Sunday Funnies: Worth a Shot

Help! I'm Stumped and I Don't Know What To Write!

 

We've all been there. You sit down to write, and your poor little brain shuts down. I'm not talking about writer's block. I'm talking about feeling like writing and wanting to write, but not having a single idea of the story you want to tell. 

You've worked your way through your backlog or story ideas and nothing is needed for a publisher. Nor are you happy with any of the previous ideas in one of your little notebooks with story nuggets that may or may not still make any sense to you. 

What do you do?

Hi. I'm Sean, and I'm glad you asked. Because, well, I have answers. 

Writing Prompts

What you need is a prompt. You're not facing writer's block (because that doesn't actually exist -- it's always something else, but that's an article for another day). You're just needing that one idea that gets your brain excited. 

A prompt is exactly what it sounds like. It's something that PROMPTS you to write. You can find lists of these things all over the Internet, and every writer has a few that he/she/they use as their go-tos and stand-bys to break through the silence and start making story noise again. 

These are just a few of the ideas I use to remind my brain that I have stories to tell. Maybe they'll work for you too. 

My Quatrain of Cheat Codes

Here's my #1 brain trick. Ready? It starts like this:

What if...

I've written an entire tutorial on using "what if" questions to launch stories so I won't go too far into it here. But it's where most of my best ideas have come from. 

• What if... the mirror in Alice in Wonderland was the same mirror as the one in Snow White? (that one became the story "The Fairest of Them All" from Required Reading Remixed (originally released in one volume as Classics Mutilated)
• What if... a woman had an accident that made her a superhero but it also made her so dangerous that she left her family behind? (that one became the multiple stories of Starlight from Show Me a Hero)
• What if... the KKK killed a black jazz musician in the 1930s, only it wasn't really the Klan and actually solving the crime could potentially destroy a white detective's relationship with his black lover? (that one became the cover story for The Ruby Files Vol. 2, "A Tree Falls in a Forest")

Here's another I particularly love. It's great for when I need a less traditional, more right-brained, out-of-the-box approach to coming up with story ideas. 

Pick three things

It's that simple. Just pick (or have someone pick for you) three unrelated things. This works great if you are in a conventional panel or at your table and ask people for random lists of three things to save for later. Perhaps my best story to come from this method is one called "Lake Jennifer Blair" from Show Me a Hero. I was in a story funk, and I randomly jotted down three items: a Coke can with ants crawling all over it, a duck with a blue goatee, and a cell phone. That it. Then I figured out a story that put all those elements together. Even though they had nothing to do with the plot, just figuring out why they were there and why they would have been there to begin with gave me the rest of the tale before I could finish the first paragraph. 

This little trick comes from the legend about Checkov in which he boasted he could write a story about anything. The story goes:

“. . . when asked how he wrote his stories, Chekhov laughed, snatched up the nearest object—an ashtray—and said that if Korolenko wanted a story called "The Ashtray," he could have it the next morning.” [And he did.]

So what if I stole the idea and added two more objects? It works for me. 

What's this character doing now?

Since I end up writing a lot of the same characters over and over again (it comes with the territory when you write superheroes and pulp characters), I have to always have the next story in my head ready at the helm. A lot of times I create these while I'm writing the previous story simply by throwing in some detail that most likely seems extraneous, but it becomes a kernel, a nugget to prompt that C-plot the won't be revealed until the next story sees print. The danger of this is to be careful not to add stuff that is just fluff. It still has to make sense in the context of the story it appears in, whether it initially feels "extra" or not. 

Often though, when I'm asked to revisit a character hadn't planned to write again, I just reread the stories I have written and look for some small thing to jump out at me. 

When that doesn't help, I just ask the question directly, "What's this character doing now?" That's where my Rick Ruby and The Fool stories came from (The Ruby Files and Show Me a Hero, respectively). I sit down with my brain and say, "Hey, brain, how are Rick and Evelyn doing right at this moment? Are they happy? Why or why not?" Or maybe, "Hey brain, is The Fool getting any better at being a costumed vigilante yet? What's holding her back?"

Reframe a classic

I love this one. It's a trick that many folks don't realize is common in the big world of publishing and movies. It goes like this: Think of a classic. Let's go with Alice in Wonderland. Now put it in a different setting. Okay, how 'bout an urban landscape? Okay, now tell me the story from a different character's POV? 

Whoa?! What?!

That one I just described is the wonderfully decadent film Malice in Wonderland. Some aren't so obvious though. 

Did you know that Star Wars is basically a re-skin of Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress? Or that Jane Smiley's neo-classic novel 1000 Acres in just Shakespeare's King Lear set on farmland and told from the POV of one of the "bad" sisters?

You don't even have to re-skin completely to trigger some ideas. You can simply re-theme the tale. Angela Carter's "The Company of Wolves" from her collection The Bloody Chamber asked what if the story of Little Red Riding Hood was really about one girl's sexual awakening, and bam, the story took form. 

It also doesn't have to be a classic story. Reframe a song if you like. I've done that several times. Prince's "The Beautiful Ones" became a story idea about four aliens living as women in the big city. Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer" became a Poverty Row thriller story idea about a trumpeter whose horn is in hock at the pawn shop to pay off a gambling debt while his new wife waits tables at a diner frequented by the gangsters he owes. 

This is also a fun, creative exercise just to loosen up your brain even if you don't use the ideas that are dreamed up. 

More Prompts

As I mentioned above, the Internet is filled with pages upon pages of writing prompts, some from individual writers, others gleaned from publishing houses and magazines about writing. Here are just a few you might want to take a look at:

• https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts/
• https://www.writersdigest.com/prompts
• https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/500-writing-prompts-to-help-beat-writers-doubt/
• https://www.servicescape.com/writing-prompt-generator
• https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/
• https://www.pw.org/writing-prompts-exercises
• https://squibler.io/learn/writing/writing-prompts/writing-prompt-for-adults/

Well, if that's enough to help you break the silence and get writing, I don't what will do it for you. And as always with the best writing tools and tips, steal freely and make them your own. 

Sunday Funnies: Last Week's Cartoon -- Fixed It (Author Edition)

 

From the "Ideas Just Never Flowing" File -- Gho-Gho-Girl

Now I'm going to have to actually write this story one day.

Su Li Chiang was born to immigrant parents in 1871. In 1892, she died along with her parents in a fire started by anti-Chinese "patriots."

In 1967, her spirit was summoned by a group of hippies on the run from demon-worshipping killers. They needed a spirit to become their protector.

Su Li "Suzie" Chiang is no longer alive, but that won't keep her from protecting her new hippy friends as Gho-Gho-Girl!

#seewhatididthere #ghoghonotgogo #itslikeghost #bootsnotincluded #canyoudancetheswim #perhapsakickstarterisinorder

Nugget #74 -- Radio Inspiration

Listening to the radio while I'm driving can be very inspiring to me 

for story ideas, though in a very mish-mash way. Once, after watching 

a binge of sci-fi and horror shows on Netflix, Prince's "The Beautiful 

Ones" morphed in my brain into a weird amalgamation of Sex in the 

City and Invaders from Mars thanks to the lyric "You were so hard 

to find / The beautiful ones, they hurt you every time."

[Link] Gestation of Ideas: On Vertical Writing and Living

by Nick Pipatrazone

I am not a writer first. I have a family, and without them I would have little reason to want to write -- or to do anything else. My desire to create is held in silence during the day, so that my literary moments can be focused and absolute.

I also remain an admirer and student of Dubus’s fiction, from the haunting “A Father’s Story” (pdf) to the terse “Leslie in California,” but have recently been drawn to his essays. One piece in particular, “The Habit of Writing,” appeared in On Writing Short Stories, an anthology edited by my undergraduate mentor, Tom Bailey. The essay is otherwise difficult to find, but is the most refined presentation of Dubus’s fictional process.

“I gestate: for months, often for years,” he begins. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins in “To R.B.,” Dubus likens ideas to a form of pregnancy, a self within the self. Stories “grow” inside him. Like children, stories are acts of love. Both are to be cared for, but sooner or later, must be released into the world to live of their own accord.

Dubus writes an idea in a notebook, and then leaves it alone: “I try never to think about where a story will go.” Planning is an act of control, and “I will kill the story by controlling it; I work to surrender.” Ever the Roman Catholic, Dubus first sees “characters’ souls.” Faces appear next, and that “is all I need, for most of my ideas are situations, and many of them are questions.” Only when Dubus sees the first two scenes is a story “ready for me to receive it.” Then he writes.

coverIt was not always that way. Dubus used to plan the plots of stories, but those stories were “dead long before I put the final period on the page.” He needed to complete multiple drafts for stories to “tell me what they were.” A novella, Adultery, “took seven drafts, four hundred typed pages…to get the final sixty pages,” a method that “seems foolish now.” Hours spent on discarded pages were replaced with gestation of idea.

Dubus changed his method while writing a story, “Anna.” The narrative was to be told from her point of view, but Dubus struggled to “become her.” He attempted a different approach:

“At my desk next morning I held my pen and hunched my shoulders and leaned my head down, physically trying to look more deeply into the page of the notebook. I did this for only a moment before writing, as a batter takes practice swings while he waits in the on-deck circle. In that moment I began what I call vertical writing, rather than horizontal. I had never before thought in these terms. But for years I had been writing horizontally, trying to move forward (those five pages); now I would try to move down, as deeply as I could.”

Read the full article: http://www.themillions.com/2014/11/gestation-of-ideas-on-vertical-writing-and-living.html

Nuggets #23 -- Hot Rod Girls and New Ideas

Sometimes I sort of back into a story, such as the time I was wearing a t-shirt with art for the movie Hot-Rod Girl on it, and someone asked me if Hot Rod Girl was my book, and I thought for a second, developed a core idea for a completely new story not related to the movie at all, and said, "Yes, it is now."

[Link] Ideas- Blessings... or Locusts?

One of the things I often struggle with as I wander through the myriad alleys and highrises of my rampant (and that is being kind) imagination is the plethora of ideas that I encounter, meet, stumble over, run from, and even sometimes cower in abject fear of.  It has been said by some in the past and indeed the very name of this blog and the All Pulp column of yore that inspired it supports the fact that I very well may be some sort of joke the Cosmos has played on....someone....and might be a veritable two legged idea factory.

This thought both inspires and frightens me.  All at the same time.

Do not get me wrong.  Having these explosions of inspiration in my head that demand to be released in some form to get the life giving attention that ideas and thoughts must have to grow and breathe and develop is truly a hoot.   I have come up with entire novel ideas based on how I see someone hold a fork or the misuse of the word 'affect' as opposed to 'effect'.  I'm not kidding, really I have.  Bits and pieces of useless information pour into my head in disjointed tirades and rambles and blossom and bloom out as somewhat realized storylines and 'What if the guy did this' scenarios.    It is truly wonderful, especially as a creator, to never be bereft of things to dream about and work on.

But then there's the other side.

Continue reading: http://ideaslikebullets.blogspot.com/?spref=fb

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now (#10) -- Developing Ideas

How do you develop your plots and characters? Do you use any set formula? -- Andrea Judy

I never use a set formula, but I do pull from a similar group of tools. For example, I used to fill out questionnaires as my characters or answer a list of questions about them or even fill out a credit card application as the character (but never sent it in, of course), but I no longer have to do that because after a few years, those kind of things became internalized and a matter of habit when I pre-write.

I also listen for clues that might surprise me in songs and from other media. About two years ago I was listening to “The Beautiful Ones” from Prince’s Purple Rain soundtrack and it hit me what a cool comic book title that could be. From there, a sort of War of the Worlds meets Sex and the City plot entered my head and the characters naturally developed from there. Or there is the time I went to a comic book creator get-together wearing my Hot Rod Girl t-shirt with the art from the old movie. A guy asked me if Hot Rod Girl was the new comic book I was working on, and I thought for a moment, then said, “It is now!”