Ideas are Worthless! (Storytelling Tips from Comp Class)

 

One of the advantages of teaching composition is that ideas from class spill over into other aspects of my writing and vice versa. Writing and teaching writing feed off each other like a very small and mutually beneficial food chain.

For example, here’s a tidbit of writing wisdom from my Comp I textbook: “Topics are worthless.”[1]  

Instead of writing about the grandiose ideas every other student writes about, such as stem cell research or abortion, the authors encourage students to say something new about the most mundane of topics: why you dislike certain foods, how you overcame shyness, how you learned nothing from a boring history class.

In other words, the topic isn’t as important as what you have to say about it.

The same logic applies to writing stories.

It’s been said that there are no original ideas. Even the most successful books and films are based on well-traveled themes:

• Harry Potter is about a boy seeking to discover his special powers in an ordinary world.

• The Help is about women seeking to overcome prejudice.

• Most super-hero stories can be boiled down to good versus evil.

The trick, then, is to do something different with the idea. Here are five tips to help you forge new paths on a well-worn trail:

1. Ask yourself why you want to write about this idea in the first place.  What attracted you to it? If you write about sparkly vampires, are you doing so because they’re popular right now or because they appeal to you in some other way? Would you write about them if they weren’t popular?  (Hint: If the answer is no, perhaps you should write about something else.) 

2. Read other books built around a premise similar to yours.  Knowing what’s already been done with your idea will help you avoid covering the same ground by accident. It’s impossible, of course, to read every book featuring, say, zombies, but studying a representative selection of zombie stories can give you a sense of what's worked and what hasn't.

 3. Read a variety of books and articles not related to your idea.  Most comic book writers know their respective universes inside and out, down to the smallest bits of trivia. That’s well and good, but many modern comic book writers bring little else to the table. Their stories become insular and repetitive, covering the same ground, plowing through the same mega-crossovers year after year.

Classic comic book writers from the Golden and Silver ages steeped themselves in science fiction or just plain science. They drew from other fields to add something fresh to their stories.

 4. Don’t strive to be original—be truthful.  While fiction does indeed consist of being original—“making stuff up”—it is also about telling the truth: your truth.

Your truth is different from my truth or the truth of the person sitting next to you. That’s because we’ve all lived different lives. Tap into that well of uniqueness that is you and write about the one thing no one else knows: what it’s like to live your life.

 5. Connect the dots.  A writer I recently met described his book as a cross between Lord of the Rings and The Family Guy—two series that seem miles apart. Yet he somehow makes it work.

Find the connections between your idea and something that seems unrelated.  (Yes, I wrote “find” on purpose. Finding connections is better than inventing them. Invented connections can seem forced or phony.)

Everything is connected to everything else—the “six degrees” theory. Your task as writer is to discover those connections and connect the dots.

Finding something new to say about a timeworn topic or idea can be challenging, but it’s also the most rewarding aspect of being a writer: discovering that piece of originality that is not only inside you but is you.

---

[1] Jack Rawlins and Stephen Metzger.  The Writer’s Way. 7^th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009. 286. Print.

Related articles

• Writer's Block is a Myth

  ---

• How to Test an Idea (Ideas Part 2)

  ---

• Where Do Ideas Come From?

  ---

• Reading: Why will it help you write?

  ---

Does Your Story Write Itself?

Writing (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Writing stories, someone once said, is like raising a child. You, the author-parent, set out with dreams of where you want to story to go, what you want it to accomplish, who it's going to meet, and how it’s going to “turn out.”

But stories, like children, have minds of their own.

They take detours. They explore dangerous places. They bring home uninvited guests.

What’s a good author-parent to do?

I’m currently trying to figure this one out. Three-quarters of the way through the second revision of my novel-in-progess, The Power Club™, a new character has entered the story.This character was in earlier drafts, but he just didn’t fit into this one, so he was omitted.

But, suddenly, there he is again.

By bringing back this uninvited guest, my story is starting to assert its independence.

Sometimes, this can be a good thing; other times, not. Writers should always be in control of their stories. A grad school professor once told me that when a story “writes itself,” it's a sign the author hasn't thought it through carefully. 

And yet sometimes those unexpected detours and uninvited guests can be the best thing about the story.

Back when I was working on my comic book, Gold Dust, I introduced a minor character who appears for one panel. A short time later, when I had the opportunity to write a story for an anthology that was never published, I decided to use my minor character. At this point, I still had no idea who she was or her motivation.

But as I was writing the story, she told me who she was—and her background and setting worked well with the end-of-the-world story I was telling.

(And, yes, I am being purposefully vague.  There’s always the hope of publishing that story some day.)

Characters, of course, don’t actually talk to writers—though it doesn’t hurt to believe they can. Writing usually involves your subconscious working itself out through your characters.

The lesson I took from this was to let my stories live and breathe.  Let them explore their world, but hang back and make sure they don’t stray too far. 

Naturally, this entails judgment and guesswork. How do you know when a story is straying too far from its original purpose? You don’t—though repeated practice can develop your sense of what might work and what definitely will not.

I’m not sure if I’m going to keep the “uninvited guest," but I’ll let him stick around for awhile and see what develops.

What about you?  What do you do when your story writes itself?

If you like this article, you may also like:

• "How to Stop Procrastinating: Trust the Writing Process"
• "Arguing with Sharks: Overcoming Your Writing Fears"
• "Letting the Fiction Take Over: How to Turn Your Reality into Fiction"

Writers: What to Do When You Feel Uninspired

Image via Wikipedia

It’s been one of those weeks when, as a writer, you feel like you’ve been banged up and put away.

Your confidence is sagging.  A story isn’t working out the way you want it to.  A friendly discussion with an acquaintance has turned into a vitriolic debate.  Your students give you feedback that your teaching style (which you’ve been using for the last several semesters) isn’t working.  And “real life” obligations remind you there are things your writing can’t “cure”.

And now you’ve got to sit down at the keyboard and actually write something.

So what do you do when your inspiration runs low like the battery on your cellphone?

First, realize that writing has little, if anything, to do with inspiration.

That’s right.  Writing is a job, like any other.  Whoever heard of fireman’s block?  What would happen if a doctor didn’t feel “inspired” to help her patients?

Yet writers often feel they need to receive some sort of magical stimulation in order to do their work.

While writing can be stimulating, those of us who wish to get some compensation and recognition for our work must realize that neither will come if we wait for that magical creature called Inspiration to smile upon us.

As someone in my grad school once said, “Writers write.”

Period.

Second, here are four methods for kick-starting your inspiration:

Write through the problem.  Start by writing about the problem.  Acknowledge that you're having difficulty.  

Knowing that I’ve got to be somewhere else this afternoon and that my writing time is limited, I woke up this morning without a clue what I was going to write about.  So I took pen in hand and began writing about how my week went – including the difficulty of writing. 

Voila!  This method produced the post you are now reading.

Don’t wait for inspiration – seize it!  You are the commander of your writing “troops” and this is war!  Take action.  Now.

Get angry.  Nothing provokes a writer to action better than getting angry.  Anger leads to passion, and passion makes you want to do something.  

Can’t find anything to get angry about?  Turn on the news. 

Take your muse to breakfast (or lunch or dinner).   In his seminal book On Writing, Stephen King says his imaginary muse is a man.  Mine’s a woman.  Every week, my muse and I trek to a local restaurant, eat breakfast, and write.  (No, I don’t order for two.)

This particular restaurant is a little pricey for my tastes, but my muse likes to be treated right – and it works.  Many of these blogposts for the last two or three months have originated while my muse and I were munching on eggs, fruit, and Canadian bacon.

If it sounds a little odd to date your muse, deal with it.

Indulge your muse, and your muse will indulge you.

But does indulging your muse produce good results?  You be the judge.  (I will tell you that January was this blog’s best month so far, at least in terms of page views.) 

The old saw says that writing is 90 percent persperation and 10 percent inspiration.  If you wait for that 10 percent to come, you’ll slog through your writing until it loses interest for you, let alone your readers. 

To borrow from Admiral David Farragut, I say, “Damn the inspiration!  Full speed ahead!”

Leave a comment.  How do you kick-start your inspiration?