Writer in Residence

I am in Perth for the Writers Festival. It was 42 degrees yesterday, and I was able to observe the effect of the heat not just on myself but on visiting British writers who had flown in from a snowy winter only days before. While the heat was not pleasant, it did give me an idea for a story — or rather, observing how I and others reacted and coped with it gave me an idea for a story. Not about hot weather, as such, but how the environment can rapidly change how people think and behave. It’s a kind of transformative effect, and there are lots of other examples. Like the increased agitation of disturbed people in asylums when the wind is strong, or the moon is full (hence the term lunatics).

I often get ideas for stories out of such relatively simple interactions with the world. There is a part of my mind that is always observing, storing things up, and then some other part adds in the catalyst “What if?” and a story is begun. For example, what if the transformative environmental effect was something familiar to the people who lived in a certain city or country, but very strange to others, even more so than going from a cold Northern hemisphere to a 42 degree day? What if that environmental effect was sorcerous or magical in nature, and for example, changed the way words were seen and heard?

I may never write this story, of course. I have notebooks full of story ideas, fragments of stories, and notes. My computer backups include thousands of words of half-finished stories, opening chapters for novels and so forth. But every now and then I will remember something I have started, or have some notes about, and I will bring it up and finish it. Sometimes this happens many years after the initial thought, sometimes only days. Every story seems to find its own time to be made complete.