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Category Archives: creating

From Idea to Story: Thoughts and Exercises

12 Jan

This post was inspired by my new Tumblr, where I’ll be throwing things that inspire me. If you want a peek inside my brain hole, feel free to click on over.

Creative people are often asked where they get their ideas from. I think anyone who has been writing for a while will know what a strange question this is, though I admit to having asked the same thing myself a few times. The question usually isn’t–where do the ideas come from? It’s more, how do I use these ideas, and make them more than snippets? How do I flesh this scrap out, build it into something that will move people, delight people, intrigue and excite people?

JK Rowling said she had the first bits of her ideas about Harry Potter when she was on a long train ride. She didn’t have any pen or paper with her, and so she was forced to mull these ideas over in her head, stringing things together for hours on end without the benefit of being able to put anything down in black and white. Her method, whether by intention or because of circumstance, was essentially daydreaming. Prolonged periods of daydreaming. And I think that is the root of the creative process. We have to give ourselves room to dream. And then we have to anchor those dreams to some kind of reality.

So how did this wildly successful author come up with her ideas? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she took them and created a world out of them. And there are at least as many ways to do this as there are authors. I’m still finding my method, that tried-and-true process that works every time.

I think I’m on a wild goose chase. I’m sure as I grow both as a writer and as a person, what works fr me will change. But that’s good! It forces me to try new things, and occasionally stumble upon something new. And the whole point of being alive is to learn, to live, to grow.

Here are a few things that work for me right now. Who knows? Maybe they’ll spur something in you, too.

Creating Characters From People

It’s cheating. I know. But it’s the best and worst kind of cheating there is. We all know people with idiosyncrasies that drive us up the wall, or make us want to study them like animals in a lab. Or something like that. And when it comes to creating believable, interesting characters you could do a whole lot worse than picking them from the ripe field that is your life.

Now, I’m not recommending trying to put Dad into your story whole cloth. That won’t work. It can’t. Human beings are so intricate and complicated that any facsimile we try to create will inevitably come out forced. Instead, try inserting Dad’s laconic nature into the best friend of your main character. Or his love of puzzles into the villain. In doing this, you inject something familiar into this character. You’ll know, from experience, how this aspect of a personality works, and it will be easier to conjecture. And by using just one piece of the person, you avoid the “OMG you put me in your book and I’m a jerk! What do you think of me?” problem.

Who is This Going to Hurt Most?

So you’ve got this awesome idea for a world where people literally share one heart, and if they don’t find their mate before a certain age they start to die. Great. Now, you go to choose a main character and–you find the middle-aged woman comfortably married with three children who have been linked with their mates since birth. Hmm…I could think of a couple of ways you could use this woman, but I don’t think she’s MC material for this story.

How about the CEO of a company in charge of finding people’s mates? If he fails, well, there goes his commission! Again, not a strong candidate.

Or how about the girl who’s fallen in love with her best friend, who gets murdered. And then she finds out her mate is the guy responsible for the murder. Now this has potential.

Who does your idea hurt? How can you make it hurt worse? I’ve mentioned this here before, and it applies as much today as it did a hundred years ago and will a hundred years in the future–put your character in a tree and throw rocks at them. But before you get them up there, find the character who has trouble climbing trees, find the character with thin skin, the character scared of heights and projectiles. The connections will start coming, growing like sinews between pieces of your ideas until you have something vaguely story shaped.

Randomize

Then, if you get really stuck, do something crazy. This is an exercise borrowed and tweaked from Holly Lisle (who has a whole, comprehensive course about how to take an idea and make it into a book).

Take a magazine. Rip out a bunch of pictures. Scatter them over your floor. Start throwing things at your impromptu collage. A penny will do. Wherever that penny lands, let that inform your next scene.

For example, let’s say you’re writing a far-future hard SF. I have no experience in this genre, so excuse any unintentional foot-in-mouthing I may commit. You’ve just massacred an issue of Vogue, so you have a spread of watch ads, fashion shoots, and the like. Your penny lands on this*:

Congratulations! Your characters have just discovered a new alien race! Or perhaps that trunk she’s sitting on contains the WMD your hero will have to wrest from the grips of evil. Or this is the villain disguised as your hero’s long-lost sister, dropping in for a none too friendly visit. There are a dozen ways you can take this particular picture, easy, and this picture is pretty…well, boring.

The ideas are everywhere. It’s the connective fibers that are harder to come by.

*photo ripped shamelessly from the internets.

Also, I’m not affiliated with anyone. Any links are free from outside influence.

 
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Posted by on January 12, 2012 in creating, planning, writing

 

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The Muse and Maple Syrup

09 Aug

Imagine you are a big, beautiful maple tree. You have lovely green leaves for shade in the spring and summer, foliage that would make a hooker blush in the fall and delightful creeping branches bereft of life in the winter. You stand in a grove amongst your fellow maple tree, in some chilly climate in the north.

And every year someone cuts you open to drain you of sap, so they can have something yummy on their pancakes.

Only, the person cutting you open is yourself.

And the sap is your creative juices. And think of that syrup as novels, short stories, poetry, or even blog posts.

What are the pancakes in this scenario? Um…moving on!

Back to the maples. Each tree only has so much sap in it at a given time. Eventually, the tree runs low, and then dry. And if you tap and tap and tap, without letting the tree restore itself naturally, what you get is only a small trickle compared to what you might get otherwise.

(Please excuse me if I’m utterly butchering the science of maple trees. It’s on my creative license that I get to warp nature to my needs.)

For some people, this fallow period represents writer’s block, and—if allowed to fester—can become something damaging. For others, though, this can be seen as a chance to rest, and rejuvenate.

When the sap has run dry, and you feel like your creative juices are coming in at a trickle, what do you do?

Better question, since this is my blog: What do I do? I have a few methods for approaching these periods, and all of them work differently at different times. Such is the human temperament.

One of my favorite activities to stir up my juices is to take long walks, preferably through a forested area, preferably alone. And when I say alone, I mean no music, no podcasts, no dogs or cell phones. Since I don’t exercise much, I wind up feeling semi-healthy for a while, and it gets blood moving through my body and into my brain in ways I don’t normally get to enjoy.

I suppose you could just exercise, but…dear god, why!?

Watching TV. Oh, the bane of pretentious scholars everywhere. And, truth be told, I hate most television. More importantly, I hate broadcast television. Commercials are mind-numbing. Soul-sucking. Creativity-killing. But a good story, told in an efficient manner? That I can get behind. Not to mention the plethora of engaging documentaries out there. All the stuff National Geographic and the History Channel puts out are creative gold mines. I often watch these with a pen and paper nearby, so I can jot down any ideas I have.

(I’ve found documentaries useful in both fallow and fertile times.)

I think the most important thing to do, though, is rest. Catch up on reading. Spend time with friends, out in the world. And be nice to yourself. The fallow periods are not forever. The words will come back. The ideas will come back, if you let them. Don’t neglect your writing, but don’t force it, either. Take a couple of days away from the keyboard or the notebook, and then try again.

If you look back over a lot of my posts, you may notice that I’m a word counter, and a huge proponent of writing every day. But between projects, I think a little downtime is essential, and restorative. Feed your muse, or whatever the hell you want to call that part of yourself. And don’t freak out if it takes a little while for the sap to fill back up.

Image used under Creative Commons License from: jbelluch

 
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Posted by on August 9, 2011 in creating, writing

 

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Day One Nuggets : Paul Park

20 Jun

As day one draws to a close, I rest and ruminate on the events behind me.

I had my one-on-one with Paul Park today (which also means I signed up to have a new short story ready by Friday, 9am) and it was really illuminating on a couple of key points. Points which I will jealously keep to myself. But! I will share a few nuggets from today’s critique/lecture period.

This week with Paul Park is different from the weeks to come. Park is not having us critique stories, as we will be doing. Instead he assigned us an exercise yesterday evening to complete by this morning. To start the meeting time we went around the room and described out strengths and weaknesses in writing. It was quite interesting, hearing where others excel and flag, and Park’s questions and observations on each.

For illumination purposes–my strengths, according to me, are characters and consistency in writing. That is to say, I write consistently, a decent word count, very nearly every day.

Weaknesses include clarity, and endings. I tend to not tell enough, when things get abstract, for the reader to really follow along. And also, I have a hard time wrapping things up in a satisfying way without getting sentimental, pat, or lazy.

After that he read a few pieces from the exercises, and we had a discussion about what worked and why, as well ash what didn’t work, why and how to fix it in regards to exploring emotions through actions.

So, on to the paraphrased nuggets!

  • The reader is doing a favor to the author (not the other way around) and should be rewarded by some kind of payoff, be it emotional, intellectual, experiential, etc.
  • If you conceive of place first (when formulating a story), the plot can end up feeling mechanical, because the author then moves us through places, as opposed to moving us through the causal sequence of events.
  • If you conceive of plot first, the characters can end up feeling mechanical, because the author chooses characters to fill predetermined rolls instead of creating round characters who make choices and mistakes of according to their personalities, traits, histories, etc. Which leads us too—
  • The more independent life you give your characters, the less likely they are to follow your plot.

All good food for thought, my friends. And now, I’m off to plug-in my head phones so’s I can ignore the drunken (again) college kids outside on my street.

(A quick note on that, actually. I was outside writing today and one of the kids had their stereo cranked, playing ‘Dirty Little Secret’. These people have no shame.)

(And a PS–The photo used in my post on Saturday was in no way, shape or form affiliated with CW or any entity connected with them. Just the first picture that popped up on Google image: sorority girls. Go figure.)

 
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Posted by on June 20, 2011 in Clarion West, creating, discovery, writing

 

The Cost of Cool

05 Apr

 

People Being Awesome

The past few days have been amazing. After the list for Clarion West attendees was made available, I suddenly have this group of interesting, diverse people to start cluing in to. Facebook and Twitter and my email have all seen a ton of action since Saturday.

It’s going to be interesting, in a couple months, when we all actually meet face-to-face. People are coming from all over the world: Amsterdam, Japan, Indiana. I find it so heartening to know that I’ll be attending with people who have such an investment in their writing career that they are willing to travel halfway around the globe to be a part of this workshop.

So I got to thinking about investments. We have a few resources available, as human beings. Time, Energy and Money. Giving a whole lot of any one of these to an endeavor shows some commitment to that cause. But I think the only way to really succeed at something is to devote a portion of each of those resources to your goal.

Time: This one seems kind of obvious. It takes time to become proficient at anything. Embroidery. Chainmaille. Drawing. Computer programming. There is a certain level of time that has to be given to the practice of whatever it is you’re trying to be awesome at. Of course, time alone, practicing the same thing over and over, is not enough. In order to become superlative, you have to expend a lot of…

Energy: You might argue that time and energy are similar enough that they can be lumped together. I think there are definite corollaries. For example, the act of spending, say, three hours perfecting your backhand swing takes a lot of energy! But here’s the distinction I see: When you practice that backhand swing, do you just do the same motions over and over? Or do you make sure that each swing you’re doing is a little bit better than the last? Practicing bad form only ingrains bad form. We have to learn what we’re doing wrong (a process which also takes time and energy) and then put that information into use. And how do we learn what we’re doing wrong? Well, that often comes down to the last resource…

Money: There are a lot of things we can get for ‘free’. Books from the library. Videos online (after you pay your service provider, of course. Oh, and buy a computer…hmm…these things are adding up.) Self-study. For example, my husband has been studying Japanese for almost a decade now. He started by getting some Japanese language books and teaching himself. But there was a limit to how far that could take him. The subtleties of the language prompted him to seek out first a private tutor, and finally to attend formal classes. As a result, his skills in Japanese have improved past where he would likely have been able to take them, and certainly at a more efficient pace.

And, to bring the point home, Clarion West requires all three. Six weeks of your time. A vast expenditure of energy. And a not insubstantial sum for tuition and time lost from work. I know I’ve mentioned this all before, but I think it’s important to see it from a broader perspective. We can’t expect to be awesome at something without investing some of each of these resources available to us. There are no shortcuts to excellency.

 
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Posted by on April 5, 2011 in career, Clarion West, creating

 

Zest and Gusto

13 Aug

I started reading Zen in the Art of Reading, by Ray Bradbury, a couple days ago. For anyone who doesn’t know, this is a slender volume of essays by Bradbury on creativity, with an emphasis on writing. I’m only on the third essay right now (wherein the muse is discussed), and I’m already finding this book inspiring.

Firstly, Bradbury has a way with words. He makes love with language, giving us lines like “Thomas Wolfe ate the world and vomited lava.” and “Look for the little loves, find and shape the little biternesses. Savor them in your mouth…” Lovely stuff.

Pleasant reading aside, the very first essay in this book, “The Joy of Writing”, should be read by every writer, at least once a year. More, if the writer is prone to fits of melancholy or self-pity. Here, Bradbury says that writing without love, and hate, is to be only half a writer. There has been a lot of discussion about writing to trends, and commercialism in manuscripts, etc. But I think, without the passion that come from writing something that matters to you, what’s the point? There are a thousand other ways to pass the time and make a living, that hurt a hell of a lot less.

When I say something that matters, I don’t mean something ‘important’ or ‘life-changing’. It can be as frivolous as…well, to take another bloggers example, a talking eclair, or as melodramatic as a soap opera. Either way, in writing those sparks out, you’re doing two things (at least).

  1. You’re writing. You’re creating something that didn’t exist before, fueling your creativity and your mind, adding to your repertoire.
  2. You’re allowing yourself to be right, and giving your muse (or whatever you want to call that yummy subconscious) the pat on the back that it deserves.

I’ll leave you with a parting gift from Bradbury: “Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way, in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig-bladders labeled Zest and Gusto.”

Why not, indeed?

PS- I finished the last short story in my plan for the Creativity Workshop, and it’s awesome. Huzzah!

Photo used under Creative Commons license from BR0WSER

 
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Posted by on August 13, 2010 in creating, writing

 
 
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