Babel Clash

It’s that time again where we must say goodbye to our current guests and welcome our new guests.  Special thanks to Mira and Jesse who filled the last two weeks with all things zombie.  I had a blast reading your posts and getting a peek into your world.  Do come back again!  If you have any last words (or zombie survival tips, or book plugs), we’d love to hear them. 

Next up, we switch focus from the undead to the epic with New York Times Bestselling authors Brandon Sanderson and Brent Weeks (who have both coincidentally started new series with their recent releases)! 

In The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson brings us the first in a ten book epic fantasy series called The Stormlight Archive.  Brandon was also one of the very first guests on Babel Clash and we’re glad to have him back on the blog.

Brent Weeks is also another Babel Clash alum (who could forget Brent’s epic debate with Joe Aberbrombie).  Brent’s new book is the first in a brand new series featuring Gavin Guile, a prism with only five years to achieve five goals. 

Welcome back to Babel Clash, Brandon and Brent.  We can’t wait to see what you have in store for us.

No, Jesse, you’re wrong; it will not all be okay, and the odds are good that the mean ol’ series will kill me in the night.  I will take comfort from knowing that yours is likely to do the same to you.  The series is the monster under my bed and in my closet, and since you probably have both a bed and a closet, one night, when you least expect it, you’re going to realize that you have a ten volume science fiction epic eating your brain.  And then?  Then I will laugh.

I do think that any really lively idea–and yes, this includes zombies, even if the zombies themselves can’t exactly be described as “lively”–is very likely to take over your brain and make you do what it wants.  I think of catching a story as being less like contracting the zombie virus, and more like getting one of those charming parasites that can take over ants and drive them around like little armored cars.  Once it’s in there, you just have to pray that it goes somewhere else before it chews your head entirely off.
 
Yes, I am a lot of fun at the dinner table.

The “where do you get your ideas?” question is common as mud.  The problem is…so are the ideas.  Seriously!  Putting together a good story is a lot like cooking a good meal.  You start with your protein, be it zombies or werewolves or vampires or a travelogue romance.  You add a vegetable–the end of the world, a political campaign, a race around the world, a case of mistaken identity, whatever.  Maybe you should get some starch in there: a love interest, the rumor of a cure, something in the cornfield.  Season to taste, serves four to six people per hundred pages.
 
Ideas are easy.  Combining ideas in a way that seems fresh and new (even if it isn’t) and keeps you interested until you finish writing the first draft, that’s the hard part.  Combining ideas in a way that keeps someone else interested is even harder, which is why so many stories wind up going untold, even in today’s storypalooza of Internet and print media and information everywhere.

Things that have caused me to write a book:

* Jetlag
* The Counting Crows
* Fish
* This interesting blueberry bush near my friend Michael’s house
* Fluke parasitism
* Reading Kenneth Muir’s Horror Movies of the 1980s cover to cover
* A blue sweater
* So You Think You Can Dance

Things that have remained entirely true to the original idea:

* …

…so yeah, there’s that.

Ideas have never been the problem.  Finding the exact right recipe to make those ideas come alive, that’s the hard part.  Sometimes you get it wrong.  Sometimes you’re halfway through the process before you realize that it should have been turnips, not potatoes, and you have to start basically from scratch.  Most of the time, you’ll get a better meal because you did that.  When you don’t, you’ll get a learning experience.  Not as tasty, definitely necessary to your growth as a writer.

And you can’t have my thirty-six hour days, Jesse.  I sold my soul at the crossroads to get them, fair and square, and you’re going to have to get your own.  If you’re really interested, I have a number you can call, and operators are always standing by…

Okay, I’m now stroking Mira’s hair because apparently I’ve struck a nerve. There, there, Mira. It will all be okay. That mean old series will get in line at some point. Or something. Though I do think it’s funny that both of accidentally wrote zombie books and accidentally wrote series. There must be something about zombies that inspires in a different way. Maybe it’s the brains thing. That must be it, they just take over your brains. 

I wonder if it was that way for George Romero, too? Or Simon Pegg? Or any of the other great zombie creators? I know for me, zombies tend to take over my brain whenever I have an idea for a book. I get a kernel or a character and then it starts itching. Twitching. Telling me to think about it. And I can’t stop (hmmm, also kind of like a zombie) until I work on it.

Lots of times people ask writers where we get our ideas from. It’s probably the question I get asked most (along with ‘so are they real books?’ and the answer is yes, they’re freaking REAL books). Like there’s an idea store or something that you could roam into and browse the aisles and just pick something out. Welcome to Idea-Mart! May I offer you a mind cart? Sometimes I wish it were that easy. Add item A plus item B and mix well, bake at 350 and voila! A New York Times Bestseller.

But it’s a little more fluid than all that. Sometimes I get ideas from characters, as I mentioned in my last blog. Sometimes it’s a scene that pops into my head (like the therapist scene in MWZ). And sometimes it’s something like an article in a newspaper or magazine, a vague reference in a movie or a line I overhear on the street. And that gets me thinking, “Gee, what if…”

What IF someone started a zombie extermination business?

What IF the zombie cure gave the person who received it some kind of zombie superpowers without the zombie side-effects?

What IF someone was trapped in a lockdown rehab when the zombie virus started to spread?

What IF someone was on a cruise and everyone got turned into zombies?

And those are just the zombie ideas! Don’t get me started on my thoughts on superheroes, witches and shapeshifters who turn into depressingly awful animals (some people shapeshift into cougars, but what if you shapeshifted into a squirrel with giant nuts). The what ifs take over, popping up like weeds in the flowerbed of my mind and the way I’m able to pull them is to write them down and develop them into healthy stories.

Most writers I know are the same. It’s never a problem of not having ENOUGH ideas, it’s not having enough time to dedicate to them all. Damn the need to sleep, eat and pet the cat!! If only I had thirty-six hours in a day! I could get so much done. Wait, sorry, I was just rubbing my hands together like a mad scientist. That’s bad, isn’t it?
But what if the mad scientist… oh damn, another weed!

See, I have a little problem: I am incapable of thinking in one-book increments.  Feed actually started as my attempt to write a book that would have no sequels, largely because I envisioned it as ending in such a way that none of my cast would ever be willing to work with me again (assuming any of them lived that long–this was a lot of drafts ago, and I honestly have no idea who was originally supposed to walk away when the dust cleared).

I tend to start less with plot than I do with situation.  In this case, my starting “what if?” was “what if the zombie apocalypse came, and the human race didn’t end in a blaze of bodily fluids and bullets?”  I wanted to play with the ecology of zombies.  Plot, and character, really didn’t matter to me, because I wasn’t going to write the book.  I was just going to play with the dead things.

Then I met my protagonists, Shaun and Georgia Mason, and character started to matter to me.  Who were they?  Why were they those people?  What did they think about each other?  About the people around them?  About the zombies?  I have literally hundreds of pages of notes on things like “what does Shaun eat for breakfast” and “how does Georgia feel about the current weapon licensing system?”  This had the handy side-effect of leaving me with hundreds of pages of notes on the world and how it worked (and people who thought Feed had a lot of data in it, you really have no idea…)

I was about halfway through writing Feed when I realized that there was going to be a sequel, and what that sequel was going to be about.  I did a lot of swearing, and took a lot more notes.  I was about two-thirds of the way through when I realized it was a trilogy.  Thankfully, there isn’t a fourth book (yet), because if there were, I think my head would probably explode.  But all in all, this is a good microcosm of how I write series.

For me, a series is an organic, living thing, a story that sprouts unexpected branches and then goes trundling merrily along them, like a snowball rolling down a hill.  Stories attract stories attract stories.  Sometimes, stories have endings, and that means the series is done; the Newsflesh trilogy really is intended as a trilogy, whereas the books I write under my urban fantasy ID (Seanan McGuire) tend to be part of long, twisty, ongoing series–and even those tend to grow on me when I’m not looking.  I live in a sea of literary kudzu.

It’s rare that I get to want anything; mostly, I just follow the story where it takes me, and, when necessary, break out the hammer of logic to force everything back on track.  It’s exciting.  In that “oh God oh God oh God what am I doing where am I going is that a hill?” kind of way.  Good thing I like roller coasters, huh?

I envy people who can decide “I think I’m going to write a series today,” rather than waking up and finding themselves six books into something that promises to be twenty-seven books long.  It must be restful.  So yes, Jesse, you have my envy.

So you’ll have to forgive me today if my brain is a little… squishy. No, I have not been attacked by rabid zombies (yet!!), it’s just that as I’m writing this I have just spent a powerhouse week banging out the end of my third book in the “Living With the Dead” series. I’ve written lots of books over the years (under a different name, in a different genre) but never followed the same characters through multiple books, so this has been a lot of fun for me. And since I know Mira is also writing a continuing series I thought maybe she would have some thoughts on this topic as well.

In MARRIED WITH ZOMBIES (which have I mentioned is available freaking RIGHT NOW at bookstores near you and you should pick it up because there are A. Zombies and B. It’s funny and C. I’m batting my eyelashes and looking at you sweetly right now) I start off with my main character Sarah and her husband, David. They’re a couple on the edge of divorce and then WHAM… a zombie apocalypse starts and really screws up their day. But it helps them put their problems and their marriage in perspective so… well, it’s not all bad.
And that was pretty much as far ahead as I thought. I mean, I wrote MWZ in order to entertain myself. It was so way far out of my usual genre and I love zombies and I thought it would be funny and I wanted to use all my own zombie knowledge. But my agent loved it and suddenly it was sold and life was oddly wonderful. But then Orbit said, “What’s going to happen to them next?”

And I realized I had to answer that question. And write another two books about my couple. Ultimately it turned out to be pretty fun. Not only did I get to follow them as their relationship changed and grew (cute mad scientists and zombie superpowers are just two of the new challenges that will face them in the upcoming books) but I also got to see their characters change.

As a I writer, character is usually what comes to me first. In my opinion character is plot because who a person is will directly influence how they react to any situation I put them in and that will change how to story develops. If Dave and Sarah had decided to stay in their apartment and just wait out the apocalypse, then MWZ would be a very different book than it is when they decide to take a risk and a road trip. Both are good stories (a great “trapped in the apartment” zombie story is Quarantine and its Spanish parent [REC]), but they are very, very different in the way they develop and feel.

Plus, I wanted their challenges to be different. MWZ is a very straight forward “oh shit, there are zombies, what do we do?” type story. But in the second book, they KNOW what the zombies are and how they fight them. So I had to change the zombies. In the third book I had to create new challenges, both zombie and human.

So now I’m done with the third book and I’ve seen Sarah and David grow and I find myself wondering what readers think of stand-alone books versus series. And also Mira, you have a really twist ending to FEED (which I won’t give away) and that changes your series considerably. How do you build a series?

So Jesse mentioned the concept of the “why” at the end of her last blog.  I like the “why”.  I like the “why” a little bit too much, as the occasional narrative restraining order will illustrate.  I was the little kid who would keep asking “Why?” for an hour, not because I wanted to be obnoxious (although I often was), but because I really truly deeply honestly wanted to know.  Why was the sky blue?  Why do cats have whiskers?  Why can’t I unleash an unstoppable army of cyborg dinosaurs to destroy all in their path before making me unquestioned ruler of the shattered world?  Why?

(Atmospheric scattering, so they can figure out whether they can fit through small spaces, and because my friends won’t let me.  You should probably thank my friends.  They are all that can stand between mankind and my frequently quixotic wrath.)
 
Now, I am the first to admit that things are scary even when they’re unexplained.  If you open your closet and a live rattlesnake is rattling at you from the middle of the clean towels, you’re not going to go “Well, this snake would be frightening and venomous if only it had a motivation and a logical reason for being here.”  You’re going to go “AHHHHHHH CRAP SNAKE!” and slam the closet door.  Even if you know why the snake is there–you live in rattlesnake country, you’re in the middle of a Syfy Original Movie, I came for dinner and my bag was making ominous rattling noises–you’re still probably going to go “AHHHHHHH CRAP SNAKE!” and slam the closet door.  Knowledge does not always eliminate fear.

Knowledge can, however, be used to enhance fear.  Imagine you’re swimming in a warm tropical river, content and serene.  Now imagine I come drifting by in a nice boat, refusing to touch the water.  That would be worrisome, right?  Now imagine I proceed to explain that I’m staying out of the water because it’s full of candiru, otherwise known as “urethra fish,” and go on to detail exactly what will happen if the candiru find you.  (I would do this.  Gleefully.  Because I think things like the candiru are cool.)  You’ll go from “tranquil” to “terrified” in under a minute, all because of knowledge.

That being said, in some cases, too much knowledge can actually cancel out fear.  I grew up in black widow country.  I have black widows living under my house and on my back porch.  I know what they look like, what their bites feel like, how dangerous they are, and how to avoid them.  I know that they’re actually pretty shy, as spiders go, and that if I don’t mess with them, they’re not likely to mess with me.  I am not afraid of them, because I know too much about them.  The “why” has become the antithesis of horror, and that’s, y’know, bad news for you if you were hoping to scare me with spiders any time soon.  (It’s also bad news for the people who choose to room with me in places like, say, Australia, where the spiders are the size of dinner plates and thirst for the taste of human souls.  I think they’re adorable.  This is bad for the health of everyone around me.)

So it’s a delicate balance between knowing/not knowing, and one that has to be maintained with the utmost care.  I believe that a little bit of knowledge can go a long, long way toward enhancing the quality of terror, like a pinch of salt can go a long, long way toward enhancing the taste of chocolate chip cookies.  Without that tiny bit of bitter, the sweet isn’t nearly as strong.  Well, without that tiny pinch of comprehension, the terror isn’t going to last nearly as long.

Like G.I. Joe once said, knowing is half the battle.

The other half involves a chainsaw and a shotgun.

Well, I hope you spent all of Sunday wondering the answer to Mira’s question at the end of her Saturday Blog. Why did Jesse feel the need to destroy everything to launch off her apocalypse in MARRIED WITH ZOMBIES. Actually, I found Mira’s whole blog very interesting. It’s true that there are a few apocalypses where everything doesn’t go to hell in a hand basket. In fact, in one my favorite zombie tales, “Shaun of the Dead” we end the movie with Shaun and Lizzie living life as usual, watching the one year anniversary news shows on their outbreak (when Coldplay is headlining the Z-Aid concert, CLASSIC). Clearly life is back to normal (with the exception of Ed out in the back playing video games and occasionally trying to take a bite out of Shaun). 

And I actually also agreed with Mira’s reasoning for why an apocalypse takes you to hell in a hand basket or not. The whole concept of the awful trifecta of Population Loss/Lack of Governmental Response/Failure of Vital Services really does make all the difference. It certainly does in my story. But I got the trifecta, unlike Mira. Over half the population is wiped out on day 1, the government doesn’t have a response (well, they do, but you won’t see it until the end of Book 1 and through Book 2-3) and Vital Services? Yeah, my characters basically have a repeating message on the radio telling them to remain calm. Awesome. And I think sort of realistic when you consider the messes made of some recent natural disasters.

So why did I go that way? Well, when I imagined Sarah and Dave, emotionally screwed up married couple on the edge of divorce using their dead marriage counselor’s advice to escape a zombie apocalypse, I didn’t want them to be able to depend on anything else in the world but each other. Simple as that. If Sarah could just call a cop on her cell phone or Dave could IM the National Guard, well then they wouldn’t really have no way out but to work together. At every turn I had them realize more and more that the only people in the world they could really trust were each other… and that is really the catalyst that drives them to answer the question “Are we going to be together or not?” by the end of the book.

Plus, another big difference between MARRIED WITH ZOMBIES and FEED (which I loved by the way, I actually thought the idea of still having a social and political infrastructure was freaking brilliant) is that Dave and Sarah don’t know WHY this is happening. They know there was a lab on University of Washington campus, that it was somehow related to the government and that zombies have been rampaging ever since, but there’s little news, little information and no contact with the outside world almost from moment one of the book. The government actually cuts off the areas affected (and you’ll see more of that in the second and third books). They don’t spend a lot of time asking why, either. They just spend a lot of time running like hell and hoping they’ll live to see another day. In that way, I think I’m more like “Shaun of the Dead” or maybe even “28 Days Later” in that the cause is a mystery that isn’t really ever answered completely.

But there’s another side to zombie films and books. The “why” side. You see it in “Resident Evil” or “I Am Legend” or in Mira’s book, FEED. The people in those stories know exactly WHY they’re in this situation. They know how “it” happened, whatever “it” is. And that may be just as scary as the empty, not-knowing that David and Sarah encounter.

So Jesse–who is apparently a lot more destructive than I knew, and by the way, if you come over, Jesse, I’m hiding the C4–wants to know why mankind has not yet descended into chaos and anarchy and lots of Mad Max-style hairstyling in the Newsflesh universe.

The short answer: Because I didn’t want it to, and I’m the author, so I get to have my way.

The long answer: The collapse of civilization isn’t a guaranteed result of any given apocalypse.  Look at Independence Day.  The aliens wiped out like half the planet in a very short period of time, and you still walk away from the movie feeling like they’ll be rebuilding by the end of the year.  The Canadians burned down the White House once, and we built a new one; why not just do the same after the aliens atomize it?  Mankind is very fond of reconstruction.  We’re sort of like wasps that way.  Kick over a wasps’ nest, the wasps will just build a new one.  After stinging the ever-loving crap out of you, that is.

The total collapse of society is predicated on several elements:

1. Population loss.  You need a lot of people to die, very quickly.
2. Lack of government response.  You need the government, for whatever reason, to delay action.
3. Failure of vital systems.  You need to lose power, shipping, communications, and law enforcement, all very quickly, all without replacement systems in place.

Stephen King’s The Stand achieves the collapse of society primarily through step one: population loss, with a lovely extra dose of step two: governmental denial.  Dawn of the Dead, on the other hand, achieves the collapse of society primarily through step three: even before most of the people are dead, the power’s out, there’s chaos in the streets, and everybody’s shooting wildly at everybody else.  As a rule, you need two of these elements to totally destroy society, and all three if you want to salt the ashes.

The apocalypse in Feed (colloquially known as “the Rising”) was specifically designed to avoid hitting any of the steps above whenever possible.  First off, while we did suffer some pretty major population loss, the start of the infection was documented enough that the death rate was a lot lower than it might have otherwise been.  Secondly, thanks to the CDC and WHO, the government was involved on a global scale almost immediately, which also did a great deal to keep things intact.  Finally, the fact that it was the zombie apocalypse meant that we had a very high geek survival rate…and they, along with the speed of governmental response, kept the power on.

Breaking everything so badly it can’t be fixed takes an incredibly fast death rate and a speed of collapse that is frankly not pretty (and probably leads to multiple unpleasant nuclear reactor incidents, since zombies can’t vent the core).  Plus, I’ve done it before.  I wanted to see what it would take to put society back together with duct tape and paranoia.  And it was fun!

So why did you feel the need to break everything?  Apocalypses like that are the reason the dystopian future can’t have nice things.

Okay, now I really want to get down to brass tacks. Seriously we have been talking about the tone and the feel of horror and why zombies are so damn cool and that’s great. But I think the real reason I love writing zombies is this:

I like to blow shit up.

Okay, maybe I should be clearer just in case the FBI decides to read this blog and expand my file. I haven’t ever actually blown anything up. My brother used to blow up his GI Joes with firecrackers, but I wasn’t really involved in that. But the idea of blowing stuff up is soooo cool. And what gives you a better excuse for doing it than a zombie apocalypse? I mean, seriously. Anarchy is the name of the game in Zombieville. If you aren’t blowing things up, you are doing it wrong.

And it isn’t just the blowing up part. Nope, you can also shoot people. Or say… kill them with their own stiletto. Or with a toilet seat. There are a hundred creative ways to kill a zombie and no one even bats an eye about the murderous rampage you are participating in (or… writing. Yes, writing, not participating).

Apocalypses are different from regular wars, I guess. In regular war you get soldiers with weapons and they’re trained. In an apocalypse we’re all soldiers and everything around you is a potential weapon. Those with the ability to creatively kill will be highly valued.

Oh and speaking of that, after the shit goes down, what we value in general will change. White collar workers, I’m sorry but you will be useless. People who can grow food, drive heavy equipment, run the electric grid and kill stuff will be GODS. They will rule and have many wives (or husbands) as a reward. Because as we know, in the post-apocalypse we’ll all go Lord of the Flies or Mad Max and run wild.

Sounds pretty fun to me.

Except wait, Mira, in FEED… it kind of didn’t go that way. So what’s up with still having a political and social infrastructure, man?

So Jesse wants us to get into the funny.  That’s cool.  I can roll with the funny–and not just the sort of funny that involves erecting elaborate scarecrows around the edges of the campsite while everyone else is still sleeping (although that was pretty funny).  I’m a funny girl.  I have to be, because funny is an absolutely integral part of horror.  Allow me to elaborate.

Have you ever been scared?  I mean really, really scared?  I’m talking about the kind of scared that makes your stomach drop down to your ankles and your head feel like it’s full of helium while your feet feel like they’re made of lead.  Think about that feeling.  Now?  Think about the way you felt immediately after you realized that you weren’t about to be eaten alive by an undead clown made entirely out of spiders.  Are you giggling nervously?  Well, you’re not alone.

Laughter is a natural human response to fear.  When something scares you, you try to laugh it off.  You make light of it, make jokes about it, because that keeps your brain from completely overloading.  (The line between “healthy, cleansing laughter” and “scary, hysterical laughter that makes everyone inch away from you and consider taking their chances with the zombies” is tragically thin, by the way.  So try not to laugh too much.)

My favorite horror movies and novels have always been the ones that included an element of comedy.  Stephen King’s IT is a beautiful example of blending screams with laughter–the kids may have everything evil under the sun to deal with, but they still get the giggles, goof off, and generally act like actual people put into an unbearable situation.  Or take Slither, written and directed by James Gunn.  That movie is insane, and I mean that in the best way possible.  And yes, all those people keep laughing, keep making jokes, and keep getting obsessed with little things, because that’s what keeps you sane when things get unbearable.

I find it really troublesome when horror loses its sense of humor.  No, a decapitation shouldn’t be funny, but that’s an extreme, and there’s a whole lot of room on the other end of the scale.  If things get too grim, too unrelentingly dark and depressing, why should I even bother trying to make it through?  It might be better to bow out while I still can, and go enjoy a story that still allows for a little bit of giggling in between the screams.  (It’s also possible to go too far toward the funny, resulting in things like Jason X, which was a lot of fun, but wasn’t really a horror movie.  Finding that fine line is part of the art of writing horror, like walking a trapeze line over a swimming pool filled with hungry mutant piranha.)

You can’t spell “slaughter” without “laughter.”  And that’s exactly the way I like it.