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Ah, those two magical words.  Inspiration and trepidation all wrapped up into one succinct little package.  ‘What if?’  The source of some of my best (and strangest) ideas, as well as some of my worst anxieties.  Hope, fear…O brawling love, O loving hate!  It was the best of times, it was the w-…

…anyways.

Yes, two small-ish words that seem innocent looking enough, but which encapsulate such a wealth of possibility that it staggers the imagination.  My grade 8 english teacher spent an entire week discussing the fact that Stephen King swears by those two words, and that every single novel he’s ever written stems from an idea that just popped into his head, and began with the words ”What if…”

Not hard to make a case for that, really.   It made enough sense that you would begin to nod your head involuntarily after a while.  “What if there was a cemetery that brought creatures buried in it back to life?”  “What if a writer was held hostage by his biggest fan?”  “What if the Devil owned a pawn shop?”  Even if someday I find out that my grade 8 english teacher was a closet basket case who didn’t know what he was talking about and said any old thing that entered his head just so that he could get through the day, go home, and huff glue until his nose welded itself shut…I’d still have to thank him for introducing me to those two words and everything that goes along with it.

You see, some people desperately need a starting point for an idea to grow from, and I’ve found no better way for an idea to germinate and bloom.  Just the other day I had an entire story pop into my head as a result of the following chain of thought:

What if there was something so unique and unusual about human beings that we were considered a priceless commodity throughout the galaxy?

Hmmmm, like what if it was something like adrenachrome or pheremones, something that the human body produced as a natural response to something, like being scared? Or like endorphins are produced by the body while working out?

Oh man, what if it was kind of a ‘Men In Black’ situation, only instead of allowing aliens to live on earth, they monitored the very secretive and methodical harvesting of human beings?  Not like killing, though…more kind of exploitative.  Maybe they’d scan potential candidates, who had to meet certain criteria in order to be suitable candidates…medical checks, very humane.

…only let’s say it was like a drug cartel that was doing it!  This stuff’s illegal, and they have the monopoly on it, and the reason why we haven’t made contact with any alien races is because our presence is being kept secret by these drug-lord aliens, who have set up shop in various governments, made countless people rich and powerful through bribes in order to get what they want, and have a strong desire to maintain the status quo?

So then, there would need to be buy-in from human beings, who would belong to some super-secret organization and do all the leg-work for these aliens planet-side.  Man, what kind of rationalization would have to happen for you to join up with something that was exploiting human beings in that fashion?

…Hey!  What if there were other groups of aliens in direct competition with the subtle drug-lord aliens who didn’t care about being discreet, and who just charged down and captured human beings to exploit as sort of a cash grab?  Like poachers!  People who believed they were fighting to prevent ‘inhumane harvesting’ would be able to rationalize away any sort of doubts about humanity being exploited.  They might even think they were saving humanity…

Oh my god, what if all wars were nothing but ‘turf wars’ orchestrated by different factions of these drug-peddling aliens?

What if this has been going on for centuries?

…and at that point, I got the screaming heebie-jeebies and the hairs started standing up on the back of my neck, and the whole conspiracy theory mindset went into overdrive.  No matter how hard I try sometimes, I can’t help myself…and a ‘What if this is really going on, right now?” gets thrown in there by complete accident.  Still, my rule of thumb is that if an idea is disturbing enough to give you a case of the screaming heebie-jeebies, it’s worth writing down.

This is apparently the point in the chain of thought that would cause Stephen King to lose consciousness, and wake up in a ditch by the side of the road with 6 days beard growth on his face, clutching a completed book manuscript.  I haven’t got the hang of that part yet.  I get stymied by a few more ‘What if’s.

What if I can’t think of a compelling enough story for this little mini-verse I’ve spontaneously created?  What if this universe just popped into existence in my head, fully formed, and simply has no stories within it?

What if it’s already been done?  More to the point, what if it’s already been done better than anything I could ever hope to do with the idea?

I struggle with the love/hate aspects of it…the very qualities that made me an excellent project manager and technical advisor in my work provide me with simultaneous blessings and curses.  I’m creative enough to come up with an idea like this one, and analytical enough to point out to myself the plethora of potential problems associated with it.

What if I only focused on the positive, creative side of ‘What if’?

Selah…

Not everyone can be Stephen King, or even necessarily should be.  Can you imagine if that were to happen?  All children’s books would have warning labels and therapy referrals attached to them, and four-year-olds would be learning how to read with such sentences as “See Cujo run!  See Cujo chase the boy!  See Cujo rake his tender calves with his razor-sharp claws, as he bares his salivating fangs and…”

Uh, where was I?  Oh, yes…I remember.

So, Stephen King is considered somewhat successful in the writing industry, much in the same way that Bill Gates is considered ‘fairly wealthy’.  He has a good solid base of readers, and tends to write consistently well for the genre he’s in…far and away one of the most popular writers in history, but some people don’t much care for him.  Fair enough, you can’t please all the people all the time, and a writer shouldn’t drive themselves crazy by even attempting to appeal to everyone.  Mister King hasn’t penned a story about an art historian who’s in trouble with a law firm while aboard a Russian sub whose captain is trying to defect, and if he were to ever write something Brown-Grisham-Clancy-esque he would likely confuse many of his regular readers.  As much as you may be trying to suppress the idea, you are writing for someone.

Oh, don’t try to kid yourself…you are.

It’s rather like those self-styled ‘high concept’ artists who ‘paint their soul’ (Which has never been photographed, but which apparently can be represented by several splatters of paint on a rectangle in many cases…) and then proceed to cry from the rooftops that they’re ‘too cerebral’ or ‘misunderstood by the common, uneducated folk’.  What’s the problem?  If the only person you’re making something for is yourself, then why would you go showing it to other people in the first place?  They won’t ‘get it’ like you do, since it wasn’t made for ‘them’.  So why complain?  Mission accomplished.

If you’re planning on writing purely for yourself, by all means do so.  Just don’t become despondent or upset when popular notions of success dramatically fail to happen, because the only measure of success in that case should be whether or not you like it.  You wrote it for yourself, after all!  Nobody else should even know it exists, as far as you’re concerned.

If, on the other hand, you’re interested in communicating with a person…whether it is to say “Here’s something cool I noticed” or “Here’s a neat story I thought of”, then considering your audience is something that has to happen.  As un-poetic and commercial as it may seem, it’s not as bad as it sounds.

Let’s take a ‘for instance’.  You’re writing a book that will appeal to fourth-graders, and you introduce a character to the story…let’s say he’s a drama instructor.  In order to give him the appearance of dramatic snobbishness, you occasionally have him spout lines from Richard the 3rd, only because he’s not very good he tends to mix them up with lines from Macbeth and Hamlet.  You write these lines of intermixed dialogue and you laugh your fool head off, while fourth-graders read the text, look confused, shake their head slightly, and continue reading to see if there’s anything in the context that will explain what they’ve just read.

See?  Were you reading Shakespeare in 4th grade?  Probably not…and neither are these grade-four kids nowadays.  No, they won’t have that damage inflicted upon them until Jr High school at the earliest.  So in the end, you’ve done the literary equivalent of telling a joke that’s gone flat, because the prerequisite knowledge required to understand that joke is simply not there.  Not yet, maybe not ever…depending on how interested they become in Shakespeare later on.

Common sense also dictates that if you’re writing for the Romance genre, you don’t include a detailed 4-page description of mechanics talking about how a variable compression ratio engine works.  You may think it’s sexy as hell, (12:1 compression ratio?  How can anyone not find that sexy?) but chances are the person who picked this book up from the section labeled ‘Romance’ is probably interested in a different kind of spark ignition.

This doesn’t mean that you get trapped into writing stuff that you don’t care about.  If you try to communicate with everyone and don’t particularly care about what you’re writing, you could end up with the literary equivalent of ‘Dogs at Cards’ and fail to make any meaningful connection with anyone.  Just be certain that all of the stuff you put in that you do care about will also be cared about by the people who could potentially be reading your book.  Use your discretion.  Odds are good that if you introduce speculative quantum theory into a sci-fi novel, you’ll end up sparking enough interest from the reader to make the journey through that line of thought worthwhile.

Odds are also good that if you’re writing a shoot-em-up Western and the main character is going on at length about his feelings, your readers are going to roll their eyes.

Now isn’t that just the sort of title you would expect to be the lead-in for an article on the antagonist…that heavy-handed son of a gun who’s forever wanting to prevent the good guy from doing what he’s supposed to be doing, the dastard! The heartless so-and-so, the gall-darned…oh, fiddlesticks! Maybe I should just use the kind of language that makes the angels weep and get it over with. ‘Evil Bastard’. There…I did it. And now I feel all tingly inside. Mwaha. MWAHAHAH!!

(I’ve always wondered about using curse words in writing. Authenticity verses accessibility…or in my own view, “How I talk to my buddies” versus “Oh my god, I can’t write that! My mother’s going to read that, and she still knows where the soap is kept.”  Anyhoo…)

…and no, actually, I’m not talking about the antagonist. There’s someone far more dangerous to your principal characters, far more bloodthirsty and terrifying. After all, there is nothing in this universe that a fictional character fears more than…you, the writer.

I think that just about everyone has had that one particular back-of-the-car childhood experience. You know, where your parents are taking you somewhere fun, or out to dinner somewhere…which was the absolute height of cool back when I could still count my age on both hands. You’re sitting there in the car, strapped down with your seat-belt, thinking about a delicious root beer float, or chocolate cream pie, or just pilfering 10 packs of sugar and downing them when nobody’s looking, until pretty soon you’re so wound up and twitchy that actually ingesting sugar seems somewhat redundant. Suddenly, out of nowhere, your brother jabs you in the arm for no reason and giggles to himself. Of course when he did so, he had to reach past your sister’s face, and in the course of doing so ended up rubbing his elbow against her nose. So, now she’s all indignant and hits him in the ribs, just as you’re doing the same thing to his shoulder while mouthing the words “Stop it!”…and pretty soon the entire back seat is like something out of the world wrestling hall of fame.

And then, those famous words would get fired into the back of the car from the adults sitting in the front, and they were always something to the effect of “All of you, stop fooling around and behave yourselves, or I will turn this car around and we can forget about going to ______!”, where _______ was equal to the object of our desire at the time.

Now, this was usually enough to get us to shape up, and there’s a good reason for that. One time early in our career as children, my two siblings and I all got to the point where we’d heard that phrase enough to disregard it, and it became just another way of saying “You kids are making a lot of noise.” We’d hear it when we were mucking around, quickly calculate our current decibal level, halve it, and proceed with doing what we were doing that our parents wanted us to stop. In our minds, the danger was never actually real. We were like testosterone-filled soccer players who routinely kicked opposing players in the face and had never been shown anything other than a yellow card.

And then, one day…red card. Tweet!

The shock, the horror, to suddenly become aware of the fact that those particular words being said to you in that order weren’t just background noise, but an actual potential consequence. Looking out of the car window and realizing forlornly that you were, in fact, returning home…sans food, and sitting behind parents who had just about had it up to here*.

(*Make a salute, and then tilt your hand so that it’s level with your eyebrows. That’s were ‘here’ always was…)

Had to be done, too. I realize this now, though at the time it was one of the most unfair and unjust things I’d ever experienced. (After all, it wasn’t *me* that had misbehaved. Not *really*…) If someone threatens to pull the plug on something and never ever does, after a while you just say “Yeah yeah yeah. Whatever.” If someone threatens to do the same, and has actually done so before…whole different story.

So, every now and then you’ve got to do it. You can’t just foreshadow something that’s going to happen and then manage to miraculously save your characters, or somehow have them extricate themselves from every single bad situation. If you make threats of that nature, you’re eventually going to have to make good on your threats in order to get the reader to believe you’re not a flake. You’ve got to unleash the beast from time to time, do something so cruel and upsetting that your reader actually stops mid-paragraph and says “NO!” with their mouth agape. Sometimes it means breaking your own heart and killing or maiming a character you really really like, just because you know what kind of an impact that will have.

Mortality is everywhere in literature. There’s the sudden loss of a loved one that turns the main character into a loner, a tragic figure who becomes lost and introspective. Being a ‘best friend’ in a hard-boiled detective novel is practically begging for death. I read this one book series which had one of the main characters die by chapter three, and which had *the* main heroic figure die by the third book, at which point the story began to focus on his friends and son picking up the threads of their new reality and attempting to cope. As a reader, it was hard to take…but it had to be done.

My own story is no exception; one of the most likable and heroic protagonists will die prior to completing his lifelong ambition, and a cheerful light-hearted girl will lose her legs. With this I hope to make my readers cry, not because I want them to be sad or because I’m a sadist, but because the concepts of value and cost are hopelessly entwined, and in order to properly appreciate and understand the true value of what my characters have done, a price needs to be paid.

Trust me. I may not enjoy it, and it may hurt like hell as I’m writing it, but it’ll hurt a lot less later on as a result. Imagine if nobody took the ‘danger’ you were writing for your characters seriously…

“Slowly, they crept towards the trunk. The ominous scratching got louder, and louder, until sudde-…”

“It’s a cat, isn’t it.”

“…”

“Well? Isn’t it?”

“Uhm, yes. But it could have been something else! Something faaarrrr more sinister and fearsome!”

“Yeah yeah, whatever. It’s always a cat, just like the loud ‘bang’ is always a car backfiring. Come on…get on to the next chapter, monkey. Let’s get this over with.”