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:
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.
