Introduction
Tell me a story.
It’s a game all writers play, an improv act. Some writers are structured; they plan thoroughly, choose carefully, write only what most inspires them, while others can be loose and nimble, reacting quickly and running with an idea, meeting the challenge at hand.
When J.M. Barrie put the Llewellen Davies boys to bed and they pleaded for a story, he made up tales to order about Peter Pan and his adventures. A.A. Milne entertained his son Christopher Robin by telling stories of Winnie-the-Pooh, Rabbit, Owl, and the Hundred Acre Wood. When I was younger, I used to babysit often. Playing with rambunctious kids and trying to get them down to bed, faced with the incessant “Oh, please, can’t we stay up just a little longer?” I learned that the only way to trick them was to offer a story. “What do you want to hear?” I would ask. They wanted me to make up Star Trek stories because we had watched Star Trek before going to bed, or one time in particular I had to spinoff from a Space: 1999 episode, continuing the adventure. Other times they wanted stories about dragons or magic bicycles.
Any good babysitter—any good writer—had to fill the bill. This was good training, learning how to write a story inspired by a prompt.
In my short story career, I often thought of intriguing concepts to explore, tales that needed to be told. Then other times I would be contacted by anthology editors who, just like those demanding kids in my babysitting years, would say, “Tell me a story about …” They were putting together a book on sea monsters, time travel, metaphorical unicorns, dragons, even enchanted garments. Enchanted garments? All right, I’ll take the challenge. For the anthology Pandora’s Closet, I wrote one of my funniest and most beloved short stories, “Loincloth,” about a spell-cursed ape man’s loincloth found by a shy and mousy nerd in a Hollywood prop department.
It’s what a writer does. You have an idea and you write the story. If you don’t have the idea, you go out and find one. If you have a well-oiled imagination, which you exercise regularly, the ideas will come and you always make the best of it.
One of the lessons I teach in my many master-class writing workshops is to always do your best work. There’s no such thing as phoning it in. If you are asked to do a story about a magical garment, don’t roll your eyes and write a slapdash story just to meet the deadline and pick up the paycheck. Even if it’s just a story for an anthology about purple unicorns, whether or not you can take the theme seriously. Do the best damn purple unicorn story in the volume, or don’t accept the job.
No matter what story it is, whatever you write will be some reader’s first introduction to your work. So, make a good impression. Besides, the people who buy an anthology about purple unicorns really want to read about purple unicorns.
I have told this story so many times that it actually did result in an anthology of purple unicorn stories, at first as a joke, but then as a full-blown professional anthology, One Horn to Rule Them All, which we put together as a charity effort to raise money for the Don Hodge Memorial Scholarship. That proved so successful we did a red unicorn anthology, A Game of Horns, and then a dragon anthology, Dragon Writers, and a sea monster anthology, Undercurrents. Together, the profits from those books have funded dozens of high-end scholarships for the Superstars Writing Seminar.
It’s a challenge and it’s a game. What am I going to write today? What story will I play with? What idea needs to be explored? Sometimes it will be fantasy, sometimes science fiction, other times edgy horror. The tales in this volume all fall under the general umbrella of fantasy, and it’s a big umbrella—from knights and dragons to subtly inhuman shape shifters in the modern world, or even superstitions and beliefs of ancient sea monsters that might or might not be real.
Tell me a story, you ask.
Turn the page.
—Kevin J. Anderson