With all the Thanksgiving prep, I’ve written zero words today. Which puts me exactly today’s required words behind on my word count. For me and my Nano track record, not too shabby. The main reason for my staying on track: high school.
High school how? Well, a year and a half ago when the market dipped, I, and many other coworkers, got the axe. Some of us were in the industry more than twenty years. But I had already started my MFA, had talked about making a career of writing. So we decided to give it a shot. But I still needed supplemental income. So now I’m a part time substitute teacher.
High school has been great because for the most part the kids sit on their computers and do their work and I can type away. Middle school… not so much. They’re more fun, but are more hands-on. So, Champlin High… thank you.
As far as content goes, this story has made me smile from inspiration more than anything else I’ve written. Part of that is due to the lack of planning. In general, I’m a planner. My novel I’m taking a break from before editing was meticulously mapped out with bullet points and sub points and color coded post it notes with corresponding sharpies. That was great for always knowing what to write, and I could argue a lot that the during-writing inspiration was instead planning inspiration. But the during-writing inspiration has a different feel to it. An in the moment “god damn I’m brilliant” feel.
For my Nano project, I went into it with four characters, only one of which had any amount of thought into their personality. I had a problem, an antagonist, a few settings, and a couple of moments I knew should happen. That was it.
The result so far is a crazy amount of Wayne Brady caliber setups and payoffs that my subconscious plans without me even knowing it. I’m making character choices that are great in the moment and give me solid foundations for growth and/or defeat. I’ve created a magic system that is both highly theoretical yet completely accessible. I don’t know that I could have done that with my normal planning method.
I’ve mentioned before that I have aphantasia, or a lack of a mind’s eye. This past summer I started playing around with MidJourney to create imagery to reference (examples shown throughout the post), since my brain’s not wired that way. I think I can attribute part of my current success to that as well.
Going into a scene, or thinking about a character, I know what I want to happen, what themes or motifs should exist. By inputting those into MidJourney, I’m provided with images that while they don’t always turn out how I expected, they often provide enough of my expectations that I can use it for repeated reference, but they also serve as spring boards for other tangential thoughts.
With a word count in the low thirty thousands, I’m just over halfway through the story. Of course there are areas that will need some work, but there have been surprisingly few writing sessions where I knew I needed to revisit down the road. I’ve come out of many feeling very good about the results and I’m just hoping that when I re-read it, that feeling won’t change.
That’s all for now. Need to allocate writing time appropriately. I wish my fellow writers good luck in their Nano/WIP, and happy reading to non-writers (I just started The Olympian Affair and am super excited). And of course Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you all can spend quality time with friends/family/loved ones.
It’s that time of year again. Time for writing too late into the night and ignoring family and friends. Time for lofty goals and (too often) broken promises. Time for Nano.
November is National Novel Writing Month, an annual masochistic tradition of churning out words at a breakneck pace (unless your name is Brandon Sanderson in which case one man’s masochism is another man’s steak dinner). There’s a youth program and an everyone else program. If you’ve exceeded your teen years, that means 50000 words in one month.
Yes, I said 50000.
That’s 1666 a day. Seems reasonable. Until you do it 31 days in a row. You get behind early, then tell yourself that you’ll catch up on the long Thanksgiving weekend. Then family comes and you don’t write anything. Then it’s Nov. 30 and you have 10000 words to write.
I may sound overly pessimistic about it. And I might be. I always start the month positive, and in fact I’m positive now about this year’s project. I’m currently 1000 or so words ahead of schedule. But I’ve done this many years now and between family and work and life in general, I’ve only ever finished it once.
Some might consider that failure, and by a strict definition, it is. But even if I only reach 40000 words during a given Nanowrimo, that’s still 40000 words! That’s a lot. It’s not 40000 more than I would have written, but it’s very likely more regardless.
So if you’re a writer, join up. Even if you don’t hit the 50000, you’ll likely make a very nice dent in your work in progress project. And if you do make it, as I’ve done just the one time, man, does that feel good.
That’s all for now. Need to ration word generating time and allocate it appropriately. I’ve got a 50000 word goal to hit.
One of the benefits of having a kid in kindergarten is the random bits of inspiration they provide. Sometimes it comes in the form of misused words. Sometimes they make a joke that makes zero sense but it hilarious to them. This time, it came from Bananagrams and Pokémon.
Last night Westley brought the kid’s Banagrams set to the table and organized all the letters and letter combinations (kid’s Bananagrams combines common letter pairings like sh and ai). He then started spelling out Pokémon. First was Ratatta, then Raticate, then Rapidash. He got through the r’s and did Sandshrew.
Here, he made sure to tell me it was a compound word, sand and shrew. The inspiration came from how he said shrew. I can’t really explain his exact tone since my mind was already headed in a different direction, but as soon as he said “shrew” my mind went to Taming of the Shrew, and then to Taming of the Sandshrew.
Now, being an English and Theatre major, Shakespeare is firmly in my realm of interests. Two of my plotted out future novels incorporate The Bard heavily, and I once considered making Shakespeare themed clothing (like women’s underwear that says “Out, Damn Spot!). I also have played Pokémon off and on since the very first games and very first cards (Tyler, if you’re reading this, I hope you kept that first edition Charizard). And I still play Pokemon Go (My 100IV maxed Tyranitar dares you to laugh). Combining the two has more than just tickled my fancy.
Since I only just started thinking about this last night, I haven’t fully mapped anything out (more about that later), but my favorite so far is The Taming of the Sandshrew. I imagine Katherine the Sandshrew being a prickly local Pokemon that all the people avoid. The most unruly Pokémon in town.
Enter Petruchio the Pokémon trainer. He loves all Pokémon and patiently trains them to be their best versions. There’ll be the back and forth you’d expect from this parody, and instead of a romance it’ll be a friendship. Throw in a tournament to keep with the Pokémon world and voilà, Taming of the Sandshrew.
A couple other thoughts that popped into my head were Macbeth in Lavender Town with Gengar as Banquo, Romeo and Juliet but Zangoose and Seviper, and A Midsummer Night’s… something, but with Jigglypuff making people fall asleep. Super fun thoughts, but also super problematic in a budding writer’s world.
As my wife was quick to point out, “there’s no way to make money off this.” There are the obvious copyright issues. Fanfic is a thing, but there’s not a not of monetization with that. And given the amount of time dedicated to getting my novel done and short fictions published, allocating time to this project might be counter productive, meaning this blog post is likely all the attention this idea will receive.
So what to do? Hopefully put a smile on the face of whoever reads this. The Venn diagram of Shakespeare readers and Pokémon players might not have significant overlap, but it’s there. Hopefully this prompts someone else to think of something clever combining the two.
Aside from that? Nothing. I’ve already come to terms with the fact that I can’t write as fast as I can come up with ideas. Since my last post I’ve plotted out two more novels, one of which could easily start a trilogy, and I probably won’t do anything with them for a decade.
Sometimes a fun idea will just end up being a fun idea. But I don’t think I’ll ever not want to see Hamlet talking to a Marowak skull.
PS: The pictures all came from MidJourney. I use it a bunch to come up for visuals for my writing since I can’t picture things myself. It’s super fun, though never give you exactly what you want. Here’s a preview image I’m using for my last short fiction piece before going back to editing the novel:
Hello everyone and welcome back. A while ago I briefly mentioned a brainstorming strategy I used when coming up with story ideas and promised to go more in depth later on. Well here that is. But that’s not all! I promised one brainstorming method, but today I’ll give you three! (For the record, I hate exclamation marks. I don’t use them lightly. I believe in the current draft of my novel there are exactly two.)
The first one I’ll go over is historically my favorite and one I still use. It requires a copy of the board game Dixit. I will admit I may be spoiled in its creative capacity due to having all the expansions, but when I first used it I only had the base game and that worked just fine.
If you don’t know the game, it’s basically Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, except the cards are all illustrations and the age level restrictions are entirely what you make them. We first played with our son with he was three and while his answers were simpler, they worked just fine. But how to brainstorm with them?
I’m going to give two different examples of when I used them and how I approached it. The first example was to create a short story. I didn’t go into knowing the length or the genre, I just wanted to spark something creative in me that was unexpected. So I shuffled up the cards and dealt myself five. I’ve found that dealing more will present too many options and it’ll be hard to focus.
I threw a couple back that were obviously outliers and drew replacements. After a couple rounds of discards I had a set of cards that I knew could work together. As you can see, there are a couple themes that the cards share, with each having their own unique message and imagery.
I’ll use some generalities to explain the story since I don’t want to give it away (it’s currently submitted to a super cool magazine and it’s the piece I used in my MFA application). I knew there was going to be a heavy nature theme, and there would be some form of isolation. From that nature theme, I wanted both plants and animals to feature strongly.
The card that stuck out initially to me as “woah, that could be fun” was the porcupine. The idea of a porcupine shooting its quills as arrows was super fun. But porcupines can’t actually do that. Unless they’re aliens. So science fiction. But if sci-fi, why would they use their quills as opposed to tech? That’s where the card blended with the nature oasis in the city.
So now I have a setting, a species, and a society. Now I need a story. If the focus of the story is within this unique setting, I needed to lean into that setting, so I combined the scary forest and the lonely barbed tail cat. A scary forest is a good reason to need to shoot quill arrows, and a barbed tail cat makes for a scary denizen. But a nature vs nature story? Where’s the fun in that?
Enter the bad guy. The bad guy doesn’t appear on these cards (neither does the POV protagonist), and I’m not going to give away his role or how that impacts the story, but I will say the last card definitely plays a role in all the other cards.
So with only five cards I was able to create a story I doubt I would have thought up on my own. Once, fingers crossed, it gets accepted by that really cool magazine, I’ll be sure to share so you can get all the details. Now for the next story where I used the cards in a different way.
The prior story I used five cards, and it was for a short story. This next one, I only used one, and it ended up being the driving force in the creation of the novel I’m working on. For this one I was attempting to do the same brainstorming tactic, and there was one card that didn’t fit with the other four. When I went to discard it though I paused, taken in by the image.
To be fair, being captured by an image can happen anywhere at anytime. But with the Dixit method, you’re intentionally inundating yourself in creative imagery, so in that way you’re increasing the odds. This one card, a man cycling across a wire/string/thingamajig overtop a city made me think, “why”? What year is this city in where the man is riding a penny farthing where there would also be a wire strung up?
At the same time I was also super into Hamilton (and let’s be honest, kind of still am), having listened to it at my brother’s bachelor party (yes, we’re that cool), and the relationship dynamics of Hamilton and Burr as well as Hamilton and the Schuyler sisters were on my mind. I’m going to play this one really close to my chest, but between finding an answer for what the city was and determining characters and motivation I had a full outline drawn up the very next day.
Let’s move away from Dixit now and onto one that I had high hopes for and which is still fun, but not quite as good for story generation, as least not for me anyway. What it is good for is writing warmups. Sometimes it’s hard to find prompts online, especially if you’re in writing groups with varying interests. Enter Story Cubes.
Each Story Cube die has six different images, and each set comes with nine dice. As you can imagine, that leads to a ton of varied combinations of images that can be interpreted many different ways. The result is fun warmups where each person utilizes what sticks out to them the most and you learn different ways to approach similar ideas.
Metaphor Dice are slightly different, and I only just acquired them at AWP this past year. It’s less for creating stories or even prompts, but more to make fun character decisions or observations. It’s especially good at creating unique character background or personality traits. How it works is you roll the dice and follow them red/white/blue. I just now rolled a set and got passion/handed-down/brand new toy. So I’d say “passion is a handed-down brand new toy, that is to say her touch traced the contours of her ex’s chest on his own”. Off the cuff not amazing, but you get the drift.
From here the question, as with the second Dixit example, is “why?” Why does this character feel that way about passion? Is it with a particular partner? Is it because of some past experience? How does this influence their everyday life? I now have a brand new angle to use for my character.
But what if my story doesn’t dictate a romance? What if I know my character is all about, say, honor? Or revenge? Or creativity? If you have a trait you know is essential, but that you’d like to explore, just set that as your red die concept. Roll the others, see what comes out of it. It can turn the superficial character concept in your head into a complex individual with compelling motivations.
The last thing I’ll write about only briefly and will make a post dedicated exclusively for it is ChatBotGPT. I want to go on record and say I DO NOT use AI generated writing, but instead I use it for brainstorming, something it is very good at. I’ve been using it a lot for the last few months, trying it out and seeing what the big fuss was. Sometimes it tries to write for me, but mostly it just answers questions or provides lists. It is not a good writer. But it’s an excellent researcher. But more on that later.
Brainstorming is sometimes a challenging and daunting task, whether it’s new stories or expanding on existing ideas. Hopefully by using some of these tactics you can have an easier and more fun go of it.
Back at AWP, which seems forever ago now, I was going through the bookfair and came upon F(r)iction, a lit mag that caught my interest like none others all weekend. If they select your story, they will find an illustrator to fully illustrate your story. The magazine looks like a graphic novel. It’s amazing. Unfortunately the exciting news isn’t that I’ve been accepted there (though my story has been submitted).
F(r)iction also has an online contest they do twice a year called Dually Noted where they have a singular prompt that people write on each week and each week they publish a winner. The stories have to be less than 500 words. The prompt this round is “god sends out a resignation letter”. I don’t have a ton of experience writing flash, but I thought “why not?” and wrote a story. And they picked it!
A Divine Appointment is about Heavenly HR worker Winston and a particularly bad day at HR HQ. It’s a quick read, so I’ll let you see what happens.
Now for other updates.
This week I had my last class this semester for my MFA. The class was all about POV. You all know the basics of what first, second, and third are, and perhaps you’ve heard of collective and omniscient and objective. It’s all that and more. Infinite possibilities as my professor Sheila O’Conner says.
The end of class is nice in that I’ll get some more free time to write, both on projects and on this blog, but is sad for a couple of reasons. One, no more weekly meeting with fun classmates. Two, Sheila is retiring.
I had her for Novel Class as well as POV, and she’s just super smart and insightful and it’s going to be perpetually drearier on campus without her.
With class done, I’ve decided this summer to focus on short fictions. To get some publications under my belt. I’ve only submitted off and on the last couple years as I’ve written things for class or been inspired, and a 2/20 acceptance rate isn’t the worst. But there are grants and fellowships out there that care about publications, so I’ll be working on that.
On Sunday I submitted a fantasy origin story of sorts for a character I’m planning an eight-book arc for. Today I started outlining a sci-fi romance with a hint of espionage. Next on the docket after that will be re-tooling a literary fiction short I wrote a few years back now that I’ve got some more tools in my belt. One every other week might be too optimistic, but any goal is better than no goal.
Before I sign off, if there are any writing subjects, or not writing for that matter, that you’d like me to talk about, feel free to let me know. The level of expertise may vary, but I’ll try to engage in whatever way I can.
Eric Taveren 