Some days are harder than others. The words don't flow, the page looks at you in a funny way, your story's two-children-short of a gingerbread house and the last thing you want to be doing is sitting down to berate yourself over the next sentence. So, some simple tricks:

WrittenKitten - you write in the text box. Every hundred words (or whatever interval you set) the image box beside it presents you with a new kitten. The work isn't saved, so make sure you copy-paste anything you want to keep into a file on your computer, and your distraction-to-motivation ratio may vary (I personally found myself adding random words just to get the next kitten, instead of writing) but hey - it's adorable.

WriteOrDie - a tool that prompts you to keep writing with anything from gentle reminders to deleting the words you just wrote as incentive. Since I last mentioned them, they've developed desktop and iPad versions of their original web-app. $10 for the desktop app which, when you consider it's a couple of coffees, could be worth it if that kind of thing works for you.

A more low-tech version is to consider paying yourself to write. But - and here's the important part - you don't get the money until the work is finished - when it's being sent out. Not when it's published - that's not in your control unless you self-pub. But if you're using traditional markets, then you can consider something 'finished' when you've sent it out.

Work out a method that makes sense to you - pay yourself by the hour, if you tend to do a lot of 'behind the scenes' work that doesn't involve actual words going on a page (but 'waffling' does not count as work. And deep down, you know the difference.) Or you could pay yourself by words, or by page, or by scene or chapter. You'll need to estimate how much you'll end up paying yourself in total, and how much you can afford. And remember to actually put the money aside as you earn it - otherwise it's too tempting to reduce your reward later when you feel you can't afford all that in one hit.

Record how much you've "earned" each session and put it aside somewhere. A sock or drawer if you're using actual money, or earmark a certain amount in your bank account. Watch it slowly grow as you keep working on the story. When you've sent out the story, you can have the money - spend it on something that will make you feel rewarded, not something that you'd spend money on anyway. You earned that money, your reward is the ability to do whatever you want with it, guilt-free.

You can use other things than money, too - time, for instance. Maybe over the course of a novel, you earn a nice weekend vacation somewhere. Or time doing an activity that you enjoy, but normally gets left out because you have "more important things" to do. Whatever works for you as a reward; break it down into small increments somehow, and slowly 'earn' them by working.

 

Editing has been on my mind lately - specifically, ways people edit and what information is useful to them. The little”learning” project I mentioned last week is software to help developmental editing, you see, and I’m a firm believer that any tool designed for artists should never constrain how the artist has to work in order to be useful.

One thing I’ve come across is a great idea for people who aren’t sure which of their plot elements have to be there. It can also work equally well if you haven’t written the book yet, and are trying to plan it out.

Start at the end - what ending do you want to see? What do you want to leave your reader with? What is the emotional finish note (and why. If we’re feeling triumphant, what are we feeling triumphant about?). Is this moment the actual climax, or a few moments after, or many moments after? What just happened?

Now, work backwards to the scene just before. What setup do you need for this payoff? What has to happen here? Where should the emotion be, and the tension?

Go to the scene before that, and ask again - work your way backwards until you reach the start of the story.

Reversing the cause and effect order (that is, taking the effect and then creating the cause) can make it much easier to work out what the bones are of the story - what has to happen, and what’s just in there because you liked it. 

There’s no reason that you have to go scene by scene, either - if you have a big sheet of paper, then just start at the end with one arc (for example, put the solving of the murder at the end or the bottom of the page) and then write the necessary elements (eg the clues) on the page in roughly where you think they’ll fall in the book. Repeat for the character arsc, the subplot, etc. Then go back and see if any of the elements on the page can be grouped into the same scene. This can work well if you know what has to happen, but you're not sure about when.

 

This isn't a writing game so much as a tool to use when you're trying to figure out how to fix something. It's shamelessly stolen from the programming and computer science arena, where it's also known as The Cardboard Cutout Dog. (it's an amusing read, summarised below).

It started out as the concept of Showing It To Someone Else - you take your work (in their case, a few hundred or thousand lines of code. In our case, a tangled outline, character arc or three chapters that don't work together). You sit down with them, tie them to the chair (because what follows is almost always painfully dull for your victim) and proceed to walk them through your code/writing. You explain everything to them, starting possibly at the beginning or pinballing from one notion to the next, whatever your brain type is.

They lose track of what you're saying within about two minutes, or thirty seconds if there are visual aids, because any student knows you can stare charts and diagrams deafly while giving the impression of concentrating, even to yourself. Telling you they've got no clue what you're on about would result in you starting all over again, and the whole process taking longer, so they sit, nod, murmur encouraging noises, and try to piece enough keywords together to ask something that sounds like an intelligent and useful question whenever you pause for breath. (Ever tried to explain something to someone and they sound like they're listening to another topic completely? Likely they were keyword-hopping).

 

For most of my life, writing has played second-fiddle to my education. I'll admit that most of that was due to me going around getting more education than was probably good for me,  but my workspace was never writer-centric. 

It was essentially my life in desk-format. I'd plonk my university books at one end with the tutes I was going to be teaching, pile my assignments in descending order of duedates (topped with whatever bill had to be paid in the next few days) near my mouse, and create horizontal 'files' of any interesting article, note, book, doodles, picture, letter, page of notebook, stickynote, sandwich* or gadget that I was pretty sure I'd want later**. Drafts of stories (and their edits, redrafts, feedback from my writing groups and notes for improvement) had their own special pile under the really urgent notes from <health and car care profesisonals> assuring me I was overdue for my <whatever>, which kept the stories safe from accidental exposure to editing, sunlight or cogitation. You get the notion that my writing really blossomed under this regime.

 

Take a fairytale, myth or story you know well. Alice in Wonderland, Prometheus, Cinderella, etc.

Take a genre/setting you've never written about. Cyberpunk. Steampunk. Space Opera. Bromance. Western. You can see where this is going. Preferably, pick something that is as unlike the story you've chosen as possible, because it'll force you to be creative instead of filling in the blanks.

You guessed it - write tab A in slot B. Hopefully, if they're different enough, having to fit the story into the genre/setting rules will mean things have to change - it stops being cinderella and turns into a story with cinderella-esque themes or tropes. 

Have fun.

 

Okay, this was news a while ago, but it's been sitting in my inbox while I decided what to do with it: through the magic of Amazon's kindle app store, Zork and other interactive fiction games are coming / have arrived on the kindle.

If you're wiggling your eyebrows at the term 'interactive fiction', think "choose your own adventure" on steroids. There's an explanation at the link, but it's essentially a story-based adventure game on computer, but it uses text only - paragraphed descriptions of everything you can look at, touch or otherwise interact with.  You type in commands like "go north", "take keys", "hit troll" "pick lock with straw" and the game responds accordingly. 

They've been quietly developing alongside more conventional computer games, developing quite sophisticated tools for construction of stories and worlds, and even their own annual competitions, and while the learning curve for producing them isn't gentle, it's certainly a fascinating idea to start blending the line between "book" and "game" so thoroughly on the kindle.

 

Find a long piece of music or an album, preferably instrumentalist. Ideally, it has highs and lows - parts where the music is upbeat, parts where it's dark, sections of tension, melancholia, light relief. Classical music works well as do movie soundtracks (if you skip out any pop songs), or (my personal favourites) albums by Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre or Enigma.

Sit down, put the album on, and start writing whatever scene the music makes you think of. A tense, underworld exploration? A happy couple? A chaotic storm of dreams? Go with the music, shifting the tone and pace of the story to match as you listen.

If you're someone who types slowly, you may find you have only time for a sentence or two before the tone changes - that's okay. Treat it as an outline exercise, in that case - you can flesh out the sentence into a paragraph or so later.

 

This is a challenge akin to writing something that (might) work for a game story - it's shifting the character arcs onto the supporting characters, the characters who aren't the story focal point (protagonist).

Take three characters (you can use more, but it's harder).  One of these is the protagonist, the one making their own life, telling the story. Give them a goal.

The other two characters may help or hinder (they can do either, but if they're both helping or both hindering, they should do it in different ways). They also each have individual goals. These goals don't particularly mesh with your protagonist's, and they directly contradict each other.

Example: C is your protagonist. She's locked in a building and wants to get out (goal). G currently controls the building, and wants C to stay there to perform a task (goal). W starts out helping C because he (secretly) wants control of the building (goal).

Now, the trick is to create character arcs for G and W. Have them go through dramatic changes emotionally and as a person - think Hero's journey, though it doesn't have to be anything grand. So, create an emotional arc for G and another for W. Now you have to work out how to get there through C's actions. C is still the protagonist. It's just that C's actions are causing emotional arcs in other people. Remember The Hollywood Formula? - well, one of G and W is the hero, one is the antagonist. C (the actual protagonist) is the relationship character.

Now, either W or G has to be the 'hero' - this is the person that C will have a reconciliation with. In our example above, W is only using C to help him achieve his goal of taking over the building. Once he's done this, he betrays C and uses her in the same manner G was earlier. Near the end, however, W realises his mistake and apologises to C - they reconcile. So that makes W the hero, and G the antagonist.

You have your three goals, and your two arcs (your protagonist doesn't get an arc, they may or may not achieve their goal.). The arcs are a direct result of the protagonists actions and interactions with the characters. Now write the story.

 

A while ago I was downloading the remaining sondtrack for Portal 2, a game that's still on my list for game of the year. (The fact that I actually wanted the soundtrack to a game should tell you something of the production values and creativity of the team involved). I thought about the story, trying to determine what made it so much better than the typical video game fare. This was shortly after I'd listened to Writing Excuses' podcast on the Hollywood Formula, and approaching the issue from this angle showed something interesting

I should note that if you haven't already played Portal or Portal 2, this post assumes you know how the story goes, and there are major plot spoilers ahead. I'd strongly suggest that if you have any intention of playing it (and you should), play it before reading any further. It's well worth it, and one of the few games where experiencing the story is a vital component to the game.

 

    Okay, after last week's rant about archetypal characters, how can we make them useful? Primarily by understanding what they're for.

They're placeholders - they describe a character's likely function within a plot. They give hints of characteristics, a springboard of ideas or traits to further develop. In other words, they're a starting point. But they shouldn't be the endpoint, too.

So, writing game: Create a character by blending two otherwise unrelated archetypes. Eg The Mentor and the Whore. The Artist and the Mesiah.The Protector and Betrayer. You don't have to use all aspects of both archetypes, just pick some that sound interesting to you, and contradict each other at least a little. (If you're struggling to think of archetypes, I recommend reading either Campbell's The Hero Has One Thousand Faces, or Victoria Lynn Schmidt's  45 Master Characters.)

Don't worry about giving your character personality yet - that's partially what this exercise is for. At the moment, all you should have is a list of contradictory traits. And a name - give them a name.

Now, put them in a situation where none of their traits are applicable. They have no advantages here. No knowledge, no experience, their go-to solution not only won't work, there's nowhere to start. Totally out of their depth. See what they do. Chances are, you'll start to build actual personality.

 

 

Think of the most trivial need you can. Someone wants a bucket of sand. A packet of chips. A left shoe. Something utterly mundane and petty.

Your task is now to write the scenario where that need is world-ending. They'd give everything they had for that shoe. And you have to show why. Why is that shoe suddenly so crucial? What terrible fate will befall without the protection of that packet of chips? What will they lose, for want of a bucket?

Go for comedy if you like - depending on the need you decided, there may be simply no way to suspend disbelief without absurdity. But make sure you communicate real need for this item, with real stakes.

 

I've always found Campbell's Hero has One Thousand Faces somewhat inaccessible. The information's buried so far down in metaphor that I found it very difficult to apply, as a novelist. And Vogler's Hero's Journey's not much better. I did, however, come across this piece online the other day, which explores the same material but makes it somehow more digestable. It's a lengthy read, but worth it, if you're looking at story structure and character arcs and trying to make sense of your gut feelings about things.

The writing game's pretty simple, really. Take a story, either one that you've written, or a book you've read recently, and find the points of the journey, if you can. Now, not all stories follow the journey (though they can usually be shoehorned in if you try hard enough, just as any literature student). The point is to get practise at seeing the structures so you can internalise them.

 

This game is actually some paraphrased advice my mother (also a writer) gave me about a draft I was summarising for her. I'd written what should probably be a 5-10,000 word story inside of 2000 words, and achieved this largely through 'telling' most of the story instead of showing.

Now, telling isn't always evil. Sometimes it's necessary to summarize information that might be tedious to show, or show a long transition of time, etc. There are many (valid) reasons for telling, and some solely-told stories can still be entertaining if the character's voice is strong and interesting. That (probably) isn't the case, here. It was just me being impatient to get the story 'out'. As a result, entire subplots are largely lost, and the viewpoint character (it's in first person) is essentially a set of reader-goggles, with no discernable personality of his own. Not good.

The game is two-fold: take a piece of text and separate all the sentences. Basically, open it up in Word / Open Office and insert a page break after every full stop. I'll explain why in a moment.

Now, take each sentence and flesh it out - turn it into entire paragraphs, explore it thoroughly. Take a page or so per sentence. Don't try to join it up wo thte preceding sentence, or segue into the next; treat each as an individual piece of writing (that's why you put page breaks, so you can't necessarily see what the next sentence is). When you're done, you'll end up with story-swamp, a giant mess of 'stuff' about the story that you're trying to write.

After a fortnight or so, you can come back to it, read through your swamp and pull together what you want out of it - but the important part is to let your brain fill in all the possible nooks and crannies of the story - you may find that the story you're trying to tell isnt the one that that idea needs. Or even that you're trying to fit two mutually exclusive stories in one (or that you only have half a story there). 

 

My partner is attempting to move in this weekend. I say attempting, because while all his stuff is now spread throughout our house in bags, boxes and deconstructed furniture, he's now napping in bed with a cold while I unpack what seem to be the least personal boxes and bags.

I'm a bit of a privacy freak. I politely declined any offers from friends and family to help me pack or unpack, because I hate the idea of people going through my stuff. Hell, I built my office as a cave of bookshelves so people can't see what I'm doing without coming into the room. Not everyone's so extreme, but I'd wager everyone has a mental box or two of things they'd rather keep to themselves - or even a physical item or two that they'd rather people didn't know about.

So, the game - either write about your own secret box, if you find it interesting enough, or come up with the oddest thing you can think of that someone should be ashamed or secretive about. Now expose it to their friends in the most humiliating way possible. What happens next?

 

I recently discovered the recycling room in the office building where I work. I've been there a couple of years, now, but my office tended to run on a "we might need that later" philosophy, and it wasn't until recently, after much discussion, that we decided we should probably shift to a "we've already got that on disk" philosphy and actually get rid of some stuff.

"Stuff" in this instance was a tower of A4 paper that reached my armpit. My boss enlisted my help to cart it all down to the recycling room.

The recycling room is in the basement of the office. There are security cameras all the way there and in the room itself, and you need a key to open it. Inside are several rubbish wheelie-bins, and two large paper recycling skips.

And two medium-sized gas tanks. Odd, I thought, as my boss ued one of them as a doorstop. They were rusty and old, with the safety-check stickers almost faded into invisibility. On my second trip down, I decided to check out what they were.

Oxygen and Acetylene. Basically - welding gear. Two highly combustable gases that, by regulations must be chained to a wall and regularly tested. Having them on your premises essentially voids your fire insurance. (I know this, because I pestered my parents to get me a shed with some for years - they're great for glasswork.) ANd we're apparently keeping them in the recycling room.

The last readable test tags were from 2000.  I can't tell if they're empty, and frankly I'm not going to try. So, two tanks that are evidently rusted and haven't been tested in over a decade are lying around in the bottom of a building that didn't even exist five years ago.

Which means someone thought they'd be a good place to get rid of them. Someone with a key to the room, who thought nothing of the legalities and the potential catastrophic explosion that could result of bad things happening to those tanks.

The funny part?

On the wall near the tanks is a sign that reads, all caps: STOP PUTTING POLYSTYRENE IN THE PAPER RECYCLING, WE CAN TRACE YOU BACK TO YOUR OFFICE.

Tanks of explosive gas are fine, but not that polystyrene, oh no. That stuff means people fine you money! This from the management that also brought us "No you can't have a fridge in the second floor kitchen because someone might steal it", and "it's imperitive we stop people from the shopping centre using our toilets".

But you're apparently welcome to an explosive death of your very own.

Skewed priorities are a great mine for comedy. What examples have you seen in your own exploits?

 

This weekend I cooked my first steak in my new place. Just as I was about to take the steak from the pan, the smoke alarms in the kitchen and the two rooms adjoining the kitchen sounded off. Mad scramble between preserving dinner and preserving eardrums aside (man those things are loud), I was rather taken by the idea of an earsplitting alarm to tell you that your steak is done.

So, the writing exercise: your own version of a steak alarm - take an everyday invention (like the smoke alarm) and twist it sideways. You can make it as useful or comical as you like. Now write a story utilising your invention.

One step further - what are the farreaching implications of your invention? For example, if earsplitting alarms are used to notify people of dinner, how would we communicate more important information, such as (for example) your house is on fire?

 

There's a story of a memory - one of my father's, from when I was an infant. He carried me through a department store, where the perfume sales assistants would hand out sprays of perfume on cards. Between my father's looks and my angelic appearance* we collected quite a few cards, and I kept them all in my father's shirt pocket, where I could smell and play with them as he walked.

Perfumes in close quarters are rarely friends. One of the reasons I don't often wear it is I hate smelling the clash between mine and another woman's. I can only imagine what my father smelled like as we continued through the store. But in the battle of scents in my father's shirt pocket, one perfume in particular won out: Lou Lou.  Everything smelled of Lou Lou.

My father then packed the shirt - I think. I'm not clear on Step 2, here. But Step 3 was him ending up on a business trip with an entire suitcase of clothes that reeked of Lou Lou. Pants, shirts, socks, jocks, shoes - everything smelled of Lou Lou.

Today, neither he nor my mother can smell that smell (or, generally, discuss perfumes) without a smiling-groan at the memory of Lou Lou. And yet, I couldn't smell it out of a lineup. A suitcase of perfumed shirts clearly didn't impact on my toddler brain. I've often wanted to smell it, to be able to associate the smell with the story like my parents can, but I've never found it - surprise surprise, it's a perfume my mother will now never wear. That one encounter with the scent has used up their tolerance of it for a lifetime.

But I think of it a little every time I smell perfume. I have a scent-memory that's missing a scent.

Again, a story without much of an exercise, so: jot down your strongest scent-memory. What's a smell that instantly transports you somewhere? Now, write a scent memory for that smell for someone else. What does it mean to them, where do they go? To avoid copying your own too much, emotionally invert it. If yours is a happy memory, make theirs a fearful or sad one, and vice versa.

*All a lie, I was a stroppy terror.

 

Not so much a writing game as a thinking game, I'll admit. A couple of friends of mine are facing burnout in their various projects - not all of them writing, but most of them creative endeavours that have to fit in around earning a living.

They're rapidly losing interest in their respective projects, and they're seeming more like a chore than pleasure, and more effort than reward.

My first-aid for project burnout is to take a break. At least a month, sometimes up to six, depending on how long and ardently you've been working on the project. No thinking about the project during the time-out.

Usually, one of two things will happen. Either I'll recover from the burnout and start itching to get back to the project, and realise an issue with it that had probably caused the burnout in the first place, or I'll realise that the reason I was burned out was that this activity just doesn't interest me anymore.

It's okay to let stuff go if it's just not for you anymore. Nobody said you had to do this. And it's just as okay to take a break from stuff and try other things to see if, maybe, you've moved on from that interest or you just need a time out for a while.

But it can be helpful to have a reminder of why you liked it in the first place - especially if you're trying to make a decision on whether to continue or go back. So - assuming, at the moment, you're into your writing (or other activity - this works equally well for everything else) - why do you like it? What is it about it that drives you, that inspires you? What do you enjoy about it?

There' s no judgement here, that's important. No such thing as a 'good' reason or a 'bad' reason. If one of the things you love about writing is having written, rather than writing, that's okay. Or if you like an excuse to retreat from the world for an hour or two with permission to daydream. That's fine.

The point now is not to determine that you don't have any reasons 'good enough' to keep doing this, it's just to make a list for yourself as to why you like it. Later, when you're deliberating whether to give up writing for a new career in scuba-pyrotechnics, you can look back on the list and make that judgement call. But for now - why do you write?

 

I'm still on my nostalgia-kick with old TV series I used to watch. And when I struggled to find mobile signal in my own house to call the internet people and complain that my supposedly-super-fast internet was actually less than dialup speeds, it occured to me what a revolutionary and disruptive element the mobile phone was to TV and movies. 

Looking back even just on the ones I've watched recently, there are so many episodes where the entire crux of the story would have been wiped out if mobile phones had existed. Need to see if someone's okay? Need to warn the government of the impending anthrax attack? Need to call a bunch of people together to take down that gang? Need to call your boss to tell him your old arch nemesis is axe-murdering people again and intends to start with you?

In these episodes, much of the drama comes from the fact that the characters need to physically travel to a working telephone, or even carry the news in person. (I have entertaining images in my head of writer-rooms across Hollywood full of writers tearing out their hair that this one little contraption scuttled so many of their tried-and-true stories.)

So, the game - take a story (not necessarily yours) that either relies on a major component of technology (eg mobile phones, the internet, cars) or relies on said technology not existing. Rewrite said story where whatever it's relying upon is the opposite. So, a pre-mobile-phone detective story gets pulled forward to the early 2000's where phones were rampant. The high-tech cyber-crime story is plunged back 50 years into barely-pubescent-computers. What aspects of the story have to change to make this fit? And perhaps more interestingly, what can you still keep of the original tale?

 

In light of a post I just read that I'm going to blog about in a moment (I'm still moving, so I'm writing both of these on Friday... but at least I'm finally packed.) i Thought of an interesting experiment:

Take something you've written recently with a fair amount of character. The protagonist has a real 'feel' to them. Preferably something short - no more than a few thousand words. If you have a novel, then take the first chapter.

Now recraft it with the protagonist in the opposite gender. 

This is about more than just swapping pronouns. You'll have to really look at your character and reimagine how they'd "work" internally if they were the opposite gender. Fundamental aspects of how they handle things, how they think, how they react and what they want (or at least, the internal goals and reasons for what they want) would change.

This may mean fundamental aspects of the plot have to change. Go ahead, change them. Write a whole new story from this one change.

How does this affect your story? And perhaps more importantly, why did you chose the original gender in the first place? Is it because that gender suited the story you had in mind better, or because you felt uncomfortable writing the other gender? Or was it even a random choice? And has the change in gender strengthened your story or weakened it?