Fears and Ideas

By Freda Warrington

Writers may give a small inward groan when people ask, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ but, the truth is, it’s an eternally fascinating question. My own ideas seldom arrive fully formed, but develop in a tree-like fashion and usually in need of considered pruning. Everyone has ideas, but the real question is, what makes us want to turn them into novels?

I began writing in childhood, always in search of the thrilling ‘otherworld’ feeling I got from my favourite books, and from the landscape of Charnwood (near Leicester, England) where I grew up. Fantasy was the genre that spoke to me. Although often unfairly derided as escapism, fantasy can reach deep into the heart of fundamental ideas; concerns of friendship and passion, bravery, suffering, heroism.

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The Genesis of City of Fire by Laurence Yep

By Susan Chang, Senior Editor

As an editor, one of the things I love to do is come up with ideas for books I’d like to read and find the perfect person to write the story. These ideas come from anywhere and everywhere: TV, magazines, web surfing, video games, comic books. One day, I was sitting at home watching an episode of National Geographic Explorer. Called “China’s Secret Mummies,” it was about ancient mummies unearthed in the Tarim Basin in Western China in 1978.

Surprisingly, these mummies had Caucasian facial features and light hair. Who were these people? What were they doing there?

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Inspiration, Failure, and Zombies

By E. Van Lowe

It amazes me where the inspiration for our stories comes from: a dream, a song, a fleeting image—and sometimes failure. That’s how it was for me. The inspiration for Never Slow Dance With a Zombie came out of a failed pitch.

In Hollywood we sell TV shows by pitching them. In 2004, when I was hot off the success of writing Even Stevens for the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon invited me to pitch a show idea. The idea I came up with was about a girl whose father had become a whistle-blower and the family suddenly found itself in the witness protection program. Yeah, I know. Where are the zombies? Bear with me.

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Zombies, Chinese Food, and Showers (and not necessarily in that order)

By David Lubar

Nathan Abercrombie was born in a Chinese restaurant and baptized in a bathroom shower. It all started on Mott Street in Manhattan. I was at a Wo Hop with my wife, celebrating our 30th anniversary (It’s a little known fact that the traditional 30th anniversary gift is duck skin).

My publisher was there, too (yet more proof that Tor is very family-oriented). We were discussing ideas for a middle-grade series when Kathleen Doherty mentioned that zombies were going to become very popular. This was well before the recent crop had staggered into view. (Kathleen has an eerie ability to see into the future).

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Flashing back to FlashForward

By Robert J. Sawyer

I’m experiencing cognitive dissonance related to FlashForward. My novel is all about seeing the future, but I find myself constantly flashing back to the past as I think about it.

See, although there’s a TV series based on my book debuting Thursday, September 24, 2009, I finished writing the novel back in 1998 (and Tor published it in June 1999).

Over the past decade, I’d forgotten much of what the book said. I never re-read my novels after they’re published, but, since I’m a consultant on the FlashForward TV series (and writing an episode myself), I broke with tradition and recently read FlashForward again.

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The Way the Wind Blows

By Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

Over the course of Frank Herbert’s original six novels, and our ten subsequent novels, the Dune Chronicles span more than 15,000 years of epic science fiction history—from the titanic struggles of the Butlerian Jihad 10,000 years before Dune, to the final battle more than five millennia after the reign of Paul-Muad’Dib. For The Winds of Dune, instead of ranging far and wide across galactic history, we went back to the core of the original story, exploring the heart of what has made the series so enormously popular.

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On Writing The Sword-Edged Blonde: The Bar Where Everybody Knows Your Name

By Alex Bledsoe

A man walks into a bar.

If this happens in a science fiction or fantasy novel, the author has his job cut out for him. Not only does he have to describe the bar physically, but also its patrons. They might include aliens, ogres, trolls or elves, all of which can have any number of permutations. Then the drinks have to be laid out, and the money system enumerated. When all that’s done, the author might have enough imagination left to finally describe the man who walked in.

I’m unusual as a fantasy or science fiction reader, in that the details of made-up societies, worlds and cultures hold far less interest for me than the people (I include non-humans in that term) who inhabit them. I remember listening in wonder to another well-regarded fantasy author describe the elaborate monetary system he’d designed, and for which so far he’d had no use. It’s something I could never do.

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Caleb Fox and Thunderbird

When I blinked, I banged from my desk into a another world. The grass I sat on was rosy, the sky salmon, and the sun was rising, which it was always doing here. Nothing ever changed, and nothing could die, except mortals like me.

I knew this place, the Land beyond the Sky Arch. When the Immortals summon you, the journey takes less than an eye flicker. Eat your heart out, Captain Kirk.

Thunderbird glared down at me from a boulder. Everything about him is intimidating. Each wing is a rainbow, each feather a snake of a different color. When he flaps, snakes shoot out and turn into thunderbolts. He is Bird, and the winged creatures of Earth are his shadows.

“So you’ve published a book about us.”

“Yes.”

“Which you call a fantasy.”

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Children of the Dawnland: Our Nation’s Forgotten Heritage

By Kathleen O’Neal Gear & W. Michael Gear

“In America, we live on top of 15,000 to 20,000 years of prehistory, and no one knows anything about it. Most of the schools in North America, when they teach Indian history, teach the Indian war history. So they talk about the interaction between the Native peoples and the European invaders. What Mike and I try to do in our prehistoric fiction is to show people that the cultures that existed in North America were as magnificent as anything you would find anywhere else in the world.”—Kathleen O’Neal Gear

Ever since People of the Wolf was published in 1990, readers, fans, teachers and booksellers have asked us when we were going to write a children’s novel. Children of the Dawnland and its teacher’s guide fulfills our promise to do so. Why is American archaeology so important? One in five Americans claims Indian ancestry, and Children of the Dawnland was written to introduce young readers to the depth and origins of our nation’s forgotten cultural heritage.

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Why I Love Libyrinth by Pearl North

By Jim Frenkel, Senior Editor

Young Adult fiction has always been near and dear to my heart. When I was a kid, I was one of those nerds (we hadn’t progressed to geeks yet) who would go to the library, take out a big stack of books, read them in a week and exchange them for another big stack.

There was always a problem with this: not nearly enough science fiction in the YA section. As the librarians got to know me, they started letting me take out books from the adult section. There weren’t enough SF books in the adult section either (and it was harder to find them, because I didn’t know the names of all the good SF writers), but I was a compulsive reader who gobbled up all sorts of books—biographies, history, mysteries, and other books. I just loved to read…and I’ve never lost that love.

So when I got the manuscript for a novel called Libyrinth—a place containing all the books ever published on Earth—I was intrigued by the idea. The idea of a library—a mysterious, huge, labyrinthine building—with everything was just…delicious.

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