Tag: ideas

Randomisation as a Writing Tool – Writing Excuses Exercise 10.10

Boy, I'm glad that's not ominous.
Boy, I’m glad that’s not ominous.

There are a lot of different ways you can use randomisation to inspire writing. Phillip K Dick famously used the I Ching to guide him in writing The Man in the High Castle. I’ve dabbled with story dice and flicking through books to pick a word or picture. And this week podcast Writing Excuses used the I Ching both to generate questions and to create a writing prompt.

The Exercise

Randomly generated using the I Ching, this week’s writing prompt is:

Competing fiercely to become Spring’s queen, the garden flowers blossomed to their full beauty. Who will win the golden crown of glory? Among them all, only the peony stands out.

For me, creativity requires structure as well as chaos. To give this prompt a bit more structure, I decided not to use it to generate something from scratch, but to build on a story idea I’m already working on for this week’s flash Friday piece.

My starting place for the story was inspired by my friend Marios, who was talking about people having to present their academic theses on human skin – more specifically their own skin. It’s an intriguingly grizzly idea, and one that puts limits on what the characters write too. But beyond that high concept, I’ve got nothing for the story. Lets see what this prompt gives me.

Flowers and Competition

The obvious thing is the flowers. My character’s academic field is going to be botany. That opens up potential to look at strange, fantastical plants and their uses.

Conflict is also clearly present in that I Ching passage. The flowers are competing for the one place of high status. I’m going to transfer that dynamic onto the academics of my story. We have two botanists competing for a top prize, job or bursary. Only one can win through the glory of their work. Who will it be?

So, with two minutes’ thought, this random prompt has given me my conflict and some information about both my characters – I doubt I’ll have space for more than two in this flash story. That’s pretty good going.

The Joy of Chaos

I think that these random idea generators work so well at times because they give us rough edges to generate ideas off. The ideas we dream up can sometimes be neat but without the complex or contradictory details that bring stories to life. Randomness adds that.

Do any of you have favourite random idea generators? What are they, and how helpful are they?

And of course you can come back on Friday to see how this story pans out.

Picture by Payton Chung via Flickr creative commons.

Writing Excuses exercise 10.4 – ideas

I’ve fallen behind on the exercises from the course Writing Excuses are running. Fortunately for me, my favourite writing podcast still includes a wildcard episode once a month not related to the course, so by skipping those I’ll hopefully catch up. I know I have quite a few readers who are doing the course, so how are you folks getting on?

This week I’m catching up on the exercise from episode 10.4, a Q&A on generating ideas. The exercise is:

Take one of the ideas you’re excited about, and then audition five different characters for the lead role in that story. Make sure they’re all different from each other.

I’ve chosen a story I’m considering for a future flash Friday, returning to the weird western world of ‘Straight Poker‘. I want to expand on that setting by giving other games magical power. In particular, I thought that the Plains Indian act of ‘counting coup‘ by touching an opponent in battle would make an interesting magical rite.

If I had more time, I’d ‘audition’ characters for this story by writing a chunk of it with each of them. As it is, I’ll stick with discussing their merits as central characters. So…

A young Plains Indian brave: This character has obvious advantages. This could be his first chance to prove himself, counting coup against an opponent either on the battlefield or in some other tense setting. It’s clearly identifiable as a coming of age thing. It’s probably who I would have chosen without this exercise. Maybe a bit too obvious.

A rancher against whom coup is counted during an attack, thus laying a curse on him: Having an outside perspective makes it easier to retain mystery around the magic, but also makes it harder to explore it in a small number of words. Victims make good central characters if they fight back against their status, but can be too passive. Also, I’m not sure I want to fall into the old ‘cowboys good, Indians bad’ trap. And speaking of traps, I realised as I wrote this that I’d automatically made the rancher male, when a woman would be more unusual and therefore interesting. Bad Andrew, perpetuating the patriarchy – go invent a better idea.

An old Plains Indian woman: OK, I’ve swung as far as I could from young, white, male protagonist. And the results raise a lot of interesting questions – why would a woman like this want to count coup? what’s her connection to the magic of that act? how can someone old and frail achieve anything in a battle? It’s such a challenge for her, she’s instantly more interesting as a protagonist.

An escaped slave: Ooh, intriguing. Slavery existed alongside some of the conflicts between settlers and Plains Indians. Maybe this woman has learned that she can gain power over her former master by counting coup. Maybe she’s seeking shelter and acceptance in the tribe. Either way, it mixes up the binary cowboys and Indians dynamic often shown in westerns.

A Chinese railroad worker: If I’ve learnt one thing from Hell on Wheels it’s that driving railroad lines across North America caused territorial conflicts with the Plains Indians. The gangs laying rails from the west coast included a lot of Chinese labour, and that could give a very different perspective on this. There’s a clear source of conflict – the railroad – and an innocent worker just trying to feed his family, now caught up in that conflict. Maybe he knows some magic from his homeland, helping me explore this setting some more.

There we go, five ideas. I’m really glad I tried this exercise, as the first couple of characters are definitely the least interesting, and as I pushed myself to come up with various protagonists I realised that they could show me more about the world the story explores. I should do this more often.

Now I just have to decide which one to use – anybody got any thoughts on who would be best? Which character intrigues you most?

This also reminded of some of the exercises in Edward de Bono’s How to Be More Interesting. Despite its pompous title, and sometimes pompous tone, de Bono’s book has some good exercises for expanding your creative muscles, and might be worth a look if you’re after more exercises like this.

Did any of you do this exercise? How did you get on? And if you just want to try it now, why not share your ideas in the comments? I’d be fascinated to see what you come up with.

Writing Excuses exercise 10.2 – developing ideas

As mentioned in a previous post, the excellent Writing Excuses podcast is running as a free fiction writing course this year. I’m following along, completing the exercises and sharing my results here, and I hope you will too. If you’d like to join in, please feel free to leave your answers to the exercises, or a link to where you’ve written them up, in the comments below.

This week’s episode, titled ‘I Have An Idea, What Do I Do Now?’ discussed developing story ideas once you have them. The exercise is:

Using last week’s five story ideas (or five new ones):

  1. Take two of them and combine them into one story.
  2. Take one and change the genre underneath it.
  3. Take one and change the ages and genders of everybody you had in mind for it
  4. Take the last one and have a character make the opposite choice.

You can see my five ideas in a previous post, and here’s what I did with them for the exercise:

1. Combining:

I decided to combine my second idea, a historical novel about a young bowman’s experience on the Agincourt campaign, with my fourth idea, a science fiction story about trying to police planetary borders. It felt like a suitably challenging pair to combine.

I think that the most interesting way to do this, while keeping plenty of elements from both stories, is to make it about people trying to enforce customs duties along the English Channel during that period, with the sci-fi element becoming a bit of secret history. So these local officials – probably a couple of minor nobles or merchants with official tax-raising positions, along with a local militia – have to struggle with two issues making their life difficult – the huge disruption caused by Henry V’s campaign in France, and strange items they start running across while stopping smugglers. It is gradually revealed that these are extra-terrestrial gadgets, being used by secret societies fighting a private war behind the historical scenes. Someone is running a very different sort of smuggling operation, and things are about to get ugly.

Different characters interpret the devices in different ways, and all struggle to be believed. Someone turns out to be a traitor who’s in on the secret war. Everything comes to a head around the same time that the military campaign does.

2. Change the genre:

I’m changing the genre behind my third idea, a cabal secretly running the world using playing-card-powered magic. Instead of fantasy it becomes science fiction. The people running a future society do so through extremely advanced technology, but they have a limited number of one-shot devices and have lost the ability to make more. The shortage causes bitter competition for this limited resource, in which more and more of the devices are used up. It’s a situation that could bring the whole institution to its knees.

3. Change the ages and genders:

My first idea, about an ageing bureaucracy running a baroque galactic empire, gets a big age switch-around. Now it’s the young who are using ancient traditions and strange practices to exclude older people from any influence or power. After witnessing her wife’s death from neglect at the hands of this failing system, a grandmother sets out to begin a revolution.

4. Change a choice:

As in my original fifth idea, a pair of angry lovers decide to destroy the town that harmed them. But as they begin their rampage, one of them feels a great sense of remorse and tries to stop the other. Soon the lovers are battling each other, one defending the town, the other trying to destroy it.

 

Reflecting on the exercise:

Even after years of practice, I often still just write the first version of an idea that pops into my head, rather than trying to vary it or take a different angle. This exercise was good for making me move away from obvious choices, and I think that the stories are richer for it. I like that I now have an octogenarian revolutionary protagonist, but I felt like the most interesting shift came in the fourth exercise. Changing a character’s decision also alters their motives and character, as well as the course of the story. It took things in an unexpected direction.

What do you think of my ideas? Do you have any good approaches for refining story ideas? And if you did the exercise how did you get on? Please feel free to leave any comments or your own answers to the exercise below.

Happy writing!

Writing Excuses Masterclass exercise 1 – generating ideas

I mentioned on Saturday that Writing Excuses are running this year’s podcasts as a free writing course, with exercises for each lesson. To try to add to what I learn from this, and generate discussion with any of you who are interested, I’m going to post the exercises and what I produce here. No set timetable yet – we’ll see how I get on. If you feel like trying these exercises and sharing the results then I’d love to read them – please put your ideas or a link to them in the comments.

So, a week behind, here are the exercises from the first episode of this course (10.1), and what I came up with:

Write down five different story ideas in 150 words or less. Generate these ideas from these five sources:

From an interview or conversation you’ve had
From research you’ve done (reading science news, military history, etc)
From observation (go for a walk!)
From a piece of media (watch a movie)
From a piece of music (with or without lyrics)

This exercise might not generate the very best ideas you’ve ever had, but it will definitely flex your idea muscles in new ways.

1. From an interview or conversation:

A galactic empire is run by an ageing bureaucracy full of strange customs and traditions in a Gormenghast style. Our protagonist must survive the strange and deadly customs involved in joining this august body before he can bring reform.

This one was inspired by a conversation about reforming Britain’s House of Lords.

2. From research:

The story of a young bowman in Henry V’s army on the Agincourt campaign. He becomes disillusioned with the warrior king he idealised, and with the romance of soldiering, as he sees the unpleasant reality of medieval warfare. The final act sees him plunged into a horrifying sea of mud and bloodshed as the outnumbered English fight for their lives in the famous battle.

This one is kind of cheating. It’s based on research I did for a couple of freelance jobs, and I considered writing it as a novel this year, as it’s the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. Then I realised I didn’t have time, so I’ll just put the idea here instead.

3. From observation:

A secret cabal of mages govern the world using magic they tap into through playing cards. But each mage can only use each card once, and when they run out their power is gone. Different cards have different powers. The protagonist is a good mage fighting the bad mages, because I am too tired for a more nuanced plot right now.

Based on seeing an ace of clubs lying abandoned in a puddle.

4. From a piece of media:

A border police story, inspired by Canadian police procedural series The Border, except in space. A group of security professionals struggle to stop smugglers, terrorists and annoying tourists crossing the planetary border, in particular a shuttle docking platform on top of a geosynchronous space elevator. Combine it with The Wire-style plots where you get to see and sympathise with both sides of the criminal divide, and every act is politicised.

5. From a piece of music:

A pair of angry lovers prepare to burn down the town that persecuted them before disappearing into the night. It all goes horribly wrong.

Inspired by one of my all time favourite albums, Black Love by the Afghan Whigs, especially the tracks ‘Crime Scene Part 1’ and ‘Going to Town’.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BM6cY-CB0c?rel=0&w=420&h=315]

Great song. Shame about the video.

There we go, my ideas. Please feel free to share yours in the comments, or comment on mine – who knows, maybe one day I’ll write one of them.

And go listen to Writing Excuses. It’s great.