Category: Brainstorming & Inspiration

Big ideas and how to get them.

Crop Rotation

Coming up with a story and all the people in it and a whole world where it can happen is a lot of work. There’s so much stuff that needs to be figured out. Working with a partner, that mostly entails talking about it. With enough talking, we can figure anything out. (Talking to yourself can work, too.)

Naturally, it’s not quite that simple. In any given conversation, we’ll pick a topic and make good headway, but getting a given thing totally solved doesn’t usually happen all in one go, or even in a linear manner. We reach a point where we’re not making progress anymore, and lay that idea aside. At some point we’ll revisit it and move it ahead. Eventually, after lots and lots of talking, we get everything we need.

It’s like crop rotation. You need to switch things up once in a while and let the soil rejunvenate. That might mean staying within the same story but shifting your attention to a different plot thread, or a different character’s arc, or it might mean working on a completely separate story. The point is, don’t strain harder and harder if your yield is dropping. Spending that energy on something else will be much more productive.

A good writing partner doesn’t let you end with an overwrought farming metaphor.

You Get 100gp and 125xp!

If you get that, you’re old-school.

A few days ago, Kent took one of our dog-walk story development sessions in a slightly different direction. Instead of our usual writerly shop talk, he ran it like a D&D game. We’ve played a variety of RPGs together in the past, so the basic format came pretty naturally even when being sprung without warning.

“You reach the top of the trail and see some mysterious ruins ahead,” Kent said.

Jen synced right up with the bit, exploring the locale of our Ghost Story as if it were all new to her, and interacting with the creatures she met. We didn’t use any maps, character sheets, miniatures, or dice, but it was fun all the same. And it was a neat way to come at the material from a different angle.

A similar trick we’ve used before is to each assume the role of a cast member and go out “on a date” in character. That’s also a form of role-playing. In that mode, we tend to act out an actual scene (in a restaurant!). This latest adventure was looser, and ended up helping us with world-building more than characterization.

A writing partner is someone with whom to make a public spectacle of yourself, unless you make your saving throw.

A Spooky Realization

Wait, what? Ghost stories are supposed to be eerie? Maybe even scary? Why weren’t we told this at the beginning!

We kid. Sorta. We’ve been happily getting to know the characters and exploring the plot and devising the physics engine that will run the whole thing, and not worrying too much about genre conventions. It is coming along great, we gotta say. It’s just that every couple of conversations, one of us will point out that our goal when we set off was to “write a ghost story,” and remind us that there’ll be an expectation of more than just alluding to the occasional spectral visage in the fog.

So we’re putting more focus on the atmosphere for a while. The story will be a Rune Skelley tale first and foremost, and a ghost story also. This is no different from the approach we’ve always taken with science fiction, but we never seemed to need reminders about putting in enough sci-fi.

We’re also upping the amount of horror in our diet. We’ve never really gone in for the slasher stuff or heavy gore, but there’s so much great material out there with a more cerebral take. Thinky can still be scary!

A writing partner is someone to hold your hand during the scary parts.

Life Imitates Art That We Haven’t Even Made Yet

As loyal readers know, we are ably assisted in our fiction by Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord, for it is they who demand nightly treks around the fiefdom, and those excursions give us much opportunity to converse about our various projects.

 

We do these walks rather late, mostly. After dark. We take flashlights with us, but unless a car is coming or there’s some other reason, we don’t turn them on. To really set the mood, people in our neighborhood have begun decorating for Halloween, and this year they’ve really brought their A-game. And, the project that’s occupied our attention on these night-time promenades of late is the Ghost Story, in all its otherworldly splendor.

A few nights ago we had an unexpectedly stimulating ghost-talk walk. About halfway around the neighborhood, as we chatted about ways in which beings from other dimensions could make their presence known, a blinding white light suddenly appeared fifty feet ahead of us. It floated about six feet above the ground, and held us for a few seconds before turning red and then moving laterally, crossing to the opposite side of the street. Still eerily hovering several feet up. There was no sound.

Then came the bark of a small dog. A gentle human voice told the dog everything was alright. It was our neighbor, wearing a headlamp as he engaged in his own canid-equipped nocturnal peregrinations.

A writing partner is someone to share a briefly terrifying but inspiring encounter.

It Has 1,001 Uses Around The Home

We’re still devoting our dog walks to conversation about the Ghost Story, and focusing on the early portion of the tale. Enlarging what we know about the setting and the characters.

Something we established fairly early was the existence of a special substance. We even gave it a name, and tossed out a few ideas about what it might look like. And then we didn’t really mention it again for a couple months, until just this past week.

Well! When we revisited this material and started brainstorming its properties, we hit a gusher! There are so many possible ways we could use it to twist reality, and not only are they just prima-facie really cool and fun, and they reinforce the desired atmosphere, but this stuff seems to give off plot like a form of radioactivity. We’re taking scads of notes!

A writing partner is someone to do mad science with.

Strange Corners

Now that we’ve taken the Ghost Story all the way through to an ending (of sorts) it’s time to circle back to the beginning and take a second look at the people and events that kick the whole thing off. And it’s turning out that these people are much more interesting than we realized.

It’s like this is a place that we’d driven past on the freeway, which allowed us to spot a few landmarks but not really get the feel for it. So, this time we took the exit so we can tool around some of the neighborhoods. It’s allowing us to look around lots of corners, and we’re seeing unexpected sights down many of these side streets. On our next visit, we’ll get out of the car and wander around, really soak up the atmosphere.

Our main point of original inspiration for the Ghost Story was, as it happened, characters who figure in the middle-to-late portion of the saga, so as we sketched in their history it led to sketching in the histories of the preceding generation, and then sketching in their ancestors’ stories. So stuff was getting pretty sketchy.

Thing is, what we knew initially about those earlier characters was just what our later characters knew of them — or, thought they knew. Once we focused on them we discovered  that the most interesting moments from their lives were the ones they were least likely to tell their nieces and nephews about. They tell us, though. If we give them the chance.

The biggest worry at this point is that the timeline will keep growing backwards and we’ll never be able to pick a starting moment for the story. When all the history was sketchy, it didn’t feel like we had to incorporate much of it. But now it’s more vivid, and we want to tell that part of the story. Which means we need to sketch in a deeper layer of backstory, which we’ll want to enrich, and then the temptation will be to tell that part, too. And deeper down the well we could tumble.

A writing partner is someone who’ll go deep with you, but who’ll also guide you back to the surface when it’s time.

Do You Prefer Tetralogy or Quadrilogy?

Both terms refer to a series of four books, and it seems like that might be where our ghost story is headed.

Our writing output so far consists of three trilogies. A trilogy of trilogies, if you will. It’s all very tidy. But now that the prose outline for our spectral saga is nearing completion we’re faced with a story that seems to want to break neatly into four pieces. And we’re not sure how we feel about that.

Our main work sessions are currently devoted to editing the Science Novels. Since we’re only brainstorming this spooky bad boy part-time, we still have a lot of detail to fill in, but the parts that we do know (and are quite attached to) include four momentous events. The sort of events that would make resounding, satisfying finales. It’s certainly possible that one of them could be adjusted and made into a tentpole moment, the sort of mini-climax that shows up in the middle of a novel to keep readers on the edge of their seats, but we’re hesitant to jump right to that.

We’re still exploring the story and interrogating the secondary characters for exciting backstories. This new story world is expansive and the last thing we want to do is hem ourselves in prematurely. For now we’ll keep talking during our nightly dog walks, and keep expanding everything. By the time we’re ready to make this project our main focus, we’ll have oceans of material to work with. At that point we’ll be better situated to tell whether there’s enough material to fill the spaces between those four big events and make our first Tetra/Quadrilogy.

Let’s hope we don’t have to figure out the word for a series of five.

Ghosts Have Become Less Theoretical

By which we mean, our Ghost Story is becoming more concrete. A preliminary prose outline is taking shape. Jen has taken point on this initiative, and is so far going at it bare-brained. Later, we’ll peruse all our notes and use them to fill in where appropriate.

At this point, the outline covers roughly 25% of the saga that we’ve generated and recorded in a mixture of typed and hand-written notes. The thing about the notes is, they reflect the chronology of our brainstorming sessions, not the saga itself. And they’re riddled with continuity bugs, because we’re still brainstorming.

Even at this early stage, though, arranging our facts into this more refined structure is providing us with new insights. (Insights about fuzzy plot logic, sadly.) Brainstorming is fun, but to do it right you have to be sort of willfully negligent about how any of the shiny ideas could be useful or if they even fit together. So, after several weeks of brainstorming, we’d become a bit attached to a vision of the narrative that’s just not feasible. Oops. It’s much harder to persist in magical thinking when all the pieces are lined up in the correct order. That’s what this prose outline has already begun to help us with. And it’s much easier to put something on the docket for the next dog walk once you know it’s there (or, not there, as is more often the case).

A writing partner is someone who helps you mend the holes in your plot.

Goose Wrench Revisited

Our writing armory is fully stocked.

Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to…

Nah. During brainstorming we mainly use the Monkey Wrench and the Goose Wrench. The Monkey Wrench is the tool we reach for when things are going a little to smoothly for our characters. It helps us find ways of causing them trouble. The Goose Wrench is a little more nebulous.

The very nature of brainstorming is for things to be loose. There are no bad ideas (except when there are). Use the Monkey Wrench to your heart’s content and throw everything you can think of into the mix. But eventually you have to start making decisions. Each decision narrows the field of options that can follow, which is what you want. You’re only going to be writing a single narrative (unless you’re doing something experimental), so you need a single plot. At each decision point you make a choice, then you get out your Goose Wrench and tighten it down. But not too far. Until you’re very close to done with your outline, you want to leave a little wiggle room. You want to leave things loosey goosey, which is where the Goose Wrench gets its name. As you continue working, things will start to take their final shape, but until then you want to have some slack so you can take some unexpected turns. And sometimes you’ll discover that you’ve written yourself into a corner (except that since this is all during prewriting, you’ve saved yourself a ton of time and work). You might need to go back and rethink some of your earlier choices, like flipping back in a Choose Your Own Adventure Book, and choosing a different path.

As we talk about the Ghost Novels, we’re making liberal use of the Goose Wrench. How many squid attacks will there be? We originally thought there would be three, but maybe it would be better to change things up and make the middle one an ambush by sharks with frickin’ laser beams. Keep it fresh.

A writing partner is someone who helps you choose your adventure.

Belly of the Beast

The finale of Son of Science Novel has a lot going on. There’s physical peril, and emotional stakes, and a lot of difficult moments for all of the characters. The reader gets to witness the action through the eyes of both the good guys and the bad guys. It’s quite spectacular, if we do say so ourselves.

As part of our quest to streamline things where we can, and make the novel the best it can be, we started to wonder if maybe a certain side-thread through the ending was maybe superfluous (well, Kent did anyway). We spread the scene out on the exam table and took a close look, and we found many items in favor of keeping it.

Its setting — we’ll call it the Elephant Graveyard — is threaded throughout the novel, and comes up again in Book 3, so giving it a job in the climax feels right. The characters that go off to the elephant graveyard need to have jobs to do, and this fits well with their skillset. If we remove their side quest we need to find a different way for them to contribute to the action, and that would mean replotting the whole ending. And we’re really, really happy with the other parts of the ending. Like, seriously thrilled. But must important is that the elephant graveyard gives the characters a really nice moment, and puts a nice bow on the arc that one of them has traveled through the novel. Plus it sets them both up nicely for the third book. So the thread is definitely staying.

But the fact that we, as the authors, had doubts, means it’s not as strong as it should be. We need to do a better job of sketching that character’s arc so that when the reader gets to this part they can’t look away.