Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:18:59 — 63.9MB)
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More
How do you find and notice story ideas, and how do you turn those into short stories, novels, or as anecdotes for your non-fiction or memoir? Why is an author's note so important in an age of AI, and what might it contain? Joanna Penn shares her thoughts, and her short story, The Black Church, along with its author's note.
In the intro, Ebook Preorders on Smashwords; Two titles per week on Amazon KDP; AI-related Digital Publishing Awards at Frankfurt Book Fair [Publishing Perspectives]; AI webinars in November; JFPenn YouTube;
This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn
Joanna Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, short stories and travel memoir under J.F. Penn and also writes non-fiction for authors and hosts The Creative Penn Podcast.
You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
- From story seeds to stories
- Writing an author's note
- The Black Church, a short story, available as a stand-alone or as part of The Buried and the Drowned collection.
- Author's Note for The Black Church
You can find How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories on all platforms, in all formats: www.TheCreativePenn.com/shortstorybook
From story seeds to stories
One of the most common questions that writers get asked is ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ This is a strange question for many of us, since we are often so deluged with ideas that the difficulty is sifting out which ones to turn into a story.
The trick is to tune into your curiosity and start noticing what grabs your interest. As Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic,
“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”
What do you see that others don’t? What turns your head while others pass by? What do you want to learn more about? What questions come up for you? What obsessions do you keep returning to? Each of these may be a fragment, a word, or a few lines. I call these story seeds.
An idea, in its earliest form, is like a seed. It’s small, easy to miss, and nothing like the thing it might grow into. You literally can’t tell what it will look like when it’s grown, but there is potential in it.
A seed isn’t a plot, or a character, or a full setting. It might be a line in a book or a film, a headline in the news, something you see in a museum display, or a place that made you feel something. It might be a question that bubbles up, or a feeling that won’t let you go.
You just have to notice these seeds and, importantly, write them down!
Capturing your story seeds
Thoughts and ideas and story seeds will flit through your mind all the time if you let them, but they are fleeting, so you need a way to capture them before they leave once more. It doesn’t matter how you do this, but you need some kind of simple process.
I use the Things app on my iPhone, which syncs to my Mac so I can always access it. Other people use a note-taking app or a physical notebook. It doesn’t matter. You just have to get it down.
My story seeds are often one-liners, quotes, or links to articles I’ve seen that I want to investigate later. They might be passages from books I have underlined, or places I visit, or questions I have while out in the world.
Here are a few examples from my Fiction Ideas file that might even spark ideas for you:
- United Arab Emirates plans world’s first underwater bullet train connecting Dubai to Mumbai
- L’appel du vide. The call of the void. The compulsion to jump.
- “Vengeance of the lost garden.” Ben Okri. A Fire in My Head
- Noah’s Ark on the moon, like the Svalbard seed bank
- The Wicked Bible. Printing error. Thou shalt commit adultery. 1631.
You can see that these are not fully formed ideas. They are just seeds. Most will lie dormant, but some will sprout, appearing in stories or books years later.
When I’m thinking about writing a new short story, I sometimes go to a cafe and sit with a coffee and scroll through my seed folder and notice patterns and see what strikes me as interesting. Sometimes I won’t even know an idea came from a seed I once found, but I look at my list later and discover I had thought about it once before. It’s a wonderful way to plant ideas and later find they have grown into something wild and curious.
If you haven’t already got a way to capture your story seeds, establish a simple process now. Don’t overthink it. Just start noticing and writing them down. They might not make sense at the moment, but they may flower later.
Searching for story seeds
Julia Cameron discusses the idea of an Artist’s Date in her book The Artist’s Way, and this practice has always been important to me. It involves taking time out on your own to go somewhere and fill your creative well, whatever that means to you. For me, it’s often travel to interesting places or visiting museum exhibitions that I know will have nuggets of fascination that may result in full blown story seeds.
On the morning of my fiftieth birthday, in March 2025, we woke up in Iceland next to the Black Church at Búðir on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, a few hours’ drive northwest of Reykjavík. The small church and graveyard sit on a bed of ancient lava under the gaze of a glacier and there is a sense that time has stopped in this place. As we walked around the church that morning, the place itself became a story seed, and I later wrote The Black Church from that spark.
On the cheaper end of the inspiration spectrum, I often go to the British Museum in London seeking story seeds and over the years, it has provided much inspiration for fiction of different lengths.
An exhibition on religious relics inspired Crypt of Bone, a Viking collection appeared in Day of the Vikings, and one of the main characters in Desecration works as a researcher there. In terms of short stories, a sunken Egypt exhibition inspired The Dark Queen and I saw the actual Bronze Age wooden spars of Seahenge at an exhibition on the ancient world. If you follow your curious impulses, you will find story seeds everywhere.
From seed to story
Now that you have a load of story seeds, how do they become stories?
For me, it’s usually about a juxtaposition of multiple seeds that suddenly coalesce into something coherent.
With a Demon’s Eye came from my own experience of laser eye surgery, which was unsettling in so many ways, but a feeling is not enough for a story. Some months later, I read It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War by combat photographer Lynsey Addario, and I suddenly had a character, someone whose life was defined by their sight, and who might indeed choose a dangerous path to keep it.
Questions:
- Where do you find your story seeds? How can you make time to tune into your curiosity and discover more of them?
- How are you saving your story seeds?
- Can you open up time to revisit your seeds and see what might take root as a story?
The Author's Note
As a reader, I love an author’s note, and as an author, I always include one in every story, of any length. I want to share the spark that started my thought process and I love to include my research trips and links to photos, as well as a bibliography if I’ve gone deeper into any subject.
In an age of AI, when whole stories can be generated with a single prompt, the author’s note is a way to double down on being human and include your fingerprints on your finished work.
What is an author’s note?
An author’s note is a separate chapter, long or short, at the beginning or end of a story. It’s from you as the writer addressed to the reader who might be interested in what inspired your fiction. As an example, you can find my author’s note for The Black Church below.
It can be simple, even just a few lines. At the end of Blood, Sweat, and Flame, I note that the story was inspired by watching the Netflix series Blown Away, a reality show where glassblowers compete in a hot shop filled with furnaces and molten art.
It can also be far more substantial.
My author’s note for Between Two Breaths is a mini essay on how I left London in 2000 to go travelling after the stress of working in the city in the ’90s and found peace diving beneath the waters of the Poor Knights Islands in New Zealand. Later, that led to diving alone and a moment where I made the choice to carefully ascend when everything in me wanted to stay down in the blue.
That author’s note also includes recommended books on free diving as well as a documentary, and links to a solo episode of my Books and Travel podcast where I talk more about why I loved scuba diving.
While the two notes differ greatly in length and emotional depth, and they shouldn’t affect whether the reader enjoys the story or not, I feel like they provide an element of humanity that adds to the experience.
So, what should you include in an author’s note?
Start with the seed
I love to include my story seeds, the initial impetus for how the story was born.
In my author’s note for Seahenge, I explain that Seahenge itself is real and did indeed emerge off the coast of Norfolk, but my own experience of it began in 2022 when I stood in the British Museum in front of the actual blackened Bronze Age timbers and imagined a sacrifice laid across that upturned trunk. Standing there, I knew that I’d write a story inspired by it someday, I just didn’t know what that would be at the time.
Then I talk about how the seed expanded after a rainy visit to Ely Cathedral two years later, as I considered rising seas and drowned land and how the ocean wants to take it all.
A curious reader can almost understand how the story came to be, and that may change how they regard it, and perhaps, how they think of you, the author.
Include your research and links to resources
One of the reasons I write is so that I can feed my books with the results of my endless curiosity. I love research, and many readers are also interested in the lines between fact and fiction.
In the author’s note for Soldiers of God, I include a link to the news report about the Vatican scanning project to digitise the secret archives and use AI to uncover hidden meanings, as well as a link to the twelfth-century papal bull Militia Dei (Latin for soldiers of God) that granted the Templars the right to be buried in their own cemeteries.
In A Thousand Fiendish Angels, I explain the elements from Dante’s Inferno that inspired various parts of the linked stories, like the Arctic location reflecting Dante’s icy hell, the terrifying city of Dis, and even the symbolism of the character names. These hidden layers in the stories can bring an element of surprise and delight which some readers love to explore further.
Include emotion and your personal story
Part of the idea of doubling down on being human is bringing your real experience and authenticity to the page. Sharing personal emotions in your author’s note can bring a sense of connection between you and the reader that no AI tool or human ghostwriter could ever mimic.
But of course, your note has to come from your honest experience of life, and there’s no need to fabricate anything to make a story seem deeper than it is. Your story may be inspired by something simple, like Blood, Sweat, and Flame stemming from my enjoyment of a TV show, or it can be a more emotionally resonant connection.
Beneath the Zoo opens at the gates of the derelict Bristol Zoo on the eve of its destruction, and the author’s note tells the reader why this real place had such a hold on me.
After my parents divorced when I was young, my dad would take my brother and me to Bristol Zoo for a couple of hours every month, all the time we really had with him for a period of years. It was difficult, but walking those paths and looking at the animals gave us precious hours together.
When the zoo finally closed, and the news reported that it would be turned into housing, I wondered what might be found beneath its Victorian structures. I entwined my imaginings about what might lie there with my own nostalgic grief.
Of course, these revelations might feel difficult to talk about and only you can choose what to share. Sometimes we write fiction to obscure the truth and bury our feelings beneath metaphor, but even sharing one true thing will help you connect with the reader.
My author’s notes in The Buried and the Drowned reveal aspects of me that even some close friends and family may not know. I reveal myself on the page, knowing that if a reader gets that far, I can trust them with these fragments of my life.
Bibliography and other resources
As Cormac McCarthy said,
“Books are made out of books,”
and I love to share further reading for those who are curious to investigate the truth behind the stories.
For De-Extinction of the Nephilim, I shared news articles about de-extinction as well as a podcast interview with the founder of Colossal, the company that inspired the story. And, of course, I shared more fiction recommendations, including Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton and Extinction by Douglas Preston, both inspired by the same technology.
For The Black Church, I include the history of the church itself as well as website links for the hotel next to it, and a link to my notes and photos from the Iceland trip, which you can read in appendix 4.
Including these kinds of multimedia links can take the story off the page and into the real world, and perhaps even encourage the reader to go on their own adventures.
If I’ve written on similar themes before, I may include links to those stories or books in the author’s note.
At the end of Between Two Breaths, I note that I’ve written about other memorable dives in some of my other fiction. In Stone of Fire, Morgan Sierra recalls a dive at the Moeraki Boulders in New Zealand while inside St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. In Deviance, O’s memory of an encounter with an octopus plays an important part in the story and is based on my own experience, and The Dark Queen features a dive to a submerged Egyptian city.
You can also use your author’s note to say thank you, although sometimes acknowledgements, email list sign-ups, and other back matter are kept separate.
There are no rules
You don’t need an author’s note at all, and if you include one, there’s no need to follow any template. It’s up to you how much you share, especially if you are self-publishing your own work as only you control the word count.
If you submit to professional markets, author’s notes are often not included or are a few short lines, so you may have to be concise, but if you reprint later, or include your stories in a collection, I urge you to consider adding something about the story behind the story and bring yourself, the author, alive.
Questions:
- As a reader, do you love an author’s note? What do you like them to include?
- For whatever story you’re working on, what are the elements you could include in an author’s note?
- If readers want to do further reading on the topics of your short story, do you have sources from your own research you could share?
- How could you connect with readers on a personal level through your author’s note?
You can read The Black Church as a stand-alone here, or read or listen as part of my collection, The Buried and the Drowned.