What stirs reader imagination or exploratory longings more than a good adventure story about a lost civilization?! Your starship lands on a primitive world where you discover mysterious structures half buried in the jungle that hint at forgotten technological prowess. (Star Trek, anyone?). Floating down the river on your noble quest, your fellowship of travelers passes through a portal guarded by towering statues of forgotten beings —what lies beyond? (Lord of the Rings, anyone)? As you pursue your doctorate in geology, your excavations uncover what looks like a giant spaceship imbedded for untold years in solid rock—what does it mean? (Babylon Five, anyone)?
Whoa! That’s the kind of story I want to read!
If I want to write stories like that, I need to engage in that kind of discovery! While travelling in our campervan toward Erie Pennsylvania to visit family and watch the total solar eclipse (my second) last spring, Mary and I stumbled upon a wonderful camping spot in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. When we awoke the next morning, we took some of the trails through the surrounding woods, and found decayed locks for the Ohio and Erie Canalway (picture above) built a hundred years before, as well as the remnants of the canal along the old Towpath, now-abandoned and emerging from the moss and leaves like the statues of ancient beings, telling of ways of life, and mighty deeds, from another time.
How did they build it with such precision so as to maintain proper water flow for hundreds of miles through the forest? How did they manage to circumvent the waterfalls and cataracts along the river? How did they do it with only horses and humans? Mysterious, inspiring, imagination-stirring!
To write the unexpected, I have to be out in the world, hunting for the unexpected! What a delightful discovery for this plains-boy, to find, unexpectedly, such evidence of past achievement half hidden in the forest “back east”.
Be sure to check out Science Fiction and the RoadWriter Life, Part 1: Finding Trilobites.