EXERCISE
Make a list of three things:
• a personal story of your own, a relative’s, or a friend’s;
• an historical figure or moment in history;
• a book or movie or TV show set in the real world (To Kill a Mockingbird, WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, CSI).
Now take the phrases “in space,” “with dragons,” and “with time travel” (or use your own: zombies, wizards, elves, aliens, in a future dystopia, in an enchanted forest, etc.) and tack a phrase on the end of each item on your list (i.e., CSI with dragons).
Next, write each story’s one sentence logline (logline = somebody must do something before something bad happens). For example: A team of crime scene investigators must prove a young dragon did not kill the king before the beast is hunted down and destroyed.
Take your favorite of the three and set your timer for 15–20 minutes. Start with the line, “This is a story about . . .” and write without stopping until the timer goes off. Do not cross out or edit, just let yourself brainstorm on the page. Rinse and repeat as many times as you like!
XAQUE GRUBER
Call of the Wylleen
XAQUE GRUBER is a writer for television (Dynasty Reunion: Catfights & Caviar), film (BROKEN ROADS), and online (The Huffington Post). He is from New England and lives in Los Angeles with his two pet mice.
A few years ago, I was working in a Los Angeles television production office where I kept two mice in a terrarium. They became the office pets. I became attached to Nugget and Hopscotch (both female) watching them play and sleep and eat and clean each other just the same as much larger mammals.
One of my coworkers was Taryn, a young mother with three children. While the office conversation with Taryn would often turn toward the subject of raising children, motherhood, giving birth, my eyes would glance over at the two tiny pet mice in their glass terrarium. I found the mice to be much more evolved than most realized, displaying sensitivities like any mammal, even emotion.
Watching our office pets, talking about motherhood, seeing the small (almost fetal) “hands” of the mouse grab a seed and nibble away on it . . . I must have made a subconscious connection and blurted out to Taryn, “If you could give birth to any animal (other than a human), what would it be?”
She looked at me and said, “That is the strangest question I have ever been asked.”
I took that as a great compliment. The strangest question ever? Wow! She was about thirty. So in her thirty years of being asked questions, mine topped the list as the strangest. I knew I was onto something.
My mind went immediately to a character that I wanted to create. A woman who gives birth to animals. But why was she giving birth to animals? And how? And who would she be?
In the news was a story about menopause, and how a woman can experience a spike in fertility toward the end of menopause. Hmmm . . . my character could be an older woman, almost to the age where no one would expect a pregnancy could even occur.
A script was taking shape in my mind. A woman nearing age sixty is pregnant with an animal. I toyed with the idea of making this a dark futuristic drama in the vein of CHILDREN OF MEN or THE HANDMAID’S TALE where technology has made it possible for human women to birth animals in order to keep species alive, but I was having a hard time developing this. The tone was feeling very serious and the story was growing more epic, like a full screenplay or a novel, and the thought of that was exhausting.
I like humor. I love bizarre, absurdist, strangely fantastical situations—like Lewis Carroll’s books or Monty Python films. This story had a premise I liked (woman giving birth to an animal), but the dark, serious direction I was heading was taking all the fun out of it.
At the time, I was newly obsessed with the BBC series Downton Abbey. I was so in love with the writing and the characters and the dialogue that I imagined myself as a footman in a manor like Downton, just for a day, in 1914. Wouldn’t that be incredible? I must have watched it three times in a month. Did I mention I was obsessed?
And then—EUREKA! If you’re going to steal, steal from the best. And Downton Abbey was the best thing I’d seen on TV outside of Mad Men—also a period piece and another obsession. For years, I had been told that period settings would turn off a reader, but the success of Mad Men and Downton Abbey proved to me exactly otherwise. My central character would be a maid in a Downton Abbey–like estate in the 1950s—just after World War II, at the dawn of television. And much to her dismay, and her boss’s dismay, she’d be birthing animals in the mansion. Imagine Dame Maggie Smith’s character in Downton Abbey watching a maid lay a large wild goose egg on the Oriental carpets—the whole script was rethought using my same, original, basic premise. I also consulted with a British-ism dictionary of the 1950s and peppered the dialogue with all sorts of fun English slang.
Suddenly my exhaustion with the script turned into elation and I wanted to do nothing but write! I felt such a wacky premise would be best suited for a short feature (for now). Shorts are such a fabulous and underrated format, and I highly advise any frustrated feature or TV writer to take a stab at a short. It’s like a brisk swim in a freshwater lake. You emerge feeling alive again. In less than twenty pages, you have a beginning, middle, and end—and lots of juicy stuff in between. Don’t worry about if it is ever shot. It is written.
The character was named Wylleen Thornby (I was fascinated with Damien Thorn from THE OMEN as a teen), and the script became a nineteen-page short called Call of the Wylleen. Jack London’s classic tale of the wilderness seemed to be a solid reference point for a humorous title. Most who have read Call of the Wylleen have laughed and enjoyed its bizarre story. A successful sitcom writer said, “Until I read this, I never knew bestiality could be made funny and charming.”
So how does Wylleen’s menopause cause such a spike in fertility that wild beasts and birds want to mate with her? Well, it just did. And you can get away with that in a short, because it’s not about the why—it’s about the characters, their emotions, and their journey. I wove dark elements—almost horror-esque moments—in there, as well as heartfelt scenes. The script has gone on to open many doors for me as a writer.
And it all happened because I connected a random conversation about motherhood with watching my surprisingly civilized pet mice frolic. By the way, Taryn’s reply to my most bizarre question: She’d want to give birth to a mouse because you wouldn’t feel it as much.
EXERCISE
Take a random conversation in your home, office, the train, etc. Write down the dialogue as people are speaking.
Using that conversation as a theme, combine it with something unrelated that you’re witnessing.
Turn that into a short story or short film (less than twenty pages) with a beginning, middle, and end.
Use current news stories or inspiration from a favorite TV show or film to help shape the tone. Feel free to adventure into a different time period.
Now write!
SEQUOIA HAMILTON
The Joy of Six
SEQUOIA HAMILTON is the founder of Ojai Writers Conference and co-founder of Ojai WordFest, an eight-day literary festival in Southern California. She is the owner of Global Writing Adventures, including her Paris Writers Retreat. She is an author of “Perfume on My Passport” and publisher of “Paris Stories—An Anthology.”
We live in a golden age of concise storytelling. We text, we tweet, we post, we IM, and we emoticate.
What if we lived in a world restricted by an economy of words—where each person was allowed to utter only six words in response to every question?
Legend has it that the first six-word challenge was posed to Ernest Hemingway to settle a bar bet. Could he write a novel in ten words or less? Clocking in at six words, he offered: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
A story of six words can speak volumes.
In 2006, Smith Magazine
posed a writing contest inspired by Hemingway’s classic storytelling challenge with a focus on personal narrative: “One life. Six words. What’s yours?” Their passion for nonfiction confessionals was dubbed Six-Word Memoirs.
When 200,000 insightful slivers of life, brilliant in their brevity, rolled in, Smith had birthed an overnight online community of nano-memoirists hungry for more. Within four years, the fledging zine’s contest—a game changer they call “their happy accident”—spawned a multi-million-dollar franchise replete with an interactive website, series of books, board game, calendar, and T-shirts.
Favorite micro-minis from the Smith website include:
Paranoia: My potato is watching me.
He proposed on the Scrabble board.
Full moon, wife dances, I howl.
Life is better in soft pajamas.
And a few on the craft of writing:
A writer not writing; certain death.
Talent. Please stop hiding from me.
Teaching creative writing; starting with this.
Though Smith founders created the user-generated website to showcase biographical content, soon other writers and wordsmiths of various genres wanted in on the fun. A half-dozen word challenges popped up all over the Internet, Chicken Soup-y like:
Craft a poem in six words.
Pen lyrics to a rap battle in six words.
Write a prayer in six words.
Construct an obituary in six words.
Tell a horror story in six words.
Describe an imaginary world in six words.
Even a blog about RVs got fifty-one submissions for a call for “Six Words About Your RV Life.”
The undisputed king of the “what ifs,” speculative fiction, fits perfectly with this challenge. Can you weave a fictional tale in six words with irreverence, humor, or suspense? This was a question posed from Wired magazine to legends of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror.
Concise masterpieces emerged:
Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?—Eileen Gunn
His penis snapped off; he’s pregnant!—Rudy Rucker
With bloody hands, I say good-bye.—Frank Miller
In a recent writing workshop, I posed this challenge to writers with a twist: Spin a tale in six words and then allow your six-word creation to inspire a one-paragraph story.
A young teen, not yet sure of a story to write but wanting merely, profoundly, to find a way to cope with her father’s passing through the therapy of writing, submits:
NO MORE CIGARETTES, JUST CHERRY LOLLIPOPS
by Sandra Perkins
I’m ten years old, it’s past my bedtime, and I pretend to just be up for a glass of water. And he wakes up to get a lollipop, because he shouldn’t smoke anymore. And he smiles, and ruffles my hair, and tells me he loves me and to get some sleep because the Hospice nurse is coming in the morning. I tell him I love him too, and go to bed. And two weeks later, he is dead.
Her story moves me. I can relate. I was only twenty-four years-young when my fifty-four years-young mother died suddenly from complications with a rare form of arthritis, triggering cardiac arrest. The doctor walked into the ICU waiting room and uttered these six words, “I’m sorry, she didn’t make it.”
Life’s short; so is six words.
EXERCISE
Deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive, six-word challenges can be powerful writing exercises that can lead to deeper, richer stories. Here are a few prompts I use in my writing classes:
1. Describe your novel, story, or concept in six words. Think of it as a six-second elevator pitch.
2. On index cards write six-word descriptions of: your protagonist, what your protagonist wants, the challenge standing in the way of the protagonist’s goal, the theme, the world of your story, the rules of that world, etc. Use the back of the cards to list additional notes.
3. Write six-word nano-memoirs for the main characters in your story.
4. To create a new story, write a six-word headline, followed by a short paragraph (like the teen writing student example above). Write three to six new headlines and paragraphs and arrange their order to ensure you have a beginning, middle, and end, with story and character arcs.
5. As a remedy for writer’s block, try these six-word fill-in-the-blanks. Complete the following adding only one word, possibly having characters in your story talk to one another.
“Didn’t recognize you without your ______.”
“My, what happened to your ______?”
“Please don’t tell anyone about ______.”
JAMES WANLESS, AKA “CAPTAIN PICK-A-CARD”
Tarot for Writers
JAMES WANLESS, PHD, is a futurist and pioneer of new thinking. He is the creator of the Voyager Tarot, the author of Way of the Great Oracle, Strategic Intuition for the 21st Century, New Age Tarot, Wheel of Tarot, and Intuition@Work. A natural Green Man, he is also the author of Little Stone: Your Friend for Life, Sustainable Life: The New Success, and Sustain Yourself cards.
When Laurie first asked me to contribute to this book, I didn’t understand why, until she explained that the tarot could be a useful tool for writers, even more so for writers working in these speculative genres, since you guys tend to make more overt use of mythology and symbolism.
My writing experience is with nonfiction consciousness type books, so I wouldn’t dare tell you how to write fiction. I enjoy it, but I don’t know how to write it. What I can tell you about is the tarot; especially my version—the Voyager Tarot.
Some tarot readers and designers of tarot cards adhere strictly to traditional interpretations while others (like me) have their own style and approach. Getting tarot people to agree on how to use and interpret the cards is a lot like trying to herd cats. They are a highly individualistic breed, often eccentric, with their own way of looking at things—I suppose they’re a lot like writers.
Traditional tarot uses the cards to read the future. Assumed is the idea the future is pre-destined and we are “victims of fate.” The cards show if you’re doomed or lucky.
The Voyager Tarot reinterprets the tradition for our modern consciousness as we become more aware we have a say in our fate. In addition to genetics and the “luck of the draw” of upbringing, free will plays a part in our lives, especially if we’re consciously aware of it and take responsibility for our own development.
To me the tarot is a map to wholeness, the “GPS of the soul,” a tool and ally on the universal, archetypal hero’s journey. Each card of the major arcana from 0 to 20 represents an archetypal energy, a tradition of mythological figures or deities, a constellation of qualities or characteristics. As a whole these cards represent a pathway from the zero point of infinite possibility (the “0” card, traditionally known as The Fool, I call it Fool-Child) through all types of internal experience to wholeness and completion (the “20” card, traditionally called The World, I renamed it the Universe).
The minor arcana resemble the playing cards we know today, with each suit representing different aspects of our being—mind (Crystals cards, traditional name: Swords), emotion (Cups cards), body and the material realm (Worlds cards, traditional name: Pentacles), and spirit (Wands cards, traditional name: Pipes).
In my teaching and practice I am always figuring out new ways to use the cards to explore where we are in or out of harmony, what we might need to focus on and develop more of, what we might need to watch out for, what could be the result if we go on the hero’s journey the cards are pointing toward.
Plus they’re fun to look at and contemplate. Tarot cards are visually rich and packed full of symbolism. In the Voyager deck I completely re-imagined the iconography of the tarot as complex collages designed to help users connect with their own unconscious and develop their intuition.
If you’re intrigued by the tarot, why not visit a mystical or new
age shop and explore the multitude of decks available? Select the one that speaks to you. You can also find them online. Each deck generally comes with its own booklet with the designer/creator’s interpretations of the cards, but don’t let those limit you. They’re just a starting point for your own intuition and imagination.
Once you get familiar with your deck, here are several ideas for how you could use the tarot as a tool for creative writing. For this exercise I’m going to reference Voyager cards, but it could probably work with any tarot deck.
EXERCISE
1. Have fun exploring the deeper meaning of a card, both its positive and negative aspects, by seeking out as many associations as you can find about a particular symbol or archetype in the cards, such as the Fool, the Emperor, the Priestess, the Moon, etc.
2. Start a new story, or do a card reading for a story you already have in progress: Separate out the major arcana cards and randomly pull five of these cards. Could they become the major characters, themes, or plot points in a story?
For example, you pull Magician, Lovers, Strength, Death, and Sun. Explore what these cards represent, their positive and negative attributes, and how they could be combined or interact to form a story. A conflict between a magician and a pair of lovers. Or is the magician one of the lovers? Is he (or she) seeking to harvest some form of strength from the sun to cheat death?
3. Character reading: Perform a reading for a character to gain deeper insight. From the whole deck pull three cards: the first represents the character’s past, the second represents the present, and the third represents the future. What insight or ideas does this reading give you about where your character is coming from and where he or she is headed?
4. Character conflict reading: in my deck, among the minor arcana there are twelve “watch out” cards. These are Anger, Disappointment, Sorrow, Fear, Stagnation, Negativity, Confusion, Dullness, Narrowness, Delusion, Oppression, and Setback. Rather than a doomed fate, I see these as what to watch out for in yourself or life, yet they each have a positive side too. The Delusion card (10 of Crystals, a quality of mind) could be about innovative thinking, the ability to see what others can’t. But “delusions of grandeur” could get you into a lot of trouble.
Now Write! Page 8