Seekerville: The Journey Continues

 Erica here: It is my pleasure to host Delores Topliff today on the blog. Delores and I, beyond being writers, have another connection. Years ago, when my daughter was in high school, she took college classes through University of Northwestern, St. Paul, and Delores was one of her professors!

Welcome, Delores!

 

I’m picking up writing speed now. Christmas Tree Wars, releasing October 5th, involves two feuding Wisconsin Christmas tree farmers in 1966, one Norwegian and one Swedish. Their son and niece both come home to boost farm finances and compete to grow the White House tree chosen to be decorated by First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson. Their farm rescue and growing romance helps the feuding farmers and town rediscover the reason for the season. There are even Norwegian and Swedish Christmas recipes at the end of the book, just in time for your Christmas baking.

Today lets focus on where story ideas come from. The easy answer is ANYWHERE! Hang on tight to all sparking story ideas. There’s never an inconvenient time for them reach your brain. Like babies, they choose when and where they wish to be born. Moms seldom dictate those dates. My purse holds a notepad and pen for story ideas, but they often gets overlooked. Instead, key ideas often get jotted on the backs of envelopes or even utility bills. These days, I often pick up my ever-present iPhone and dictate enough notes or short text to capture the idea.

While writing a number of stories or poems, I can tell you exact places and times when ideas came. If I paid attention and tuned in, they were mine to keep and watch them grow. If I didn’t, they waved goodbye and visited the next appreciative person who would give them the time and space they needed.

For example, Christmas Tree Wars was born one Sunday morning when I drove along Minnesota farm roads going to church when I took a different road and spotted something interesting. A row of tall, uniformly evergreen trees stood along one side of the road. On the other, one single mid-sized evergreen tree stood by its lonesome self bordering the edge of a hayfield. Instantly the Lord gave me the basic story idea and arc. The owner of the row of trees was to provide a stately evergreen to a public figure. Instead of sacrificing one from his own row, he cut and presented the one belonging to his neighbor, kind of like the O.T. prophet Nathan comes to King David talking about someone stealing someone’s beloved ewe sheep. Of course some details change as stories develop but I’m happy to remember how the story kernel dropped into my heart on that exact stretch of road. I wish it was always that easy, but it helps when we welcome inspiration and tune in.

 

One of my best poems arrived between our automatic washer’s rinse and spin cycle as I bent over the appliance with a scrap of paper and pencil.

Wilderness Wife, releasing next February, came from appreciating all I’d heard about Dr. John McLoughlin, founder of Fort Vancouver in my home town at the end of the Oregon Trail. Most of us know a fair bit about this famous man. One day I wondered what his wife, Marguerite Wadin MacKay McLoughlin was like and found a gold mine that totally inspires me. For me, an occupational hazard when writing historicals is that so much to inspire, it’s hard to weed out and decide which key parts to keep.

Connect with Delores
Website: www.delorestopliff.com (blogs every 2nd Tuesday)

Email delores@delorestopliff.com

Twitter: @delorestopliff
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DETopliff

 Supposedly this is the question authors are most frequently asked.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas???

My answer to that is --- EVERYWHERE.

I am blessed.

I have no shortage of ideas. I have notebooks with ideas, computer files with ideas. I've learned to write them down when they hit, so I don't forget. That image of the writer scribbling on a scrap of napkin is all too true!

It's sort of magical, because when I go back and look through those ideas, the excitement for that story builds all over again.

When Harlequin announced the Killer Voices contest, I needed a suspense story. I remembered an idea that had come to me one night. I'd been standing at my kitchen sink washing dishes, and I could hear a block party on the next street over. That suspense writer brain kicked in and I thought WHAT IF...  Ultimately the story changed so that original idea wasn't even recognizable, but it got me started. Christmas in Hiding was the result.

A few years ago, I was sitting having coffee with my editor at RWA, and we were talking about the popularity of Amish fiction. RWA's conference that year was in Times Square. I live in NYC, but normally I avoid Times Square like the plague. I remember at the end of the conference thinking that I got the appeal of Amish life - simple, calm, as far removed from Times Square as your imagination could take you.

That got me curious to learn more about the Amish. A few weeks later, I was chatting with an author friend about her editor wanting both books set in Texas and Amish books. I joked that she should do Amish in Texas.

I was joking, but the idea stuck, so I Googled. What I found intrigued me SO much that I knew I had to use it in a story. (More about that in a minute.)

When I started writing Texas Witness Threat, I had one idea in mind. It was a question I'd thought of a few years ago. What would it feel like if you were someone who suffered anxiety and then you witnessed a murder, but no one believed you because there was no body? I have no idea where the idea came from. I was walking along the street when it popped into my mind. But I wrote it down.

When I actually started to write the story, I had no idea where the story was going - and then I remembered the result of my Google search. 

When I searched Amish in Texas, I discovered there had actually been a number of settlements, but none of them lasted very long. Oh well. 

But then I found this article, and I was so intrigued. You can go read it, but the gist is that after Ike devastated parts of south Texas, a group of Amish from Indiana came down to help rescue the animals and rebuild the fences and homes.

Amish Volunteers Help Gulf Coast Ranches Rebuild After Ike.

In that moment, a story was born because my brain started playing What if? What if they came to help, liked it, and stayed?

The result was the book with the snake cover. 

My box of books arrived last week, and I have to say, snake not withstanding, I like the cover. The art department did a fabulous job with the colors. The book glows.

I had to laugh though.  When Christmas in Hiding arrived, I took a photo of Fenway with the book. 

When I tried to replicate that for his book, he shied away from the book as if the snake was real! Oh, Fenway.

I could go on and on with where I got various story ideas, but enough about me. Where do you get your ideas? 

When we teach children to keep a writer's notebook, we tell them to fill it with seed ideas, so they'll never have to say they have nothing to write about. 

Do you have a notebook full of writing seeds or a folder full of napkin scribbles? Tell me what inspires your stories.

by Pam Hillman

How many times have you read the headlines in a newspaper or from an online source and thought, “well, that was interesting?”

But how many times were you able to take that small snippet in a headline or an event and turn it into a full-fledged story? Can every incident become a novel?

Maybe, maybe not.

Pssst… in the hands of a Mary Connealy or a Ruth Logan Herne, I’d say that just about any heading or topic could be turned into a full-fledged novel. :)

So, just for fun, I browsed some topics online. So many of them are extremely boring and don’t even warrant reading the article.

Okay, let’s mostly take all the cooking and recipe articles off the table. Sure, some of us write and read about cooks and cooking, but it’s doubtful that an article or recipe is going to send us running to our laptops to pound out a story about a French chef trained in Paris and a road-kill country cook from backwoods Mississippi. But, such a story would be quite interesting.

Now this subject heading caught my eye. But is there anything of substance to be found? (Sorry, this article turned out to be LONG, but I still included it.) If interested, read/skim it here.

Yes, this article had my mind thinking of characters who speak different languages trying to learn to communicate with each other; or two scientists who cannot agree on anything, but have to work together. Or a group of anthropologists who find an entire tribe of seemingly color-blind natives. Lots of possibilities here, but still it's a stretch because it's very broad and there isn't anything to really make you sit up and say "aha"!

Link to article

Well, this article was kind of interesting, but ideas for stories just didn’t JUMP out at me when I read it. Sure, it might be a good article to read to help with character development, but not necessarily for those big picture ideas. Moving on...

As I pondered why I was having a hard time finding just the right headings that would make us as authors sit up and take notice, I realized that I was looking in the wrong places, and my focus was too broad.

What I needed was human interest stories. Yes, we’re cooking now! I took screenshots of just the headlines for several human interest stories from People Magazine and every one of them jumpstarted my thoughts in several directions for story ideas.

All of these headings are about somebody, or a group of people. All of them jumped out at me with potential for story ideas. I especially liked the one about kids interrupting Zoom meetings. Oh, the fun someone could have writing a Rom Com where the hero is suddenly thrust into Zoom meetings and needs a nanny for his kids or nieces and nephews. I can see the chaos now, as well as the "KISS" Zoomed to the entire office. lol

So, yeah, reading recipes, or political squabbling, or the top ten ways to grow your investment portfolio won’t necessarily generate compelling stories. But delve into the headlines of human interest stories and you’ll have more ideas than you can shake a stick at!

Maybe you have all the ideas you'll ever need tucked into your folders, so this isn't necessarily about searching for stories, but about those that just JUMP out at you when you're not even actively looking. So, where do your ideas come from? The news? A snippet of something on Facebook or Twitter? A sermon? A phrase in another book? Something a friend or family member says in passing?

excerpt...

author's note...

further encouragement...

1. "Homeless shelter" angle 

2. Real estate buyouts 

3. City politician trying to make a difference 

4. Bad cop muscling locals for graft money 

5. Local minister fights for the rights of the poor 

6. Kindhearted fire marshal sees danger in old, decaying building

1.Organizer is the heroine.

2.Organizer is heroine's mother, a real do-gooder down-home type person.

3.Heroine is busy executive.

4. Heroine had the best of everything, can't see the magic of hand-me-down gowns but is pressed to help by what?

5. Hero is cop? Sheriff? Teacher?

6. Schools with poverty populations are often under-performing. Does this open a new door for heroine?

A story of one child... one teacher... and the men who love them both.

Kerry McHenry is nobody’s fool. She sees her own tough upbringing in Cassie’s dire situation, so she works tirelessly to guide the young girl, trying to help her become everything that God wants her to be. At the same time, she finds herself torn between a commitment-phobic pediatric oncologist from a nearby town and Phillipsburg’s widowed deputy sheriff, a complicated man who is still angry with God. As the stakes grow ever higher and the characters’ lives intersect in unexpected ways, each will face a true test of faith—and come face to face with indisputable evidence of God’s love.

Multi-published, bestselling novelist Ruth Logan Herne has written over 40 novels and novellas and is pretty sure she's living the dream. Stop by her website ruthloganherne.com, friend her on facebook or see what she's up to on Twitter @RuthLoganHerne. An avid gardener and baker, she's pretty sure she does both because flowers don't talk back and cookies are everyone's go-to food!SaveSave