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Two Little Words: a guest post by author A.M. Harte

11 May

Two Little Words by A.M. Harte

The first time I sat down to write a zombie love story, my mind went completely and utterly blank.

I’d been challenged to enter a zombie love flash fiction contest, and in that moment I despaired. The topic seemed impossible. Inspiration was thin on the ground, and it didn’t help that I absolutely loathed zombies.

Flash forward a year, and I’ve written over a dozen zombies stories and published an entire zombie love anthology. So how did I go from staring blankly at my computer to having too many stories to write?

More simply: where do ideas come from?

Every time I’m asked this question, I panic. I scramble around for days thinking about the science of writing, trying to find the elusive formula which distils inspiration into an everyday occurrence.

But every time, after days of soul-searching, the only answer I can come up with is: I make it all up.

When it comes to writing, getting an idea is the easy bit. Ideas are everywhere. They’re in your head. Everyone has ideas all the time—the only difference is that a writer trains themselves to pay attention. In reality, all you need to have an idea is two little words: “What if?”

Imagine you’re in a restaurant and order the vegetarian option. All of a sudden you wonder: What if zombies were vegetarian?

Hold onto that thought. Follow it. See how it leads to other questions.

What if the zombies were the only vegetarians in their family? What if the mother-in-law was an avid carnivore? What if she came to visit?

With each question, the story begins to take shape. And that’s your job done: you have an idea. Something to start with, so now what?

Now the hard bit begins—the execution. Sitting down, writing word after word after word, until the story is done. Sometimes along the way, you’ll twist off of the original path and end up somewhere else. Sometimes the idea crumbles, and you have to begin again.

The second zombie love story I ever wrote featured a female lead zombie being sexually abused in prison. The idea came from one question: What if zombies fed on sins of the flesh, rather than flesh itself?

I began writing, word by word, brick by brick, until halfway through construction, I realised my foundation was unstable. The story wasn’t going to hold itself up. In short, the story sucked.

For a long while, I abandoned the idea. There is no worse feeling than watching your ideas die. It’s a piece of you—your child—and seeing it fail is devastating.

But you have to be tough. So eventually I went back to that failed idea to whip it into shape. I took my favourite question, set back to work. What if the lead zombie was male, instead? What if the cop was a good guy rather than a molester?

Eventually the pieces clicked together. I began writing again, and created a story called “Hungry for You”, which is now the title story of my anthology. To this day, it remains one of my favourites of the collection, and I’d like to think you’d enjoy it, too.

Where do my ideas come from?

I make them all up.

There really is no trick to it. When you’re stuck in front of that blank page, remember that finding inspiration is not a black art or obscure science. All you need is two little words: “What if?”

A.M. Harte writes twisted speculative fiction, such as the zombie love anthology Hungry For You. She is excellent at missing deadlines, has long forgotten what ‘free time’ means, and enjoys procrastinating over at amharte.com.