Brainstorming Strategies

Posted on September 6, 2023 by erictaveren

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.

Distractions: A Writer’s Nemesis… or is it?

Posted on December 31, 2022 by erictaveren

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Most people in the world don’t celebrate Christmas, and far fewer celebrate it in a religious fashion. I celebrate it in a benevolent commercial way. I don’t believe in a higher power, but I do enjoy the opportunity to be with friends and family and the exchanging of gifts in the process.

My wife and I alternate which family we visit each year and this year we went to Seattle (where I grew up) to visit my family. We rented an airbnb and had over 20 people under one roof. That being said, any hopes I had of writing or continuing my reading goals were thoroughly dashed, and the only productive time I had was on the plane where I managed to get through about two thirds of Boneshaker while helping to manage our four-year-old and his airplane-bathroom-shy-bladder problems. There were a lot of trips to that bathroom.

This delay in productivity however gave me the idea of what to write about today. Distractions.

I’ll be the first to admit that my main distraction is my phone. Facebook, mobile games, internet rabbit holes, they’re all regular culprits for my lost hours. For a while I was actively playing far too many games: Disney Emoji Blitz, Hero Wars, and Clash Royale being the main culprits. In October I cut myself off from all games except Clash, which was to be my kill-five-minutes-game as opposed to a regularly played thing. The idea was I’d have more time to write and work.

That didn’t exactly go as planned. I did cut out all but Clash, but still play it a bit more than planned. The upside is I did get more writing done and I have larger chunks of time for reading. So distractions reduced, but not eliminated.

The next distraction I want to mention is TV/movies. I’m a huge cinephile. It’s got to the point when I make references in my friend group that I just assume no one will get them and usually that’s what happens. With my kid around I watch much less than I did before since he needs attention and I can’t exactly put John Wick on in the background. That means once he’s asleep I’m much more motivated to catch up on a show or movie I’m behind on than to be productive.

Practically speaking, I wouldn’t be able to write if I wanted to. He’s asleep at 8:00 and my brain has checked out for anything more than entertainment input. A book is entirely feasible, but more often than not the TV gets powered on, the hum of Netflix triggering those endorphins. I haven’t found a good way around this distraction. There are too many interesting shows and movies out there to watch them all, so I do what I can.

The last real distraction I struggle with, and I challenge any writer to deny their struggle as well, is the new idea. No matter the project, something you write or see or dream will inspire and drag your thoughts to something new, something unconnected with what you’re trying to complete. For me it’s usually dream based as that’s where most of the kernels of my ideas come from, but this distraction can come from anywhere.

My current distraction came from a dream and is a murder mystery. The dream played out like watching a movie, the roles featuring well known actors playing characters and I was the viewer following the drama and intrigue. But before I witness the resolution I woke and was left with a legit “whodunit” thought. And so for a couple days I completely forgot about my novel and my reading and thought about this new story.

I don’t want to give much away in case I do write this at some point, but Tom Cruise was killed, and Hailee Steinfeld was Nancy Drew-ing her way through suspects to figure out who did the deed. Alongside those two were Jack Black, Delroy Lindo, Helen Mirren, Stanley Tucci, Eugene Cordero, Ben Mendelsohn, and Timothee Chalamet among others. But based on what I’d seen in the dream and what my detective fiction knowledge told me to do I’ve now figured out the killer(s), motives, and opportunities. I’ve also assigned backstories to each character as well as each set of characters. There’s no reason two suspects might not be at odds with each other as well as with the deceased.

This distraction was particularly hard to ignore given my fondness for the genre. My senior thesis was on detective fiction, specifically Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins stories. I’ve a list of mystery plots already on file and I try to watch them whenever I can (I just watched Glass Onion which was good in presentation but sad in that there are visual tactics that just don’t translate to the written word, and I recently rewatched Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, which if you’re an old noir movie fan you must give it a watch).

While I was victim to this distraction, I was able to limit it. I had to scratch the itch, that was a given. But once the itch was scratched, I couldn’t just leave it alone. So, like so many other ideas, it went to the idea notebook.

My notebook is digital so I can access it on any device, but any notebook will do. I use OneNote since it’s very good at simple organization and the interface is very user friendly. Once I have a story idea, whether it’s an inkling or more fleshed out, it goes there until I’m done with my current project. It’s a great way to group ideas, not just to write later, but sometimes to combine and weave together. A good story doesn’t have just one through line to engage the reader, but many smaller stories told in conjunction. By grouping ideas together in one place or side by side, many complimentary ideas can be combined that may have otherwise been overlooked.

I see that I’ve derailed somewhat from my topic of distractions. But isn’t that was a distraction is? Our minds inherently want to discover, to learn or experience something new. And we need that for creative growth, for those subconscious influences and at times the more overt ones. So is my advice to cut out all distractions? No. Just limit them. Find out what distractions are beneficial to your craft (Glass Onion) and what ones are less so (Emoji Blitz). Embrace your distractions, but do so on your terms, not theirs.

Writing is hard

Posted on June 21, 2022 by erictaveren

As I’ve pursued writing over the years I’ve experienced bouts of inspiration and even more bouts of writer’s block. Figuring out how to get inspired is unique to each person, though I’ll share my tactics for that in a later post. But dealing with writer’s block, that’s a beast all by itself.

When I was younger, whenever I had a lull in writing output it was usually due to video games. I’m a gamer, and between video games and game nights with friends, let’s just say I could have written a metric butt ton more in my 20s. That’s not to say I chose poorly with my time allotment, but as someone now wanting to pursue writing more, I can only imagine what could have been.

The reason I think back to that so much is that as a parent, as someone with a job, writing is hard. Jobs require a set number of hours. Family deserves their time as well. Unfortunately once those obligations are met my energy levels are severely depleted. Some people can work with twenty minutes here or there, but to write effectively I need at least an hour, preferably more.

This became more apparent to me as, for the first time in well over a decade, I’m no longer employed. It was a tough hit to my ego, but it opened up many hours each day to write. And the difference between trying to write with a full time job and trying to write as a full time job is like night and day. My writing output has quintupled at the very least, many days I’ll get even more done. This freedom to devote time to my writing has only proven how much more difficult it is to write while employed.

I recently finished a novel writing course where our weekly writing goal was ten double spaced pages. Ten. That’s about a page and a half a day. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but in a graduate class full of working professionals ten was an overwhelming goal for many. Our professor set that goal with decades of writing experience under her belt. Why only ten pages? Writing is hard.

This past spring I had a conversation with an alumni from my masters program, Mindy Mejia. She just put out her fourth book and she spoke on the time it takes to write. Her first book she wrote during her masters program. Her second book she wrote during work lunch breaks. Four years of lunch breaks. This is a published and well received author, and it took four years to write a book, as she was juggling kids and work at the same time.

Writing is hard.

I don’t have a solution to this. I can’t change reality. What I can say to writers out there who are struggling to put pen to paper, to fill up that Word doc, is you’re not alone. Unless your name is Stephen King or J.K. Rowling or Brandon Sanderson you’ve probably got a day job. Pair that with a family and a social life that are all meaningful and important, squeezing that novel or short story into your day is a tall order. But you can do it. You’ve got something to say, and there are people who want to hear it. It’s going to be tough, but you can do it. Write during your lunches, schedule a few hours of uninterrupted time, let your superego reign and convince your id that Great British Baking Show can wait until the end of your chapter. Writing is hard, but you can do it.