Treasure Trove

 

Terry Here answering our weekly question: Where do you get your ideas? What do you use for inspiration: art, music, landscape, the news, dreams, family stories . . . ? 

 When people ask where writers get their ideas, there’s usually some glib answer, but it’s a real question. I’m not one of those authors who sprouts endless plots and twists. I have to have a reason for the book, i.e. What is the book about? Bottom line, though, my ideas come from all of the above except dreams. And most of them begin with stories I’ve heard, often from my extended family. 

 Many of the books in my Samuel Craddock series began as family stories. My grandfather, my father and some of my uncles were great story-tellers and bits and pieces of their stories show up in my books. Having a close extended family meant that when I was a child I was constantly bombarded with stories. The one about the panther. The whispered suspicion that my uncle killed his first wife. The one about the snake. The one about the prostitute. The one about the guy hiding in the bathtub. I could go on and on. And I could elaborate. Instead, I take kernels of them and turn them into fiction. 

 My mother told a lot of stories that were supposedly true, but as I got older, I began to suspect that many of them were embellished. For example, did she have an aunt and uncle who actually banished their son outside in winter and he died of pneumonia? Did she have another aunt who was fastidious and always wore gloves and said she couldn’t eat at anyone else’s house for fear of germs—and then proceeded to gobble food like there was not tomorrow? I’ll never know because anyone who might have known the reality is dead by now. 

My father also loved to tell stories, mostly funny ones.  I suspect some of them were embellished as well, especially his stories about World War II. Those stories were almost always funny, and I’m sure there were humorous moments in the Pacific war, but as a rear gunner his war involved ongoing terror. He never talked about that part. He also spun stories of his childhood. Did he actually spend a lot of time with a band of “gypsies” who camped near his house? Who knows? 

And then there was my grandfather. I tended to believe his tales. He had a way of telling a story that seemed real. He once described stopping at a grocery store in the central Texas deep back country when he was a young man. There, he saw a Wild Child. Literally, a child who had been brought up in the wilds. He couldn’t speak and was totally untamed. The reason I believed my grandfather was because of his level of detail and the soberness of his demeanor as he told it. He wasn’t telling it to be entertaining. He was telling it as a tale of an abused human being. 

When you read my Samuel Craddock stories and you see Samuel commune with his cows—that’s my grandfather. I didn’t have to hear that as a story, though, I saw it for myself. 

As for art being an inspiration, I don’t necessarily get ideas from art, but if I’m feeling drained of energy for writing, or inspired, going to an art museum or the theater always gets my creative energy stirring. Oddly, I never feel that way with music. I love music, but it doesn’t really show me plot ideas. (And that may be a problem because I’ve agreed to write a short story for a music-themed anthology.) 

I can’t say that TV news ever inspires me. It mostly annoys me or terrifies me. But I sometimes clip news articles out of the newspaper because they intrigue me. For example, I just ran across one I clipped with the headline “Don Walsh, a Record-Breaking Deep Sea Explorer, is Dead at 92.” Since I’m embarked on writing a new series about a diver, I added that to my trove of articles about “sea people.” And an article I read in a magazine (which I clipped and still have) was the inspiration for one of the most terrifying scenes in Perilous Waters, my new Jessie Madison novel that comes out in April. 

Sometimes not landscape, but hiking in general can spur me. I once went on a vigorous hike with the admonition that I couldn’t go home until I had figured out a reason for a character to show up in the book I was working on. Suddenly, on a steep hill—the solution came to me. I loved the idea. Too bad that so far I haven’t finished the book. But I might. 

As for dreams, never. My dreams seesaw between excruciatingly boring, and odd. I never have nightmares, but I do have “frustration” dreams. Just last night I had a visit from my old friend Marilyn Wallace, who died many years ago. She was a wonderful woman, so why did I dream that she led me on a merry chase, keeping me from something I needed to get done? I woke up…frustrated, never having reached my goal. Wow. Come to think of it, that sound like a good idea for a story. Stay tuned.