Original Source Material

Science Fiction author, Tobias Buckell wrote a series of articles intended to educate new writers called, Getting Past Being Joe Blow NeoPro. If you write, no matter what your genre, you should listen or read them. I have the audio version on my iPod and listen to them on a regular basis for inspiration.

One of the things he talked about in that series was finding the original source of your story. Look back in history or across genres for a story that you could use as the inspiration for your own unique vision. Instead of rehashing yet another take on cyberpunk or popular TV programs like Battlestar Galactica or Lost, come up with your own spin based on something tried and true that has been done in the past.

I won’t rehash his examples; you should read or listen to his article for that. But I would like to talk about how I do this when I write a short story or even a novel. My first published short story started out as homage to one of my favorite aviation cartoonists from World War II, Bob Stevens. My father had a collection of military aviation books that I pored through many times over as a teenager. One of those books was called There I Was, Flat on my Back, and it was taken from a cartoon Stevens had drawn about veteran fighter pilots impressing the younger pilots with their daring deeds in the skies over Europe. The older pilots were participating in what is called hangar flying.

I decided that I would emulate hangar flying in my story by having a bunch of space pilots hanging out in a tavern and trying to out-do one another with daring feats of space piloting. I even paraphrased the name of Stevens’ book by starting out with a star pilot just finishing a wild tale by saying “There I was, hanging from my thruster jets as my ship cruised into space dock”. My protagonist then proceeds to start his own wild tale, in which the story takes place. My story winds up being a campfire yarn or Shaggy Dog story in which the entire story is just to get to the punch line at the end which is usually a simple play on words.

Another short story of mine is called “Red Allen” and it is about a military test pilot who bites off more than he can fly and has to save himself from being killed by an experimental star fighter. As you can guess, the original source for this story was non-other than Chuck Yeager, legendary test pilot and the first man to break the sound barrier. I read Yeager’s biography and based my character Red Allen on him in many respects. But I also used the look and feel of early 1950’s test pilot aircraft in describing the ship that Red is called in to fix.

I also made some fairly obvious nods to a well known genre writer by including a barkeep in the story. Originally he was modeled after the woman who ran the bar outside of Edwards Air Force Base that Yeager and other pilots used to haunt – Pancho Barnes. My barkeep is named Spider and I describe him just like Spider Robinson who is known for writing SF novels set in a bar where fantastic things happen. Most of that story involves Red using his engineering skills to figure out why some star fighters are crashing. His reasoning and deductive skills are modeled on the real Chuck Yeager.

I could go on with more examples from my own stories but I think you get the idea what is involved. Put some thought into your stories and have fun with them. Most readers may never be able to pick out your obscure references, but they will respond to the original source material, buried within.