Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview.
Today’s guest for the WHAT is Matthew Donald, author of Teslanauts
Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?
For my upcoming book Teslanauts, I remember when I first started looking into Nikola Tesla and learning about his crazier inventions, and I thought, what if he got the funding for them? Naturally this is a pretty common idea for a book, but most others with this concept seem to be in the alternate history genre, with Tesla's inventions radically changing the historical timeline. What truly made the idea spark for me is the concept of the inventions always being there, but locked away in the shadows and forcibly kept secret by government conspiracies. Why would they do that? What is the benefit of keeping all this wonderful technology hidden? And what would happen to anyone who discovered it? That's what really got my creative juices flowing.
Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?
I figured post-WWI was the best place to set the story, with the war itself being a backstory to what had happened. I knew that Tesla himself couldn't be the main character, as he would be in his mid-sixties at that point, so I figured he would be more of a mentor, leader type that showed up only in passing and at key moments in the story. Instead, I thought it would be more interesting to have a teenager discover this hidden world of Tesla technology, and learn about it as the reader did. Then the plot came about when trying to figure out how he would learn of this organization, and what prompted him to look for it to begin with, and what it would be that the organization was trying to stop. The Roaring Twenties were defined by catharsis, with the Great War ending and people wanting to celebrate and have fun and forget that the horrors of the last decade ever happened. Would the war be continuing in the shadows, or some smaller conflicts? Would someone be mad enough to try and restart the war, and why in the world would they want to do that? The influx of ideas came not only from figuring out the place of the main character, but the time and place I had decided to place it.
Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?
The way I tend to write stories is to have a beginning and ending already in mind, for both each individual story and, if applicable, the series as a whole. I also tend to have certain elements or concepts in mind in the middle, but those are much more malleable. The middle is where I can truly go bananas, as I know where I'm going and I get to concoct all sorts of rampant buffoonery getting there. Sometimes certain events in the middle get changed or eliminated, but in terms of the ending itself, I rarely change it, or at least rarely change the important parts.
Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?
Brand new story ideas tend to not come by very often. I tend to stick to big concepts and work with them for a while, adding to them and coming up with more and more of my nonsense to build them up. My ideas tend to be kind of high-concept, ones that I can do a lot with, so it's only occasionally I get one big enough to keep my interest. Currently I've got my previous book series Megazoic, my upcoming Teslanauts and its sequels, and at least two other major ideas in the pipeline, with the possibility of spin-offs and expansions for each idea always on mind. I think of my works as franchises, with the potential of adding to them indefinitely if need be. My Megazoic books may have concluded with its current four installments, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the last you've seen of that world.
How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?
A combination of which one is most intriguing to me, which one I have the best ideas for, and which one I think I should be writing. As much as I love Teslanauts and the world and characters I've built within it, Megazoic is my baby, and I could write endless spin-offs and sequels to that forever if I wanted to, and honestly, part of me kind of does want to. But I also recognize that in order to grow as a writer, I need to challenge myself. I want to be known for a lot of stories rather than just one. I want to be known for my style rather than any individual story.
I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?
I have a cockatiel that lives with me in my apartment, and she's absolutely on my shoulder when I'm there on my computer, which is pretty much all the time. However, my computer at home is far too distracting for me to write there; so many games to play and YouTube videos to browse. Therefore, I take my tiny old laptop to a local coffee shop and do my writing there, free of distracting video games, and since I don't bring headphones I can't browse YouTube or any other streaming service there either without annoying everybody around me. Once my draft is finished though I can definitely edit it at home, so while I do have an animal companion, they're not so much a writing buddy as an editing and gaming buddy, haha.
Matthew Donald graduated from the University of Northern Colorado in 2014 with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. He lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado with his cockatiel, Lyra.
