Which books helped inspire me to write my new novel, No, You’re Crazy, which is scheduled for release next May? See my recent article in Shepherd.com, a year-old website focused on book reviews. My piece in titled, Best novels that question the nature of reality.
Fiction
My short story, This Heaven and Hell We Create, published in Litbreak Magazine
This Heaven and Hell We Create is a short story picked up by Litbreak Magazine in September 2020. It gives a taste of my novel, No, You’re Crazy, scheduled for release by Roundfire Books in May 2023. In this harrowing look at mental illness and neurodiversity, a runaway teenage girl beset by guilt and suicidal thoughts seeks comfort and salvation in her own tangled reality. Somewhere between exploring how we define who we are and examining the power of faith and survival, this story dares ask, Who gets to decide what’s real?
Writing
Author Lorna Suzuki interviews me about my novel Sneaker Wave and the writing life
B.C. author Lorna Suzuki interviewed me about my novel Sneaker Wave and about the writing life, in her blog All Kinds of Writing, on Sunday, Jan. 12. Lorna is a script writer and creator of the Imago Fantasy series. Her books have been optioned for a motion picture trilogy. Below is part of the interview. To read the entire interview, click here
I had a chance to read an excerpt from your debut novel, Sneaker Wave and I can see why it has been receiving some great reviews. For me, it gave me the chills and brought back memories of the Reena Virk murder of 1997, when teens involved in her horrific death tried to keep the details of her murder a secret. What was the inspiration behind Sneaker Wave and can you tell us a little bit about your central protagonist, Brady Joseph?
Jeff Beamish: I hate to use the word inspiration when talking about senseless tragedies like the Reena Virk murder, but, yes, that was one of three incidents in B.C. involving so-called codes of silence that in part moved me to write Sneaker Wave. The first was the 1989 murder in Surrey of a 12-year-old boy named Shawn Tirone by a teenage acquaintance in a case where dozens of teens heard about the killing but few came forward to police. I covered the case as a newspaper reporter and I can remember interviewing the mother of one of the first kids who spoke up, a boy who wasn’t afraid to do the right thing even if it caused him trouble. The third case was the 1998 manslaughter death of Bob McIntosh in Squamish after he went to break up a house party. While each case is extremely different, there was that one moment in each where everyone involved agreed it was in their best interest to keep quiet about a horrible act. I’m fascinated both by how these people got to that point, and how they got away from it. In Sneaker Wave, my main character Brady Joseph acquiesces, and, for him, the stakes get higher as weeks and months turn into years.Without giving away too much, can you reveal what’s in store for the readers when they crack open Sneaker Wave?
JB: It’s a story about how the choices teenagers make can haunt them for years if the circumstances are bad and the decisions are even worse. While at times it’s a plot-driven novel with numerous twists and turns and, I hope, plenty of suspense, I think Sneaker Wave finds it strength as a study of how different characters react when they realize they can get away with a horrendous crime if they just keep quiet. The coastal geography and beauty of the Pacific Northwest area where the novel is set help bring the story to life.
Can you share that exciting moment when you sold your novel to Oolichan Books?
JB: I signed my book contract with Oolichan in February 2011. My wife photographed the moment with her cell phone and then I went off to work. That night I told our children the news at dinner and I believe later that night we popped open a bottle of champagne. But I told very few other people, thinking I’d wait until closer to the publication date so I could avoid people asking me for incremental updates. Good thing too, as numerous delays meant Sneaker Wave wouldn’t be published until the fall of 2013.
At one time or another, most writers hit the wall and their work stalls because of the dreaded writer’s block. What do you do to get around or over this mental wall to resume writing?
JB: I don’t believe in writer’s block. Writers only get stuck when they have nothing to say. For newspaper reporters, if they get stuck writing a news story, they haven’t done enough reporting. For fiction writers, if they get stuck they haven’t done enough imagining or creating.
Writing
Where do great story ideas come from? Or more aptly, what do Stephen King and Leonardo Da Vinci have in common when it comes to creativity?
How do fiction writers generate their ideas? It’s one of the most difficult questions for a writer to answer, maybe because the act of creativity is at its heart random, chaotic and unexpected, not a structured formula to be shared like a long-held family recipe.
Sometimes the best stories do come from simply plotting your story out through a strict framework that follows a character on a quest for his desire, as delineated in dozens of how-to-write-fiction books and magazines. Sometimes they come from brainstorming – from spiralling out more words, phrases and thoughts from a central word. And sometimes you simply dream them.
The first chapter of my novel Sneaker Wave literally came to me in a dream. I’d written the manuscript, but hated the way the book started. Something was missing, but I couldn’t figure out what. This shortcoming haunted me for months, until one night my subconscious finally pushed it forward. I dreamed about a father and son on a seemingly idyllic family outing, one suddenly interrupted by an unexpected and deliberate tragedy. I awoke, sat straight up in bed and knew I finally had the beginning to my novel.
So a writer can arrive at an idea for a scene or a story in dozens of ways – plotting, brainstorming, dreaming, stealing and sometimes simply stumbling upon them in a manner they don’t understand. But whatever the process, some of the best ideas have one thing in common in their origin. And that one thing is actually the use of two things – two very different things.
I’m talking about a blending technique that master horror writer Stephen King and Renaissance inventor and artist Leonardo Da Vinci have both put to use, even though their creations came five centuries apart.
Da Vinci, for his part, was considered one of the most diverse talents to ever live. The man who came up with concepts for a helicopter and tank and painted the Mona Lisa often found creativity by blending together two completely unrelated items, following a principle that everything connects to everything else in some way. He made connections that no one else would, letting his imagination fill in the gaps between the two very different things. He would often combine art and science, and, for example, in the case of his flying machine invention, combined his fascination with birds with his knowledge of aerodynamics. No matter what he did, the results were usually brilliant.
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So what does this have to do with Stephen King, who has used his often dark creativity to sell 350 million books? King, in his 2000 book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, tells the story of working as a high school janitor one summer and venturing into the girls’ changing room, a foreign place with tampon dispensers and shower curtains. Later he would envision the opening of a story, a girls’ gym shower room where there were no curtains and one girl gets her first period and is pelted with insults and tampons from her nasty classmates. The girl fights back the only way she can, through telekinesis, the movement of objects through thoughts or willpower, a power King had read can come to some girls in their early adolescence, at about the time of their first period. Two unrelated ideas – adolescent cruelty and telekinesis – came together to provide the start to his first published novel, Carrie. It might be a story, and not one of Da Vinci’s inventions, but the creative process is the same.
In the dream that gave me the first chapter for Sneaker Wave, my subconscious mind had combined a pleasurable father/son activity, a Sunday morning jog, with a deliberately catastrophic event. After those two polar opposite ideas collided and blended so perfectly, the chapter almost wrote itself, and when people describe the chapter as “dreamlike” I almost have to laugh.
The overall idea for my novel also combines two divergent things. Some would quickly suggest these two are 1) a back yard full of partying teens and 2) a random act of violence. But that’s not it. Those two things easily go together, at least in many peoples’ minds, and in fact an actual incident like this did provide some of the inspiration for me to begin my novel. Where the story really comes to life, however, is when this random act of violence is combined with a participant who possesses a conscience, albeit one hidden so deeply that he even wonders if it exists.
This is where my story and many others find their vitality: in the electricity that sparks in the gap between two unrelated ideas brought together.
Consider the work of American writer Cormac McCarthy. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road, McCarthy combines an apocalyptic world with a father determined to safely raise his young son. The result is a brutally tender love story unlike any you’ve read before.
Or McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, a novel that initially appears to combine ruthless drug gangs with a mostly honest man who winds up with their money. At this book’s heart, though, is a story that stirs together an increasingly violent world and an aging lawman who’s lost faith in himself to stop the carnage.
Doesn’t matter where your two unrelated ideas come from. When they come together in a way that generates creative tension, new insights and perhaps something wholly unexpected for your readers, you’ll know it. Stephen King uses one word to describe this moment of cognition: “Pow.” If he was still around, I’m sure Leonardo Da Vinci would agree.