Ask the Author: Amiee Gibbs
Answered Questions (8)
Amiee Gibbs
Hi Amanda, A special edition is something that I would welcome but I’ve not anything about one happening at this time. But, fingers maybe down the line. Should I get word of though, I will definitely spread the word! Thank you for asking.
Amiee Gibbs
It is perhaps the most frequently asked question posed to a writer, either from an audience member or from other writers: where does the idea for a story come from? We all get there from different points, but for most the answer is straight. An idea may stem from an interest in the subject or a snippet of conversation or perhaps an article that was read. It could be a historical event, based on a true story or a climatic disaster, or the threat of one. For some, a story might even come from a dream or memory. For me, the road to the story was a bit more unusual, because The Carnivale of Curiosities was never one I set out to write. Rather, it seems, it was a story that found me.
It began in 2012, when I was working on a novel that, for two years past, had me essentially stuck in Baltimore with a troubled British forensic psychologist-turned-professor character who was lured back into the field by a disturbing cold case. Not a terrible place to be, but with only fifty pages to show, I was less than thrilled with my progress. After two years, I had hoped to be further along. I had hoped to have finished at least a full draft, working on revisions. I hope, I hope, I hope had become something of a mantra.
To be fair though, those two years, starting in 2010, saw a fair amount of change. I was in the last months of my Master of Liberal Art’s program when I first started writing the story. I had started a new position in sales with Penguin Random House (when it was still Random House). And the biggest and most personal of all: in 2011, I experienced the end of a long-term relationship, which, looking back, would never go down in the books as a grand romance, but more a sociological study in indifference as time wore on. It was a significant relationship—my first. It was, in its way, a strong friendship; in the end, it was a loss.
Fortunately, I did have a support system, a writing group that had been born from that very same creative writing course I had been taking. And it was suggested in this group that we put aside for a month what we were currently working on, as most of us were feeling a bit stagnant in our works, and do the NaNoWriMo challenge, the caveat being that while we would aspire to fifty thousand words, it was by no means necessary to meet that. We only had to start something new and, in essence, get the creative juices flowing again. A wonderful idea that I was on board with, as I had many ideas floating around that were waiting to be explored. I have always been in love with the Victorian era in all its morbid splendor. Sideshows and curiosities have long fascinated me, and I adored the concept of the Faustian bargain, driven as much by Goethe as by my love for Robert Johnson, who went down on his knees at the crossroads as immortalized in his song Crossroad Blues. But at this point, while I had all the elements, I lacked the story.
Eleven or so days into the challenge, I had absolutely nothing to show. And while it was not a feeling of panic, it was an overwhelming sense of frustration and failure I found settling over me. Each day when I got to work, I would open a blank Word doc in case inspiration struck, but each day before leaving, I closed the screen as blank as when I opened it. It was no better at home. So not only was I not writing something new, but I also wasn’t working on the mystery, either. I wasn’t writing anything at all, and that was a bit scary. So, it was in this murky soup of self-doubt when, on the twelfth day of this cycle, something that I still cannot explain happened.
I was sitting at my desk at work as usual, about mid-morning, a cup of coffee in hand with a blank document blinking like an accusation in the background of my computer, when the phone rang. Our phones have caller ID on them, so I recognized the caller—it was my ex-boyfriend. This was not entirely unusual, as he had wanted to remain friends, but we had not spoken in several months and this call was coming almost a year to the day that we had parted ways. I had considered letting the call go to voice mail, to deal with later, but I answered instead, and after a bit of mindless chit-chat came the reason for his call. I could tell by the way he began—saying he had done it, which to me suggested a series of possibilities save for the one that it was— that he was calling to announce his engagement to the woman he had fallen for during the last dying months of our relationship.
Anyone reading this might ask why this call ever took place, and Reader, to this day, I do not know, as the protocols on this are subjective. But the call was made, the call ended, and I was left sitting at my desk not so much upset by the announcement but confused by his needing to tell me. And as the clock ticked on, I felt a bit irritated by the fact that while he had built a whole new life in a year, I couldn’t complete a novel or even string together two words of a new story when that was all I wanted to do. I wanted one good idea to prove to myself that I could write. And this is when it happened. Something that has always felt a bit out of the ordinary that I cannot help feeling was at work that day.
Because it was only moments after I hung up the phone in that stew of confusion that a name popped into my head as if it drifted in on the air itself. Aurelius Ashe.
It was an unusual name. If I had been reading Marcus Aurelius at that time, that might have accounted for it, but it had been many years since I had done so, and the Roman emperor was a million miles from my thoughts. Aurelius Ashe was a complete stranger. I typed his name on the blank word document and I liked how it looked. It had a flair and a cache and an intrigue that I wanted to uncover.
I knew nothing more than that. He wasn’t a character yet. He was merely the first two words of a story that would come to fill my nights with magic for the next eight years. But I knew he was special and the story he would bring out of me was going to be unlike any I had ever attempted.
Over the subsequent years, I immersed myself in Victorian and sideshow history. I had double majored in English and Theatre Arts as an undergrad in college, so all those nights of stage craft and costume design finally came in handy. I revisited the Commedia d’ell Arte and the Harlequinade and the paintings of John Singer Sargent and the sculpture of Guillaume Geefs. I relied on Shakespeare and Dickens, folklore, myth and the works of John Dee. I indulged in the lush and ornate descriptions of Anne Rice and Angela Carter to decorate my world, and I crafted my perfect playlist.
Every night I worked, from ten pm to nearly one am, longer on the weekends, but I kept to that schedule like faith. No matter if I wrote a single sentence, to be deleted the next day, I still wrote. And in time Aurelius was joined by Lucien and Dita and Timothy Harlequin and by a young woman named Charlotte, who sits sickly by her window longing for escape—and for something more.
I understood that desire for something more and slowly the words came, as did the story until one day, nearly nine years after Aurelius first came to me, I wrote the final word. I saved and closed the file, knowing I wasn’t finished, that there was editing to be done—a lot of editing. But the story was told. The story was real. Whatever happened that day long ago, I still can’t explain. But a writer friend, whom I shared this origin story with, perhaps said it best:
“It all seems fated, somehow.”
I feel she may be right in that assessment. Who knows the workings of luck, fate, dreams, and wishes? Whatever they might prove to be, it can never hurt to throw a pinch spilled salt over your shoulder or toss a penny in a fountain and or to always make a wish when passing through a crossroad. You never know what might happen.
It began in 2012, when I was working on a novel that, for two years past, had me essentially stuck in Baltimore with a troubled British forensic psychologist-turned-professor character who was lured back into the field by a disturbing cold case. Not a terrible place to be, but with only fifty pages to show, I was less than thrilled with my progress. After two years, I had hoped to be further along. I had hoped to have finished at least a full draft, working on revisions. I hope, I hope, I hope had become something of a mantra.
To be fair though, those two years, starting in 2010, saw a fair amount of change. I was in the last months of my Master of Liberal Art’s program when I first started writing the story. I had started a new position in sales with Penguin Random House (when it was still Random House). And the biggest and most personal of all: in 2011, I experienced the end of a long-term relationship, which, looking back, would never go down in the books as a grand romance, but more a sociological study in indifference as time wore on. It was a significant relationship—my first. It was, in its way, a strong friendship; in the end, it was a loss.
Fortunately, I did have a support system, a writing group that had been born from that very same creative writing course I had been taking. And it was suggested in this group that we put aside for a month what we were currently working on, as most of us were feeling a bit stagnant in our works, and do the NaNoWriMo challenge, the caveat being that while we would aspire to fifty thousand words, it was by no means necessary to meet that. We only had to start something new and, in essence, get the creative juices flowing again. A wonderful idea that I was on board with, as I had many ideas floating around that were waiting to be explored. I have always been in love with the Victorian era in all its morbid splendor. Sideshows and curiosities have long fascinated me, and I adored the concept of the Faustian bargain, driven as much by Goethe as by my love for Robert Johnson, who went down on his knees at the crossroads as immortalized in his song Crossroad Blues. But at this point, while I had all the elements, I lacked the story.
Eleven or so days into the challenge, I had absolutely nothing to show. And while it was not a feeling of panic, it was an overwhelming sense of frustration and failure I found settling over me. Each day when I got to work, I would open a blank Word doc in case inspiration struck, but each day before leaving, I closed the screen as blank as when I opened it. It was no better at home. So not only was I not writing something new, but I also wasn’t working on the mystery, either. I wasn’t writing anything at all, and that was a bit scary. So, it was in this murky soup of self-doubt when, on the twelfth day of this cycle, something that I still cannot explain happened.
I was sitting at my desk at work as usual, about mid-morning, a cup of coffee in hand with a blank document blinking like an accusation in the background of my computer, when the phone rang. Our phones have caller ID on them, so I recognized the caller—it was my ex-boyfriend. This was not entirely unusual, as he had wanted to remain friends, but we had not spoken in several months and this call was coming almost a year to the day that we had parted ways. I had considered letting the call go to voice mail, to deal with later, but I answered instead, and after a bit of mindless chit-chat came the reason for his call. I could tell by the way he began—saying he had done it, which to me suggested a series of possibilities save for the one that it was— that he was calling to announce his engagement to the woman he had fallen for during the last dying months of our relationship.
Anyone reading this might ask why this call ever took place, and Reader, to this day, I do not know, as the protocols on this are subjective. But the call was made, the call ended, and I was left sitting at my desk not so much upset by the announcement but confused by his needing to tell me. And as the clock ticked on, I felt a bit irritated by the fact that while he had built a whole new life in a year, I couldn’t complete a novel or even string together two words of a new story when that was all I wanted to do. I wanted one good idea to prove to myself that I could write. And this is when it happened. Something that has always felt a bit out of the ordinary that I cannot help feeling was at work that day.
Because it was only moments after I hung up the phone in that stew of confusion that a name popped into my head as if it drifted in on the air itself. Aurelius Ashe.
It was an unusual name. If I had been reading Marcus Aurelius at that time, that might have accounted for it, but it had been many years since I had done so, and the Roman emperor was a million miles from my thoughts. Aurelius Ashe was a complete stranger. I typed his name on the blank word document and I liked how it looked. It had a flair and a cache and an intrigue that I wanted to uncover.
I knew nothing more than that. He wasn’t a character yet. He was merely the first two words of a story that would come to fill my nights with magic for the next eight years. But I knew he was special and the story he would bring out of me was going to be unlike any I had ever attempted.
Over the subsequent years, I immersed myself in Victorian and sideshow history. I had double majored in English and Theatre Arts as an undergrad in college, so all those nights of stage craft and costume design finally came in handy. I revisited the Commedia d’ell Arte and the Harlequinade and the paintings of John Singer Sargent and the sculpture of Guillaume Geefs. I relied on Shakespeare and Dickens, folklore, myth and the works of John Dee. I indulged in the lush and ornate descriptions of Anne Rice and Angela Carter to decorate my world, and I crafted my perfect playlist.
Every night I worked, from ten pm to nearly one am, longer on the weekends, but I kept to that schedule like faith. No matter if I wrote a single sentence, to be deleted the next day, I still wrote. And in time Aurelius was joined by Lucien and Dita and Timothy Harlequin and by a young woman named Charlotte, who sits sickly by her window longing for escape—and for something more.
I understood that desire for something more and slowly the words came, as did the story until one day, nearly nine years after Aurelius first came to me, I wrote the final word. I saved and closed the file, knowing I wasn’t finished, that there was editing to be done—a lot of editing. But the story was told. The story was real. Whatever happened that day long ago, I still can’t explain. But a writer friend, whom I shared this origin story with, perhaps said it best:
“It all seems fated, somehow.”
I feel she may be right in that assessment. Who knows the workings of luck, fate, dreams, and wishes? Whatever they might prove to be, it can never hurt to throw a pinch spilled salt over your shoulder or toss a penny in a fountain and or to always make a wish when passing through a crossroad. You never know what might happen.
Amiee Gibbs
Inspiration comes in many forms for me. It might be a song lyric or a snippet of conversation, something I've seen or read or some bit of history that takes my imagination. An example would be when I was in Wales and I saw a small motorboat adrift on the water-I suppose it broke free form its mooring. I took a picture of it and that image, that memory, has been sparking an idea, a scene that I plan to incorporate into a story at some point. Inspiration is all around, if we are willing to see it.
Amiee Gibbs
Several ideas are bubbling, some notes jotted down, a few sentences here and there but nothing fully concrete on the page yet.
Amiee Gibbs
Never lose the joy in what you are doing. Like with anything, when it no longer feels fun but rather a chore, that's when you need to step back and revisit why you started writing and return to that space. Also, never give up on yourself. There are going to be those hard days when the flow isn't there, allow the mistakes, allow yourself time and treat yourself with kindness. You will write something today that you will delete tomorrow, but getting the words on the page is the real accomplishment; it might be a sentence, it might be five pages, no matter the length, it is all a step forward.
Amiee Gibbs
The freedom to create and explore ideas. It's fun to escape into worlds, past, present, future. The process can be maddening and there are days you want to throw the computer or the pages out the window but there is so much reward when an idea comes to fruition and you start to see what has only been a thought transition into something tangible. And you did that!
Amiee Gibbs
I can't say that I've experienced full on writer's block but I am a writing procrastinator. But whenever I feel stuck, I tend to walk away for a bit. I listen to some music or I busy myself with other things, which I find seems to free up my brain to allow ideas to flow through freely rather than sitting at a computer in front of the blank page trying to force an idea. Time and distraction has worked so far for me.
Amiee Gibbs
The butcher knife in the tractor tire. When I was 11 or 12, I was staying at a friends house for the weekend and, she, I, her twin sister and another friend went to explore "The Rocks", an area in her neighborhood that was a heavily wooded hill comprised largely of huge slabs of black rock. Now, her neighborhood, was sprawling and wooded, and it was also experiencing a spate of strange happenings. Houses, including my friend's, were being broken into. Nothing was ever taken but damage was done, including the deaths of family pets. There were rumors of a man living rough in the area, a man the neighborhood kids had christened "Gus". It was thought that he was the culprit but no one knew for certain and he was never caught and rarely seen. But the threat of his presence did not deter any of the kids in her neighborhood, including us, from going into the woods and up to the rocks, where an old tractor tire marked the path. We made our way up on a Saturday afternoon, but once we got up to the rocks, there was an immediate feeling of something being off. The wind had started to pick up and it was quiet, barely any birdsong, only the leaves. All four of us felt it, the raising of the hair on the back of the neck like we were being watched, and it did not take us long to decide to leave. We made our way back down the hill and when we reached the tire, we saw it. A large butcher knife jutting from the rubber that wasn't there when we first went up. At first we didn't know if we were actually seeing the knife, but unlike "final girls", we did not wait around to study it further. To this day, none of us know who put the knife in the tire. Whether it was one of their older brothers playing a prank on us, or the mysterious "Gus" or someone else entirely. Prank or warning, I still think about this incident and one day it might find its way into a future work.
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