Tom Crosshill On The Meeting Point of Personal Passion & Public Interest

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today's guest for the blog is a seriously interesting person. Originally from Latvia, Tom Crosshill moved to the US as a teen and now lives wherever his adventures take him. A black belt in aikido, he has operated a nuclear reactor, worked on Wall Street, and toiled in a Japanese zinc mine, among other things. You can see why I like Tom.

Tom’s fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award (thrice), the Latvian Literature Award and the WSFA Small Press Award. He has won the Writers of the Future Award. In 2013, and was a resident at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa — where he started THE CAT KING OF HAVANA. To find out more about Tom’s fiction — and to read some of his short stories — visit his website.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

As with most of my projects, CAT KING was born at the intersection of several inspirations:

-- Being a passionate salsero, I did a dance movie marathon one day and realized most were kind of bad. Entertaining, sure, but not particularly nuanced or true to life. I was inspired to write a dance story which, while fun and fast-paced, would also make dancers go -- yes, that's what it's like! (I also wanted non-dancers to go -- now I want to learn to dance!)

-- I was a nerdy non-athletic kid and it sucked. I wanted to help others in my position develop the confidence to get out of their shell and try some physical activities. More, I wanted to help kids discover the strength and passion required to keep going even in the face of the inevitable struggles and failures and setbacks. The story of a cat video geek who gets it into his head to learn salsa seemed like just the ticket!

-- I wanted to go back to Cuba, an island that has fascinated me since my first trip there, but I couldn't afford to. I figured writing a story set in Cuba would be just as good -- and would help my readers visit too!

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I'm a big believer in structure -- in stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end, with particular functions and requirements for each part. Before I sit down to write a word, I need to know what challenges will be set up for the protagonist in the beginning, how these will evolve through the middle, and what resolution the protagonist will (or will not) find by the end. 

With CAT KING, I had the story of Rick Gutierrez, a cat video tycoon who becomes obsessed with salsa dancing -- and with Ana Cabrera, this smart & cute girl he meets (beginning). 

Following both obsessions takes him to his mother's native country Cuba, where he discovers that love and dance are both a lot more difficult than he ever imagined (the middle). 

Then (the end) Rick comes face to face with Voldemort and must destroy the seven. . . oops, wrong book there. I guess I won't be spoiling the ending of CAT KING after all!

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Absolutely, this happens a lot -- in fact, I believe that it should, otherwise you're not writing a living, breathing story but executing a construction blueprint. With CAT KING, I discovered a lot of layers I hadn't anticipated including in the story initially (such as the mystery of Rick's mother's past and the anti-government struggles of his cousin Yolanda). In your head, the novel is a shimmering ghost of a thing, full of promise but insubstantial. As you sweat and hack and struggle through the arduous process of dragging the story across the imagination/reality boundary line, you discover all sorts of unexpected wonders. 

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

Ideas as such come to me often, but ideas I burn to write about come by only once in a while. I know other authors have dozens of ideas they'd love to write at any given time, but I don't. I'd rather go dancing or do a business deal or read a book than write about an idea I'm only moderately interested in. I'll work to put together something that electrifies me and then get to work. 

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

Because of the reasons I mentioned above, this is typically not a problem for me. But generally I tend to look for the intersection of passion and public interest. Between two ideas that I'm equally excited about, I'll pick the one that I think more people will love reading about.

I recently got stitches in my arm and was taking mental notes the entire time about how I felt before, during, and after the process of being badly injured. Do you have any major life events that you chronicled mentally to mine for possible writing purposes later?

Sure -- pretty much everything, every day, from the time I broke my jaw to the time I watched Lehman Brothers go bust in real time on a trading floor, to that one time I was overcharged for a pound of chicken at the grocery store. I try to reassure acquaintances by noting that my characters are always compositions of several real life figures, seasoned liberally with imagination. Similarly, I don't lift scenes one for one but mix and match. But certainly, every mortifying conversation, every sublime experience of beauty and joy, every hilarious mistake, every medical struggle, every sweet little daily moment gets stored away for later retrieval.  

Zan Romanoff On Story Origins

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today's guest for the WHAT is Zan Romanoff, debut author of A SONG TO TAKE THE WORLD APART. She also writes essays and fiction, mostly focused on food, feminism, television and books. She graduated from Yale in 2009 with a B.A. in Literature, and now lives and works in Los Angeles.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

The origins of A Song to Take the World Apart are definitely murky: when I first started writing about Lorelei, it was in a short story, she was in her 30’s, and the focus was really on her bartender boyfriend. Luckily someone in a writing class suggested I switch the perspective to hers, which was the right thing to do: as soon as I started writing about how she’d figured out what her powers were and how to use them, I realized that I had stumbled onto an idea that let me talk about a bunch of my favorite subjects—music, magic, adolescence, family inheritances, women’s place in history and myth, to name a few. I sort of let myself pretend I was still writing a short story until I was many, many words in, though. 

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I always have a hard time describing this book to people because the concept and the plot are essentially both: a girl figures out who and what she is. Song was a nice first novel that way, because it really is a pretty straightforward journey: Lorelei doesn’t know what’s going on with her or her family, and then she finds out! Most of the work of the book was building out her emotional world: her relationships to her family, her friends, her boyfriend and his friends and his family, etc. It’s pretty much all emotional arc that drives the plot (such as it is) in the book.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Yes, yes, lord yes. I’m not much of an outliner, but I’ll usually keep a handful of blank scene documents in the sidebar of my Scrivener file with notes reminding myself where I want to go next—scene titles like “pool” or “conversation with X,” just so there’s some skeleton in place. I’d say typically about half of those scenes end up getting written. Sometimes those changes are minor, and sometimes whole emotional beats end up getting scrapped when they go. The plot of Song also changed semi-significantly in revisions with my editor at Knopf—it ends up in pretty much the same place, but how it gets there is different than in the early drafts…

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I can come up with ideas like crazy—most of which I know immediately are just funny concepts, things I’ll never actually sit down to write out. Then there are a handful that seem compelling enough to start working on, which sometimes pan out and sometimes don’t. I have not yet figured out how to tell the difference between the two, which is frustrating, because I can only work on one piece of fiction at a time. 

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

So far this hasn’t been a problem in terms of starting projects—what happens more often is that I’ll be a third or so of the way through something and struggling and start thinking maybe this was the wrong idea, maybe I need a new one.

I recently got stitches in my arm and was taking mental notes the entire time about how I felt before, during, and after the process of being badly injured. Do you have any major life events that you chronicled mentally to mine for possible writing purposes later?

Oh god, I don’t think anything has ever happened to me that I haven’t mined for writing purposes. I’ve actually written about that! Now I’m mostly conscious of it, but it’s been really fascinating to get through writing these first two books and see how much stuff gets put in them that I’d been saving for years without quite knowing why—details about houses that have stayed with me, stories about outrageously rich people in Los Angeles doing outrageously rich people things, emotional dynamics from friends’ families that I found fascinating—truly all kinds of stuff.  

Helen Douglas On Inspiration From A Photo

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today's guest for the WHAT is Helen Douglas, author of the young adult time-travel romance novel AFTER EDEN (Bloomsbury USA Childrens, July 2013) and the upcoming sequel CHASING STARS  (Bloomsbury USA Childrens July 19, 2016).

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

Very much so. I came across a photograph from Vanity Fair that imagined what New York City would look like if sea levels were to rise as a result of global warming. It was a frightening, but beautiful illustration. I started researching the likely effects of global warming on communities around the world – not just the effect of rising sea levels on our coastlines and cities and islands, but also on our food production and landscape. And then I began imagining what it would be like to live in a world so recently changed. Because Chasing Stars is the second part of a time travel duology, it had to take place in the future. It was fun – and alarming – to set it just a hundred years in the future, using some of these projections. Then I asked myself how my main character, Eden, would cope if she suddenly found herself living in this world where once powerful nations were struggling to feed their people, and other countries had risen up as world leaders. How would she cope in a world where cereal crops were impossible to grow and insects formed a large part of our diet? 

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

Once I’d decided the story would take place in the future, and that there would be a scene set in New York, I plotted backwards and forwards from that. In After Eden, Eden and Ryan had broken the laws of time travel in order to be together. I knew there had to be consequences. And so, at the beginning of Chasing Stars, a ‘cleaner’ is sent back to ‘clean up’ any trace of Ryan’s presence in the past, and to transport him back to his own time for a trial. As Eden knows about time travel and bits and pieces about the future, she has to go to, to prevent any contamination of the past. The story built from there.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

I don’t like to outline in too much detail, because for me, the ‘fun’ part of writing is the discovering of the story. If I’ve already worked out in detail what is going to happen every step of the way, the writing itself feels like a chore. So, I have an end point and a journey in mind, but usually find myself taking unexpected detours along the way. With After Eden, however, the book I submitted to my agent had a very different ending to the one that was eventually published. Without giving too much away, the original ending was quite bleak.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I have more ideas than I have time to write. They’re not fully fleshed stories, but bare bones of ideas just waiting to be assembled into an interesting shape and given substance. 

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

Generally one of them is yelling just a little bit louder to be heard. That’s the one I’ll go with – the one that makes me most excited. Other times I’ll pass on a story idea for the time being, because I know it will require lots of research and I don’t have the time to do the research at the moment.

When it comes to naming characters, I just rest my hands and let them tell me what their names are. What’s your process? 

It depends. Some of the names of characters in the After Eden series are quite significant. Eden, for instance, is the name not just of the main character, but also of a new world – I wanted to draw on the symbolism of an unspoilt paradise. And because many of the characters in the series live at a time when space exploration is happening, they are names after famous constellations or stars. Many of the minor characters are named after friends. Sometimes I really struggle to fit a name to a character though and have to go through several name changes before it feels right.