Watching Predator 2 the other day got me thinking about some of my favorite sci-fi movie aliens. In addition to the Predator, I'm also a fan of the creature from Ridley Scott's Alien and the Brain Bug from Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. And there's a consistent trait shared by the trio: they're all perverse. With the creation of the facehugger, the Alien writers had created a film that's essentially focused on inter-species rape. When discussing the design of the Brain Bug with his crew, Paul Verhoeven said, "Well, perhaps it should look like a vagina, or perhaps it should look like an anus."
Thinking about the aliens that I wanted to write about, in homage to those gross sci-fi movies I love, I figured there really was no reason I couldn't make a creature that looked like, say, a prolapsed rectum. 'Cause rectum damn near killed 'em!
Going into another round of thinking on my alien story, I thought I might be using too much logic. I had watched all these science shows on what alien life could be like, and I would base my thinking on only that material. I'm not saying that research is bad, but there are times when it can put a huge limitation on me. What I decided to do was reverse the process. Over the weekend, I came up with some pretty cool and disgusting alien concepts, and now I'm going back and filling in the gaps of stuff like what environment they live in, what kind of tools do they use, and so on.
The bottom line - and I think this is why I'm so excited about this new approach to the book - the bottom line is that sometimes it's more conducive creatively to go for something cool first and then employ logic to fine-tune it. Function is still there in the back of my mind, but like the first draft of a story, it's much easier to get ideas onto a page and then refine it rather than try and come up with something complete right from the start.
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