Friday, November 24, 2006

Thanksgiving Challenge

This week's update is going to be short and sweet on account of the holiday. Stay safe this weekend, and don't let the leftovers get nasty.

Challenge: Think about the people you have encountered this weekend, whether it be family or the people who camped out at Best Buy Thursday night, and create some character sketches from them.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Mining For Ideas

Every now and again a good idea strikes with such force that the writer feels as though they are channeling the idea from some mysterious cosmic fiction-fountain. The rest of the time, however, coming up with a good idea is a pain in the ass and can be quite discouraging. This week, I'd like to talk about the brainstorming process and how to take seemingly "stupid" ideas and turn them into interesting stories.

I've found that the best place for me to start is with a "what if..." question. This can range from something as mundane as "What if I switched laundry detergents for a month?" to something as far-fetched as "What if an extra-terrestrial being is monitoring my use of plastic knives in conjunction with buttering my toast?"

Now, it's very easy to dismiss these questions with a chuckle. After all, laundry detergent is hardly significant in the grand scheme of things, right? Right... unless you make it otherwise. Think about it: What are the differences between two laundry detergents? The biggies are color and scent, but the amount that is used could vary as could the thickness. But again, who really cares? Perhaps your clothes do.

Okay, so this is still sounding ridiculous. "Why the hell would clothes care about what detergent is used on them?" This is where things can start to become interesting. Why would they care? That is the central question, and it is the path to your story.

(In case you are wondering, there are many reasons why an assortment of shirts and pants would care about laundry detergents. Perhaps they are living entities, and some members have specific allergies, and the detergent aggrivates them. Or maybe the clothing exists in the future or in an alternate universe, and is outfitted with several nanomachines that are responsible for regulating body temperature and maintaining camoflage. The wrong detergent could cause something to glitch out, resulting in any number of strange situations.)

The main thing to keep in mind during this process is that any idea, no matter how stupid it seems, can be fashioned into something relatively interesting. It just takes some work.

Challenge: Take your dumbest idea and think of what implications it might have in the real world, then write that down.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Developing Personality

A character's personality is something that develops over the course of the writing process. It's a lot like getting to know another person - it's impossible to know a whole lot about them before you've seen them in a variety of situations. In the prewriting stage, don't worry about brainstorming a full-fledged character; just stick with the basics we discussed two weeks ago - the immediate backstory and the important details of the characters' relationships with each other. Your chief concern is getting the story finished, even if it sucks.

Because it will suck, and it will most likely be due to your characters. That's where revision comes in. Your second and third drafts (and beyond) are where you start fixing things, including the focus of this week's talk: personality.

Do you have your character sketches handy? Get those out. If you had any ideas during the writing, add those if you haven't already. You should have a rough idea of what the character is like - adjectives like "angry" or "melancholy" should give you a basic filter through which all other details should pass. The next step is to take the information in your character sketch and ask, "How does this interact with the character's personality?"

Let's take a look. Suppose your character sheet tells you that your main character is bald. If he is fundamentally insecure, then he'll probably wear a hat and become defensive if attention is drawn to his head. If he's more secure, he may think he looks like a badass and try to act tough. Of course, it could be an interesting twist for a guy who is insecure about something else to think his baldness makes him look scary, so don't rule anything out without giving it real consideration.

Another thing to keep in mind are your character's hobbies, as they can be quite revealing. Think about the differences between things like collecting stamps and fixing old cars. What is it about your character that makes one hobby preferable to another? Does he have exceptional patience? Is he organized or disorganized? Is he creative or destructive? Try and imagine your character involved in different activities and see how it unfolds.

Finally, think about personality quirks - little things that bring a character to life. These can be anything from fear of clowns to obsession with the freshness of fruit. Work these idiosyncrasies into the story; the characters will be far more interesting with them than without them.

Challenge: Take a character you are working on and put them in a variety of challening situations (traffic jam, power outage, in line behind a screaming kid at the grocery store, for example) to see how he or she will react.

Friday, November 03, 2006

What Good is Prewriting?

Last week's discussion of character touched on something that I think I should deal with more fully before I move on. Developing a character's backstory is just one aspect of prewriting, which is essentially "what you do before you write the story."

Before this goes too far, I want to be clear that it is perfectly legitimate to begin work on the story before stepping back and engaging in what we call "prewriting." When an idea strikes, it may do so with action or dialogue, and there is no reason to forego getting that down simply because it would be "out of order."

The main idea of prewriting is getting the rough idea out of your head and into a notebook or text file. This frees up your mind to develop the idea further since you no longer have to worry about keeping everything in your memory. And that's really the point of prewriting, to get major aspects of your story worked out at the beginning so there is less to worry about in revision.

Obviously character is one of those major aspects that needs to be addressed - personalities, backstory, physical appearance, and relationships are all things that need to be considered ahead of time to make the story believable. But character isn't the only thing that needs to be considered.

It is important for the writer to be aware of the story's setting - the locations the characters inhabit and the props they interact with. The setting has tremendous potential for symbolism, but in the prewriting phase the writer only needs a general idea of the way things are set up. For example, if the story involves three characters on a road trip, the size of the car is more important to consider in the prewriting phase than the vehicle's color or the scenery. Three people driving across the country in a Volkswagen Golf are going to behave much differently than three people in a conversion van because of space difference, but are not likely to be affected by whether the exterior paint is blue or black.

The writer also needs to have a loose handle on where the story is going. This is an area that I strongly recommend against spending a lot of time on in the prewriting phase because it is likely to undergo the most drastic changes throughout the writing process. Still, it helps to have an idea about the situations that the characters may face in the story, even if those situations ultimately become irrelevant because of choices the characters make.

Basically the point of all of this is to establish a framework to build the rest of the story around. It will make it easier to maintain consistency within the work if the world and the characters are laid out for easy reference. Ultimately, this will reduce the stress that comes with revision because there will be fewer mistakes to correct.

Challenge: Create an environment. Then create two or three characters. Write a rough outline of what will happen if those characters are dropped into that environment.