Yikes. If I'm guest hosting Write On! it must be December. This means that a whole lot of things are in the rear view mirror that just a few minutes ago were only approaching from a great distance. Like Halloween, the national elections, Thanksgiving, and, most important for our purposes, November and NaNoWriMo.
Several of our doughty participants (about nine in all) have been checking in weekly with astonishing word counts. Now it's time to submit your final reports. Please include:
* Word count;
* Your plans for the ms, such as expanding it, tweaking it, and/or cannibalizing it for parts; and
* Mandatory self-congratulation, regardless of word count.
Now, for both the NaNoWriMoers taking their victory lap and for those who hesitated on the edge, letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would' like the poor cat i' the adage (Lady MacBeth via Jeeves and Bertie), let's talk about starting your next work. Where do you get your initial idea?
I've been thinking about this because I'm trying to do it, and I've been drawing, not a blank exactly, but a pretty bad hand of unexciting ideas. In the past, my favorite writing ideas came from some real life experiences. But those were in public defenderhood, and ten years in the municipal bureaucracy since then haven't proved as rich in material.
Besides, that whole "write what you know but make it interesting" school is so last millenium. Sure, it worked for Jane Austen, but according to the internets, this approach is now declasse, because a lot of people write fantasy and a lot more people write about serial killers and vampires and zombies, and a lot more write about the clash of galaxies, and most jobs/lives don't have a lot to do with these milieux.
SensibleShoes explained recently (Blog, Sept. 9) how she started plotting Jinx with one character in mind, and when she bubblemapped it, another character came to the front of the story and became the protagonist. Her drawings of the world of Jinx showed her what it was like. Other writers start with a single visual image and build from there; Garth Nix began the Abhorsen trilogy with the picture in his mind of the wall that separates, in that world, its magical and non-magical countries.
Ckf recently mentioned one of her favorite opening gambits for sci fi:
My favorite beginnings which have happened in eight or nine books is the space ship which suddenly hears a beacon from another ship that needs help.
Should they go to the rescue or will they get fired if they do? The Code of Space says go no matter what and what if it were you out there alone and needing help?
Along the lines of these exemplars, I've been trying to think of characters and visual images and intriguing situations, but nothing has worked. So I went to teh google, where there is an intimidating plethora of ideas, and wallowed there and drank coffee for a few days. My ultimate favorite, suggested by a guy named Glen Strathy, is the steal it and hide the evidence approach. He says to take a movie plot summary (we call them loglines out here in Hollywoodland), like this one from "The Third Man":
An American pulp writer arrives in post-WWII Vienna only to find that the friend who waited for him is killed under mysterious circumstances. The ensuing mystery entangles him in his friend's involvement in the black market, with the multinational police, and with his Czech girlfriend.
Then, Strathy says, change one element in that plot. Make the protagonist a traffic engineer or a realtor, for example, instead of a pulp fiction writer. Then change another element. Instead of being dead, the friend could be a zombie. Instead of having been in the black market, the friend might have been a baker. I tried it and came up with:
A fussy grammarian arrives in modern-day Albany only to find that the colleague who waited for him has taken a vow of verbal and written silence. The ensuing lack of information entangles him in the colleague's involvement in the world of subversive, unauthorized dictionaries and underground graphic novels.
Well, it needs work. But it's a start. I think the idea is to coax your subconscious authorial yearnings out of hiding. When you start substituting elements, you put in a mix of things you know, things you want to know, and things that appeal to you. The end result will look nothing like the original.
It seems to help for me. How about you? Where have your best ideas come from?
Tonight's Challenge:
Choose any of the following scenarios, or any well known logline/plot summary (but tell us what it is). Rewrite the logline, changing one or two elements in it. Then write the first or last paragraph of the resulting novel.
* A callow youth must find the Jewel of Togwogmagog in order to save the kingdom, aided by his Stout Companion.
* International superspy James Buns has been captured by an eccentric megalomaniac, who plans to use an elaborate invention to kill the hero and his unfortunately-named girlfriend.
* Belinda learns that her rival Adelaide is plotting to marry Belinda’s beloved Lord Postlethwaite-Praxleigh (pronounced Puppy) in order to get her hands on his jeweled sash.
The Write On! timeslot has changed to Thurs 7 pm ET (4 pm Pacific) for the winter.
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