For example: tuna fish, trombone, sofa, and tar pit. (That’s pretty disconnected, right?) And in keeping true to what I’m writing about right now, I will make up some things on the spot.
So the story will be about a mysterious disease that when you contract it, causes you to have the taste of tuna fish in your mouth and get severe headaches that first strike with the sound of an unbearable trombone tone sliding up and down the musical notes and ringing in your ears, while your blood slowly turns into tar. Investigators eventually trace the source back to a factory that is producing sofas filled with a deadly foam that when you come into contact with it, gives you this disease. The owners and workers in this factory are aliens that use this factory as a cover for a hidden agenda of taking over Earth. Their planet mainly consists of certain tar that accumulates in huge pits on their planet and is more plentiful than water and is made from a highly concentrated tuna fish-like oil. The reason they use sofas is because they know that people are getting lazier and this is an effective way to get to everyone.
I could make it comical if I said their planet was called Trombonia-X.
You see—it is not that hard. Now I could create ten or more ideas like this on 3 x 5 cards and organize them on the table or wall and weave them together or eliminate whichever ones I feel are too much for the story’s continuity.
I will ask you a few questions and all you have to do is answer them with the first thing that comes to your mind, no matter how ridiculous.
You are standing in some imaginary place—where is it?
You are wearing something unusual—what is it?
Someone suddenly is standing in front of you—who is it? And they say . . . ?
You tell them . . . ?
You see a piece of paper on the ground and pick it up. It has a magic word on it—what is it?
Okay, stop! The fact of the matter is that as long as I ask you questions, your mind will manufacture answers. So keeping that in mind, the thing that keeps us from coming up with ideas and solutions is not a matter of not having enough answers, but not having enough questions.
So going back to the “tuna fish, trombone, sofa, and tar pit” story, I allowed my uncensored, whimsical, nonjudgmental mind to use each unrelated image to evoke responses and, in turn, my mind automatically connected the dots as well as answers. As you go back to the story or stories you just made up and read and reread them, additional images and plots will emerge.
The important thing is to not force ideas, just let them associate ridiculously all they want. Later you can rein them in and develop continuity.
The third element is to reincorporate your ideas:
So like when I said that the victims had a tuna fish taste in their mouth and their blood turned to tar, I later reincorporated the fact that the alien planet was mainly made up of this tar-like substance that was made up of a tuna fish-like oil substance.
If you follow this process, it will never fail you. This can also be used to develop the main characters and their motivations and goals. The only problem now is you will have too many choices and won’t know which story to develop first!
STEVEN BARNES
Creativity on Demand
STEVEN BARNES is a New York Times best-selling author who has written twenty-five novels of science fiction, mystery, and suspense. He has also written for television’s The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Stargate SG-1 among others.
In the course of a career spanning twenty-five novels and thirty years, I’ve found that I have to bounce back and forth between structured and unstructured thought processes to keep the train moving. The ability to create new text every day, and then edit and polish it, is the most critical element in what I call the Machine, my engine of creation. As a result, I thought I’d offer a few thoughts on feeding the nonlinear part of the process.
At every turn in your writing, you will be faced with choices, decisions about the direction you should go, what someone should say, what a character might do. And when you back yourself into a corner, it will be your flexible creative mind that gets you out of it. More than one writer has enjoyed and excelled in the game of “How do I get out of this?”
If you’ve never entertained yourself with this one, the basic rule is that you get your characters into a jam, and then see if you can write them back out of it. Keeps you alert, that’s for sure!
At any rate, as long as you have the twin qualities of focus and flow (both of which can be developed with meditation), the more creativity you have and the better off you are.
The understanding of creative problem solving, the ability to design and predict aha moments, moments of unusual clarity, is an incredible boon to those in the arts as well as the sciences. Basically, the brainstorming process works as follows:
1. Clarify the problem. Define as clearly as possible exactly what the difficulty is.
2. Do massive research. Swamp yourself in every possible piece of information that could possibly contribute to an answer. This is done both to give you raw material to chew over and to keep your conscious mind occupied.
3. Brainstorm every answer you can come up with.
4. When you have reached the absolute limit to what you can come up with, take a complete break. Exercise, take a nap, make love, go see a movie, etc. It is when your conscious mind is totally preoccupied with another task that the aha moment will occur.
The key to brainstorming is that you must give yourself specific permission to come up with absurd answers. Otherwise you will think only in a direct, linear path, and miss the chance of a high-level breakthrough.
For instance, you’re writing a scene in which a character faces certain death—surrounded in the kitchen by vicious escaped bank robbers with a dozen guns. How do we get out of this? You start brainstorming.
Could your character be a karate expert? No. She’s sixty-seven years old, with one leg, and you don’t want to change that. Can she appeal to their humanity? No, you’ve already established that one of them killed his own mother for a piece of Juicy Fruit. Well, then . . . could God reach down and take her out of this freakin’ situation? Well, no, but . . . (the image of the roof being lifted up, and God reaching down suddenly strikes a nerve). What if something else lifted the roof up? A T. rex? No, Spielberg’s cornered the market on Jurassic carnivores. How about . . . a tornado? Or a hurricane? What exactly is the weather in this scene? Could it be that you never considered that? Even a bad rainstorm could wash out roads, trap criminals in the house, kill the power . . .
Hmmm. Kill the electrical power? If this were built up properly, would the audience go for that?
Maybe not—but what if the power outage created the crisis in the first place . . . and it’s the power coming back on that changes the situation? Eyes adjusted to darkness don’t like light . . . So maybe there aren’t a dozen guns. Make it two guns. And the light comes on, and they shield their eyes, and she wrenches herself away and hops out into the storm, where the fractured electric lines flap about in the yard, sparking . . .
Hmmm.
This is the way brainstorming works. Give yourself permission to think of the absurd, and go from the impossible to the improbable to the possible to the Yes! That works! moment that we all love.
This is another instance where the practice of keeping a dream diary can come in useful. It is quite valuable to specifically exercise your creative muscles.
If the image of an object comes to you: Is it a goal? (Does someone want it?) Is it a disaster? Does it pose a dilemma? If so, to whom? Why? How might they want to resolve it, and what kind of goal might result?
If it’s the image of a person—who are they? What might they want? What might their inner demons be?
What about if it’s a place? Or an action?
Practice playing with these pieces, specifically stretching and twisting your mind. Such mental gymnastics are t
he tools you will need to build a career.
EXERCISE
Newspaper clipping exercise: A brainstorming exercise I recommend heartily is to open the newspaper and give yourself one minute to find an article upon which to base a story idea. You don’t have to write the story, but do block it out briefly.
This kind of practice gives you invaluable skills. It is important that you have confidence in your ability to think yourself out of any corner you might back yourself into, that you can generate a hundred ideas an hour for days at a time.
And the only way you can do that is to practice generating creativity on demand. These exercises work. I would suggest that you try them, and devise others of your own. They’ve served me well over the course of a career verging on four decades. They’ll serve you as well.
STORY DEVELOPMENT AND PLOTTING
“There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.”
—PHILIP K. DICK
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
—LEWIS CARROLL
DIEGO VALENZUELA
The Constant Writer: How to Plot an Entire Story in Minutes and Never Run Out of Ideas
DIEGO VALENZUELA is a young sci-fi and fantasy writer born and raised in Mexico City. He’s worked under the tutelage of best-selling author Piers Anthony and has co-written science fiction screenplays with best-selling writer and friend María Amparo Escandón. He’s in the process of preparing his debut novel “Reverie of Gods” for publication.
Writers are liars—this has been said many times by many different people, and for good reason. However there’s one thing no writer, no matter his or her success or talent, can lie about: writer’s block. Writer’s block is a monster, no doubt, but like all monsters, it can be defeated—easily, if one comes properly prepared.
I’m certain there have been many brilliant wordsmiths who can weave continuous paragraphs of beautiful, complex, and vivid sentences without breaking a sweat, but have nonetheless found themselves staring at a blank page, unable to write a word. Why? Many times, we discover that, even if we have something we want to write about or to express artistically, we’re short of ideas.
And I’m sorry to say, but good and original ideas are an absolute necessity—especially in genres like science fiction or fantasy, where creatures, artifacts, and stories not easily found in this green world are mandatory. It may seem daunting, but the truth is good ideas are easy to come by—writing them proficiently is the hard part.
I hope with the following to aid you with the easy part by sharing a technique I’ve found extremely helpful in times where creative ideas are scarce. This way, there may be a million things keeping you from writing (because your dog sometimes needs to be walked, and that treadmill is gathering dust), but a lack of ideas will never be one.
I’m a firm believer that there’s no such thing as pure inspiration; all ideas come from somewhere—be it other books, movies, personal experiences, or something you overheard in the gym. There’s always an endless source of inspiration around you, and here’s a method to tap into that.
EXERCISE
If you’re a writer, chances are you have a very rich and hopefully varied library of music. In the best of cases, this library can be found in your computer perfectly ordered within iTunes or similar software. Here’s what I want you to do with that:
1. Open a blank page of whatever word processor you’re most comfortable with.
2. Imagine you’re about to outline the table of contents of your new fantasy/sci-fi novel. Write the numbers 1–30 down the side of the page. We’ll fill in the actual chapter titles soon.
3. Put your entire music library in “Shuffle” mode and write the title of the first song that randomly appears, thus naming chapter 1. Say you’re a classic rock fan, so chapter 1 is now called “The Great Gig in the Sky.” Great start!
4. Hit the “Next” button in your music library and see what song is randomly playing now. Put that song’s title as chapter 2. So maybe you’re a progressive metal fan, and chapter 2 becomes “The Night and the Silent Water.” Now we’re getting somewhere.
5. Keep going until you’ve filled the list of chapter titles in the table of contents of your imaginary new novel. Now, my friend, after just a few minutes of listening to music, you have a story.
Sure, it may look like an undecipherable thread of unconnected titles at this point, but that’s when your imagination comes into play. Start thinking up ideas based purely on these song titles, and make connections. Maybe “The Great Gig in the Sky” describes an opening scene where two gods fight in the clouds—one kills the other, and it dissolves into a great lake of magic power-granting water in chapter 2: “The Night and the Silent Water.” Keep this going and you’ve got yourself a plot.
Be smart, don’t be too strict, be creative, and let the ideas flow organically. The list you first create obviously doesn’t have to be the final index of your novel. Use each title as a creative starting point, craft ideas, move them around, disregard the useless ones (because there’s not much you can do with “9th Symphony”), and keep the ones you like. If, like many successful authors such as George R. R. Martin or Terry Goodkind, you prefer not to have chapter titles at all, no problem! Get rid of the titles in the end, once you’ve outlined your story.
The beautiful thing about this is that the possibilities are truly endless because you’ll never run out of songs (and there are always movie titles, TV episode titles, etc). You’ll be exercising your creativity and you’ll hopefully map an entire plot in just minutes. Do it a million times if you need to—trust me, you’ll never be bored. There are no excuses now, go write!
DANIKA DINSMORE
Put It in Space
DANIKA DINSMORE is an award-winning spoken-word artist and screenwriter. The first book in her middle-grade fantasy adventure series is Brigitta of the White Forest (2011) and the second is The Ruins of Noe (2012). The third is Ondelle of Grioth due out fall 2013.
In my travels as a teacher and writer, I have come across many people (almost always adults) who are intimidated by the idea of writing speculative fiction. In awe of world building, of making up language and culture, they wonder where on earth (or in the galaxy) it all comes from. In my writing classes, it begins with the exploration of ideas.
One of my favorite idea-generating writing exercises started as an inside joke. A student in my story class at Vancouver Film School commented that his screenplay sounded too much like the movie THE BOURNE IDENTITY. I jokingly responded, “Well then, put it in space.” We all paused as the idea sunk in. What would this story look like in space? It was worth exploring.
“Put it in space” became the default punch line for the remainder of the term. Students would pitch ideas to me like, “It’s To Kill a Mockingbird . . . in space!”
Then, a few years ago, I was attending a writers’ conference, listening to a panel of agents and editors, dutifully taking notes, when one of the agents said, “I want to find the Lady Gaga of literature.” Without even thinking, I wrote in my notes, “It’s Lady Gaga . . . in space!”
And something inside me clicked.
Characters tend to inspire me first, then the situations around them. The idea of Lady Gaga on an interplanetary tour was too tempting for me to pass up. The story would be funny, irreverent, campy, unapologetic. Completely inspired, I dug my heels in and my latest project was born: “Intergalactic: A Pop Space Opera.”
After this brainwave, I started using similar idea-generating exercises in my workshops, experimenting with other phrases like “. . . with dragons,” or “. . . with time travel,” and ”. . . in an alternate universe.” Every class always has a good laugh while sharing these ideas, but inevitably, there will be one that causes us to pause and ponder, swirling the idea around like tasting wine.
One time a
workshop attendee used a favorite lawyer movie for the exercise (I’m not at liberty to say which one). When it was his turn to share, he said, “It’s [lawyer movie] with time travel.” There was a pause in the room, an audible click, and he sat up straighter. We all thought the idea was brilliant. I told him, “You should write that.”
He’s in the middle of writing that story right now.
But wait, you ask, won’t people recognize the story? Isn’t this plagiarism?
I have several answers to that. First, we never write anything in a vacuum. Our ideas are a collection of observation and experience, tales that have come before us, and common threads that connect us as human beings. There are only so many core stories; the characters and settings are what keep changing. And, if you like, you can always begin this exercise with a core story archetype (rags to riches, grail quest, rebirth) rather than a specific story (it’s a rags-to-riches story . . . on the moon).
Second, it is your job, as the writer, to make the story your own. If you breathe life into your original characters, use your own personal language and style, allow the plot to organically reveal itself rather than to force it into someone else’s structure, it will most likely not even resemble the story that inspired you in the first place. This is what happens to stories when we own them (or they own us, as is often the case with me).
This is not about writing the next Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (although that’s fine too). This exercise is about inspiration and exploration, for those who are intimidated by writing speculative fiction, or not.
And, really, if I asked everyone in one of my workshops to write Eat, Pray, Love in space, we would get a workshop full of variations on that story. Wait a second . . . Eat, Pray, Love . . . in space . . . click!
Now Write! Page 7