Tags
bad tv, bob ballard, craft, Eden's Gate, fiction, inspiration, oceanographer, persistence, science, seaquest, story, titanic, writing
I love cheesy TV shows. No joke, no guilt. I love bad movies, too, but that’s a post for another day.
Why open with a confession like this?
Because even cheesy stories can inspire.
I used to watch a show called SeaQuest when it first aired (in 1993, since apparently I need to give away my age). It was the quintessential cheesy show about how we colonized Earth’s oceans and needed a police force to keep order. Or something. All I specifically remember about the episodes themselves was that Roy Scheider was the captain and he communicated with a dolphin using sign language.
Every episode had a kind of epilogue featuring Bob Ballard, the oceanographer who found the Titanic. He talked about all kinds of oceanic science and anticipated advances in those epilogues, and one of those stayed with me from 1993(ish) until 2014 when I started working in earnest on Eden’s Gate.
In his epilogue, Ballard posited future homes on the ocean built like tall cylinders. The homes could be constructed on land, and then towed by ships to locations anywhere in the world. Once in place, one end of the cylinder would be sunk into the water, leaving a portion of the home above the waterline. If I’ve let you read Eden’s Gate, you’ll probably recognize the setting for Godfrey Meredith’s research lab. I’ve had the image of those floating towers in my head for more than 20 years, and I just now found the right place to put them in my universe.
A lot of writing guides will center around finding your muse, but I think more salient advice would be to harness your own persistence. There’s a reason those floating towers stayed with me, it just took two decades to learn what that reason was. The fact is, I have lots of ideas like that, stored in the vault, waiting to be unleashed. Some of them are quite grand, like who really killed JFK, or small, like a little boy who’s afraid of the dark until one day, the sun never goes down.
I’d be willing to bet serious money that anyone who ever aspired to tell stories has details like that floating around in their head. We’re like magpies, storing little bits of treasure away until just the right moment. And then, watch out.