Guest Post: Matthew Young - What drives your creative process?

So how is everybody doing this Good Friday?

I told y'all that I would have a guest post coming from Matthew Young in the coming days, and here it is! I asked Matthew, "What drives your creative process?"

It's a pretty important question to ask as far as I'm concerned because that is what really makes the difference when telling a story. Where do your ideas come from? How do they morph and adapt to meet new things that you didn't think of at the time of original outlining? Let's go ahead and read his response, and afterwards, I'll have a link to his new book, AWAKEN.

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One of the toughest things for new writers is coming up with ideas. 

For me, it’s always the easiest part. I don’t have a set process, but I am very meticulous when it comes to tracking any ideas I have. I have a lot of them and they come from everywhere. When I first started out, most of my ideas came from other books. I carry around a notepad and sometimes a voice recorder to make sure I don’t forget things.

Just remember that reading is important. You can never read too much. There are billions of good ideas out there, but most of them have been used already. If you’re not well read, you might have the coolest idea ever, write a superb novel, and then find out that you just wrote another version of Twilight. The concept has sold well many times already, so the odds of another retelling of the mythical-monster-falls-in-love-with-girl-for-some-inexplicable-reason story being successful yet again are not good. And if you read a lot, you would know that it’s not a viable storyline anymore.

The same is true with television. Tons of ideas out there, you need to be aware of them and make sure that what you’re doing is original. People say there are no new ideas out there. The truth is, a lot of concepts are old. This doesn’t mean that you can’t tell them in a new way. That’s where writing gets hard! 

The first scene in my book Awaken, I “stole” from the end of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It’s one of my favorite movies ever and I thought it would be a cool place to begin. But not to copy.

Awaken was a mixture of a lot of different ideas. It started out as a Western and just a Western. It was about 20 pages long at first and that was it. Then I started getting into horror writing, so I added some scarier elements, added a psychotic criminal, and was happy when I hit 40 pages and had a complete story. It was pretty original, I thought. And that version of the story still might be. There are not a lot of writers out there that combine serial killers with the traditional Western. But it wasn’t enough for me.

There’s a scene, just before my main character realizes that his perception of the world is wrong, where he climbs up something unsavory to escape. This was an original idea of mine, but this wasn’t where I first put it. The same thing happens in my first published short story, “Freak Magic,” where a slave boy with super powers is sent into a mine as punishment. I wrote it, but it was something that I had thought of several years before I put it into Awaken.

I get a lot of ideas from dreams, too. I have a good ability of recalling details from dreams, and for the longest time, I kept dream journals. These ended up getting too interfering, though. I would spend 30 minutes or more every morning writing down every detail. Each morning, I could easily fill up a few pages. It was too much, and I had to teach myself to stop. I started getting more sleep, too! Anyway, characters from my dreams often find their way to my stories.

Character names are hard for me. For Awaken, I named my main character after my best friend from college: Jon. Other character names stemmed from the Bible. James and Paul--the kids in the story--were named after two writers in the New Testament. I did this on purpose and it’s an important part of the book. No one is perfect. Everyone does a lot of bad things. Jon is my hero here, but in the first scene of the book, you see him kill a couple guys in cold blood. He has no good reason to do this, but he kills them anyway. Yet, by the end of the book, he’s a much different person. His awakening is not only physical when he realizes that he’s not who he thought he was (it starts a Western, but Awaken is definitely science fiction!), but it’s also subtly spiritual, too. This isn’t Christian Lit--there’s swearing, drinking, murder, torture, and a lot of other stuff--but it does touch upon how people can change--which is a major theme within the Bible.

Ideas come from everywhere. You need to latch onto them when they come, because if you’re like me, you will forget them quickly. Write them down somewhere and then wait for the right time. You can combine a lot of different ideas, even those that don’t seem related. When you do it successfully, you can take even old, recycled ideas, and make them into something brand new, something that no one has ever read before.

That was my goal for Awaken. I took a bunch of very different and unconnected ideas, some original, some not so original, and then combined them to make them my own. Now I have a novel that starts as a traditional Western, but is pure Science Fiction once the story unfolds.

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I want to go ahead and thank Matthew for taking the time to write us a guest post, and I hope that y'all enjoyed reading it and getting a glimpse into the thought process of another author. On Easter, I'll put up a look into my own creative process to give y'all yet another view on how things can progress in the mind of somebody telling a story.

Now, without further ado, y'all can find Matthew's new book, AWAKEN, at http://www.amazon.com/Awaken-Matthew-G-Young-ebook/dp/B00JM033DA/.

You'll also be able to connect with him over at his blog: http://matthewgyoung.wordpress.com/

And you can also interact with him through Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/MatthewGYoung

Y'all enjoy the rest of your Friday, and I wish y'all a Happy Easter.