some of it is threatening and dark, and I reckon there are only some of us who can’t help but search for it, darkness, and wonder at it.

I see darkness in a look one student gives another in class when I’m teaching; in the grocery store when some gal tries to get a green avocado near the bottom and sends the whole pile tumbling to the floor; in the shoes tossed over the phone lines and the birds that sit next to them; in the man selling flowers on the street corner on Sweetest Day; in an apparently empty rowboat, or high school band concert, or a can of Silly String, or even a family having a picnic to celebrate the Goodness of the Good in the Good, Good World. Even in a sweet comment my four-year-old daughter makes, and in a bumper sticker that says, “My daughter the honors student can kick your football player’s ass” (okay, I’ve never seen this one, but I’ve always wanted it).

I’m far from a worrywart about myself or things related to me. In fact, I’m probably just a bit too irreverent and unconcerned. But I worry about those closest to me, like my aging parents, and, of course, first and foremost, my two daughters. So, the answer here about how wonder, and more importantly darkness, are part of my creative process, well. . . .

This is far from being my original thought, and Ray Bradbury probably put it better many times, but, consider this: wonder comes with remembering what it was like to be a kid. Kids have a childhood full of “whys” and “hows”: Why does the moon change shapes? Why do we have eyebrows? Why does pencil lead stick to paper? (The last being a question from my teenage daughter when she was in pre-school—she was the master of the Stump-Daddy Question.)

As we get older, we have to keep the why/how part of us but also let it blossom into the “what if” stage. This is where invention comes in, how we progress and adapt and evolve. It’s also how we start to worry, and how we cause ourselves to have to face the darkness, the Unknown, if you will. What if ________, whom I love dearly, gets sick, gets hurt, disappears, or, God forbid, dies?

For fiction writers, especially speculative fiction writers, our job is in the equally maligned and loved What-if Business. Those folks who don’t write, or at least read, fiction may not understand. Those of us who like to write and/or read dark fantasy fiction, or horror fiction as we should call it unless we’re afraid of the stigma, well, our what-ifs tend to be the kind that make some folks shy away, I reckon. You see, I believe that what-ifs are further probes toward honesty. If hows and whys lead to “facts,” what-ifs lead toward deeper exploration, something beyond facts: truths.

If facts deal with science and logic, truths deal with what it’s like to be complex, sometimes disturbed, confused organisms called humans. So truths deal with humanity beyond a biological level. These truths are in the darkness, they are the Unknown, and that’s what we’re striving for.

Fiction is all a big humpin’ WHAT IF.

What if one of my students has noticed a tiny, hairy, naked woman climbing behind another student’s ear while carrying a spear? What if the gal who dumped the avocados all over the floor leaves them there, and then me and the other shoppers find her in another aisle later and she is trapped, her face in a silent scream just beneath the surface of a newly sprouted but already dead-looking avocado tree in the cereal aisle? What if the birds are the ones that steal shoes and string them over power lines? What if the Sweetest Day flower salesman has a thorny rose where his penis should be? What if worms fill the bottom of the rowboat, and they have teeth and someone desperately needs to get off the shore? What if a fire alarm sounds during the school band concert, the auditorium is evacuated, and the firefighters and rescue squad go on an ax-murdering rampage?

What if?

The wonder is in the form of imagination for the writer. And imagination can only come from memory. We draw upon things in our mind already and put them together in new ways. No one could have written about a flying ship . . . if a ship and knowledge of flying were not already there in the ol’ brain, in other words. And dark fiction likes to work in fantastic imagery, which often serves intentionally or unintentionally as metaphor.

The tiny, hairy, spear-carrying woman might stand for jealousy. The face in the avocado tree might represent selfishness. The shoe-stealing birds might stand for mankind’s inadequacies. And the flower peddler’s anatomy might represent greed or secret lust.

Wonder for me—dark wonder, so often in my work—is in saying, in wondering, “What’s the story behind that?” Going from the concrete, which is the literal imagery in the story, to the abstract, which is, really, theme.

It’s in seeing and showing the world in vivid detail and in discovering what humanity’s place is in it by witnessing human struggle. And in knowing that if you see Silly String scattered and sprayed all around the end of someone’s driveway and mailbox, it surely has to do with a mail carrier who is struggling desperately in his relationship with a rodeo clown who is haunted by dreams of a psychic bull that can predict the immediate future.

About the Guest Author

Brady Allen

Brady Allen is the author of Back Roads and Frontal Lobes, a collection of 23 tales in the genres of horror, crime, the road story, soft sci-fi, dark fantasy, surrealism, existentialism, the weird tale, and even some plain ol’ realism. He has published numerous short stories in magazines, journals, and anthologies in the U.S, England, and Ireland and has received honorable mentions for a couple of them in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror volumes from St. Martin’s Press, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship in fiction from the Ohio Arts Council for three others. He loves Reds baseball on a transistor radio, and the sound of a train in the still of the night calls to him. Allen teaches writing at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and lives in Dayton with his two daughters.

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When Will Horner asked me to contribute to the “Awakenings” blog, I had to think about it, and when I thought about it, I realized I needed to think more. You see, the point of the blog is to talk about what “awakens your wonder,” and if I’m being honest with you and with myself, the answer to that would be everything. I don’t think there’s a single thing that happens that doesn’t make me feel something or leave an impression that someday might turn into a story. And that’s the way it works with most (possibly all) creative types. We are inspired by and reflect the world around us. Not just a part of it. All of it. But that’s not an acceptable answer. I can’t sit here any type “everything” and be done with it. How does that reveal anything? It’s too vague to hold any real meaning, no matter how true it may be. This left me searching for something more specific, something inside that ephemeral “everything” that I could latch onto and explore, but what? That question lead me to a rereading of many of my stories, and I discovered something there. I discovered a piece of “everything” that I seem to return to again and again, unknowingly until now. I discovered my memories there, in every story, just below the surface or sometimes blow-by-blow as things happened. But that discovery made me pause, because is that an acceptable answer? What’s special about memories? And aren’t they in themselves stories?

They are stories, I think, because what we remember is never exactly what happened. It can’t be. Our perception is always skewed by our desires, by our wants, our needs, by our lives and hopes and dreams. By us. What we remembered is never truly factual because it’s our memory of it, our interpretation. We place emphasis on certain things; we see things from angles specific to us. Our memories are part of us. They are our story, but is that story something that truly “awakens our wonder”? It is.

Thinking about it, I remembered many of the stories of Harlan Ellison, especially the novellas All the Lies That Are My Life and Pretty Maggie Money Eyes. Both of these, he claims, were straight out of his memories. And then I remembered an interview I watched once with Ray Bradbury, where he talked about the story that changed his life. That story, he said, was “The Lake,” which he based on a memory. He did the same, he claimed, with every story after it. Then I picked up Richard Matheson’s new novel, Generations, which is overtly autobiographical, and I realized this was something I could talk about, because if it’s good enough for the greats, then why wouldn’t it be good enough for me?

Looking over my stories, I realized it’s the common thread. My first published story grew out of my parents’ custody battle, my first Pushcart-nominated story grew out of an early morning walk in Columbus, Ohio’s Park of Roses, when I watched the snow melt. You see, even that moment was special, at least the way I see it. I wasn’t just wandering while stuff dripped around me. I was thinking about my life. I was feeling the cold and the wind and the wet, and that was making me feel something, face something. And when I think about it, every memory is like that. Maybe it’s because of its importance that I remember it or maybe everything that happens in life is that important. I don’t know. But I do know that nothing is simply a “fact.” There’s always more to it. There’s always us inside of it, and we see that, we know that in what we remember. We don’t—or at least I don’t—always notice it as it’s happening, but I do when I look back. And that’s where stories come from. They come from moments that are more than they seem at first glance, that carry more in them than you’d expect.

When I was little, probably two, maybe three, my family lived on a small farm in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, and I used to go out back and sit on this large rock that waited by the edge of the forest there. I’d sit there and think, and I remember seeing the shadows stretch and then take hold of each other. I remember the yellow eyes of beasts hidden in those trees. I remember the sounds and the smells, and I remember the way it made me feel. Now, is what I remember what happened? In one sense I know it isn’t. I was just a toddler sitting on a rock. But in another sense, it is, because it’s how I lived those moments. And stories come from what I lived, not from what necessarily was. And you only get that—get the full sense of that—in memories.

About the Guest Author

Christopher Shearer

Christopher Shearer’s writing has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Horror World, Big Pulp, From the Fallout Shelter, the all-star anthology Dark Light, and many more. In the past five years, he has received three Penn State University Best Short Story Awards, a Demon Minds Best Short Story Award, and two Pushcart Prize Nominations. He works as an editor with Cemetery Dance Publications and reads for John Joseph Adams’s magazines, Nightmare and Lightspeed, as well as his upcoming anthologies. Chris is also a featured book reviewer on fearnet.com and co-chair of the Bram Stoker Award Long Fiction Jury. He attends Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction where he is mentored by Tim Waggoner and Lawrence C. Connolly, and he is finishing his first novel.