“Vivid and Clear” video, bootleg style

ByJohn Brown

Michael Barker generously offered his time to mash up the audio and PowerPoint for my LTUE presentation “Vivid and Clear.” He didn’t have tons of tools so ended up playing the audio on his computer, clicking through the presentation as it played, and recording the event with his iPad as a movie. So the result isn’t Hollywood. But it’s not bad for a bootleg (grin).

You can find it in seven-part Vivid and Clear (almost…) series on YouTube. Enjoy! And here’s the Vivid and Clear v2.

He’s now working on Story Turns. Stay tuned for more.

BTW, a big thanks goes to Aaron Allred who recorded the audio.

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  • Generating Story 14: Freewriting from Inquiry to Outline to Scene to Draft with Author Maya Lassiter

    ByJohn Brown

    Maya Lassiter is an unschooling mom, a yogini, a goat keeper, a yurt dweller, and a pantsy fantasy writer. Or should I say very likely soon to be less pantsy and more of a juggernaut? We shall see.  The initial results of her attempt to go from writing by the seat-of-your-pants to doing more pre-draft development seems to be paying off big time in less stress and higher word counts in each writing session.  I asked Maya to share her method with us. Here’s what she had to say.

    Maya

    At one hundred pages in on my eighth novel, I ran aground and could not seem to move forward an inch.  This was totally normal.  As a pantser, I pretty much always ran aground at some point, usually many times per novel, and then had to go back and rewrite, revise, redraft, finding the point I had gone off the rails and fixing things until finally I could get the train drafting moving once again.  Of course, even after all that, I would still go back to the beginning again, once I had hit then end, for revisions were where I found the book out of the mass of stuff I had gotten down by the seat of my writerly pants.  It was usually for four or five more drafts.  Grueling, exhausting work. 

    This time, however, staring at the choked up, broken manuscript before me, I had had enough.  I decided I wanted to be one of those people who planned their book: to heck with this pantsing crap. I wanted to write a draft that hung together the first time through.  I wanted this whole novel writing thing to be easier.

    In deciding this, however, I realized I had no idea how to proceed.  It’s one thing to say, “I want an entirely new way to do this,” and quite another to actually know what that new way is.  So, I did what any avid reader does when trying to figure anything out: I went to the library.  I checked out a giant stack of books–anything about writing fiction, or writers talking about their work, or editors talking about their writers.  I read it all. 

    In the process, I might have figured out how those outliners do it.

    Pantsing, for me anyway, involves figuring everything out in the draft.  Following your nose, your characters, your muse, your whim, and learning about your story as you go, often right along with your protagonist.  I had previously given up on outlining (multiple times) because, how can you outline what you don’t know, and how can you know if you haven’t written it yet?

    I found one solution to this in Alan Watts’s The 90 Day Novel.  In a word, free-writing.  In fact, 30 days of his 90 are spent just making stuff up, fooling around, free-writing without intending to keep a word of it, all using Watt’s copious question prompts about your story, your protagonist, or your antagonist, whenever you need to, to prime the pump.

    So I tried it.  And after 30 days, I knew a ton about my story I hadn’t already figured out—even though I had already written 100 pages of a draft.  (A draft that was riddled with problems, and now I could see what the pieces were.)  Basically, inquiring into the story and characters, and fooling around in longhand to find answers, brought many insights, including flashes of scenes, scraps of dialogue, the voices of the characters coming to life, new ideas….

    At some point I started listing these flashes out.  That is, any time I actually saw a scene-let from my novel spring to life in my head, I wrote it down.  I got an out-of-order laundry list this way of bits and pieces of the book-to-be, and I kept adding to it as the 30 days progressed.  Until one day I realized that two or three of those scene-lets could come together and become a true scene.  And that this bit ought to go in front of that bit–the beginnings of a plot!  Basically, the list started organizing itself as I figured out more about the story through those free-writes.  Magic.

    Watts also makes use of a three-act structure and slotting my proto-scenes and full scenes (as I found them) into his structure helped me see where there were holes…which brought more questions and more inquiry, which brought more free-writing, free-wheeling, answers.  I think any structure could work for this step: a romance structure, a puzzle structure, a plot-coupon epic, a coming of age story, whatever you know and love and want to use. 

    So, the laundry list, the scene list sequence, and then playing with that scene list within a structure template, these were the three steps that took me from a mass of free-written, stream of consciousness stuff, to a pretty clear idea of the arc of the story, beginning, middle, and end.  With lots of information along the way.

    At this point, I was at the end of Watts’s 30 days, the point at which he starts to draft in earnest….but I still wanted more than a laundry list of scenes, even an organized one.  I wanted a tighter sense of the thing.  I wanted less WORK and flailing about as I wrote.  So I took a page from Holly Lisle’s technique–a very similar one, I have learned, to a technique in Victoria Schmidt’s book, Book in a Month, that she supposedly got from Nora Roberts, and on it goes.  What you do is you take an index card for each scene and write a single sentence on it that sums up that scene.  The sentence includes five parts: [A protagonist with a need][in conflict with][an antagonist with a need][in an interesting setting][with a twist].  If you’ve got all five of those parts for each and every scene, you’re going to have tight scenes that move the story along, with no dangling bits or wandering (re: getting lost). 

    I took the “twist” part of that formula and read it to be similar to a central idea in Robert McKee’s book, Story, something he calls the Turn.  Basically, your character walks into a scene expecting X and the general energy charge of the scene is either postive + ish, or negative – ish.  Then something happens, or something is revealed, that changes all that, turns those expectations upside down.  That’s the Turn.  Whatever the charge was to begin with, it is now very different, either much further than it was (really + or really -) or the opposite charge altogether.  If a scene doesn’t have a Turn, it isn’t a scene.  If the charge doesn’t change, you get a monotony in your manuscript.

    All right.  I took my scene list and converted it into Sentence-per-Scenes on index cards, making sure each sentence had all 5 components, more or less, especially including the Turn.  Surprise, there were 28 scenes in this novel.  How about that?

    If I wrote 28 cards-worth of material, I’d have a complete novel draft.  It seems so doable, when it’s put like that.

    But I wasn’t done yet.  I remembered a blog post I had read a while back about increase productivity–and remember, this whole experiment was to see if I could make novel writing an easier, more streamlined process.  Maybe I would fail, maybe writing novels for me was always going to be guts and angst, but I wanted to see what was possible.  I mean, why not, right?  So I went and found that post, a post on Rachel Aaron’s blog, called How I Went from Writing 2000 Words a Day to 10000 Words a Day.  (http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.ca/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html  )  One of her primary tricks was to figure out what you were going to write for five or ten minutes–just fool around long hand on a page or two, before you start drafting until the scene is clear in your mind before you start drafting.  It was sort of like Alan Watts’s 30 days of free-writing, in miniature. 

    I also remembered another writer, Laurel Amberdine, talking about her trick of priming the pump for a scene with a sort of cheat sheet she had invented, a list of things she wanted to be sure to hit in each scene–not as a checklist, but as more writing prompts to help her find the details of the scene before drafting.  I went looking for that in our writer’s group threads, merged it with John Brown’s take on that same list, and then added on some questions from McKee’s Story, and I came up with my own prompt-sheet, designed for 10-15 minutes of pre-writing before starting each of my 28 scene cards.  Here it is:

    One Sentence Description:

    Problem:  What does the main character want in this scene?

    What persons or forces stand in the way?  What do they want?

    Value:  What is the value at stake?

    Describe the charge, positive or negative, for the main character as the scene opens.
    Described the value charge as the scene closes.

    Turning Point:  When does a gap open between expectation and result?  Describe it.

    Beat Pattern:  Comment on any of the action/reaction exchanges that may occur.

    WHERE ARE WE?
    – Fun, cool, weird, odd, particular details, surprises for reader
    – Time, weather, etc.
    – Background or world building details?

    WHO IS HERE?
    – What’s the situation for each character?
    – Who is driving this scene?
    – What is his/her concrete objective?
    – What does each of the others want (motive)?
    – Fun & cool stuff?  Surprises for reader?

    WHAT STORY LINES WILL HAVE BEATS HERE?
    – Progress or trouble?
    – Points of conflict?
    – Obstacles?
    -TURN

    Opening/transition:
    Current Situation:
    Setting, and significant details:
    Next big crisis:
    Turn:
    Background/worldbuilding details:
    Desired effect in reader:
    Events:
    Emotions:
    Character’s unique reactions:
    Ending hook:

    Print one of these out, read my scene card, and start fooling around with the prompts.  By the time the page was filled up, the scene was clear in my mind, often with dialogue written, emotional beats I wanted to hit, and most importantly, the Point of it all, that Turn.  Not to mention foreshadowing, setting goodies, backstory bits I needed to get in, all of it on a single, handy page.

    Of course, at this point I had about a half-dozen different writer’s processes rolled together into a giant mash-up that was sure to do me in with sheer weight and complexity.  But so what–this was in the name of Science!  Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks!

    With card #1, built off the bones of my 30 days of free-writing, and my filled up, front and back, worksheet (took about fifteen minutes), I banged out the first scene chapter, 6000 words, in about 3 hours.  That’s double my usual top speed of 1000 words an hour, but who’s counting?  The main thing: it was perfectly painless.

    My scene card #2 was written similarly in record time, the words flowing easily, no staring into space or getting lost, just smooth, lovely writing.

    Plus, I wasn’t at all having the feared, “why write it if you know what’s going to happen?” thing that so many pantsers cite as their reason for not outlining.  On the contrary, I was very excited about each scene because I knew just what was so cool about it, where the juice was coming and why, and I was psyched to get in there and make it as awesome as I knew it could be. 

    In other words, I could focus on the HOW because the WHAT had already been determined.

    I won’t know, of course, until I finish card #28 whether the process will really work. And I REALLY won’t know until I do a revision pass on the complete draft to see if what I’ve got is any good.  So think of this post as a progress report from the trenches.  I’m up to scene card 6 so far, 16,000 words in, and its still going well, easy writing sessions at double my usual speed and no flailing. 

    Too soon to tell, but tentative conclusion…maybe a pantser really can become a plotter?

    John Sez

    Isn’t that absolutely fantastic?

    By simply taking some time to freewrite, which is just another term for sketching, she has been able (so far) to take out a ton of pain AND increase her word count. And increase it dramatically. So let’s see again how she does it.

    Step 1: Sketch the story using questions as prompts

    1. Sketched using inquiry and freewriting a la Alan Watt’s The 90-Day Novel. Among many other things, that pre-draft development generated a number of scenes and scene snippets. (Hum, “inquiry” and “freewriting”; why, they’re just another form of creative Q&A. That dang creative Q&A is popping up everywhere!)
    2. Kept a list of the scenes she saw.
    3. Sequenced the list in a this-before-that order.

    Step 2: Create a working outline

    1. Maya compared what she had to a structure pattern that and tried to fill in any gaps using more inquiry and freewrite.
    2. (I’m a big believer in patterns, not formulas.)

    Step 3: Sketch the scenes

    1. Next, she sketched out each scene on her list using her own version of the Holly Lisle/Victoria Schmidt/Nora Roberts technique. 
    2. Her sketches had 5 parts: [A protagonist with a need][in conflict with][an antagonist with a need][in an interesting setting][with a twist]

    Step 4: Draft

    1. She was now ready to begin drafting, but does one more sketch before she writes each scene.  She uses her own version of the Amberdine “Template,” which I call the “Scene Primer” and Maya calls a “prompt-sheet,” which helps her (a la Rachel Aaron) to envision the scene more clearly.  So does this for about 15 minutes at the beginning of her drafting session.  
    2. She starts to draft, full of excitement, and feeling free to focus on the how instead of so much on the what.

    Note all of the sketching. Note the creative Q&A. Note the developing in iterations. Did you also see her comments on the helpfulness of using a plot pattern?

    I remember when I first started doing this and feeling the same way–I can focus on the how! It’s so liberating! The writing became more of a pleasure. And I never stopped inventing. Because even though I’ve sketched a lot out, things change when you do the next take. It always does.

    I cannot wait to see how this experiment of hers turns out. I think she’ll run into a few snags but find it’s a much more productive method. We shall see.

    We shall also see if I can’t improve my productivity and pleasure because while this is generally how I work, I haven’t used the Lisle card prompts. Nor have I read Watt’s book. Which means it looks like I’m going to be performing an expirement of my own. And it couldn’t come at a better time. I’ll be done with BAD PENNY here in just a few weeks. And it will be time to start another novel. I can’t wait to try these new tools.

    For more in this series, see How to Get and Develop Story Ideas

    P.S. Look at the cover of Maya’s latest novel. I think it’s gorgeous.

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    The Little Secret that Propels So Many Blockbuster Plots

    ByJohn Brown

    I was invited to present a master class at the 2022 StoryMakers conference in Provo, Utah.

    We all want to develop plots that delight readers. Maybe we have ideas for the characters. Maybe we have ideas for the setting. Maybe we even have a couple of scenes.

    But a novel needs 40, 50, 60 or more scenes.

    How do you figure out what happens next, and do it in a way readers love?

    There’s one tool that can help.

    Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and The Da Vinci Code all had it. So did Star Wars, Raider of the Lost Ark (1, 2, and 3), Taken, James Bond, The Wheel of Time, and thousands of other stories, TV episodes, and films.

    It’s what I call the wanted object, sometimes known as the MacGuffin.

    A good MacGuffin will not only make your plotting easier, it can also inject a wow factor into your story that readers love.

    In this session, the writers learned what a MacGuffin really is and how you can use it to propel the plot and keep readers turning the page.

    Here’s a PDF of the presentation.

    2022 john brown – the secret that propels so many blockbuster plots2

    And here’s the PDF of the handout.

    2022 john brown – the secret that propels so many blockbuster plots handout

    Enjoy!

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  • Indie Thoughts: Tend Your Garden

    ByJohn Brown

    From Joe Konrath.

    Your ebooks function much like a garden.

    One rare occassions, a plant will thrive with little help from you.

    Others may whither and die no matter how much help you give them.

    But the majority need to be constantly tended. Planted, watered, fertilized, weeded, pruned, mulched, replanted, harvested. In other words, lots of work.

    Ebooks aren’t a Mr. Popeill invention where you can set it and forget it. Quite the opposite. You need to pay attention, and keep active, or your garden won’t thrive.

    Everyone experiences slow downs in sales. It’s inevitable, and it seems to be cyclical, but not in any sort of way I’ve been able to prodect. Sales seem to rise and fall for reasons unknown.

    But if you’re doing what you can to make your books discoverable, you have a better shot at sales than those authors who self-publish then self-ignore.

    Here are some tricks to tend to your garden.

    1. Change prices. As an indie, this is one of the biggest advantages you have over the legacy industry. You decide what the customer pays, and this is powerful. Don’t be afraid to weild that power by experimenting with prices, both lower and higher.

    2. Newsletter. There is no excuse why you don’t have a newsletter. People who sign up are actively looking for your titles. Make them aware a new title exists.

    3. Sales. Unlike a change in price, a sale only lasts for a short time. KDP Countdown is what I’m currently using, because it offers 70% royalties when I drop the price. I’ve been pleased with my results.

    4. Advertising. Bookbub and Booksends are the ones I use regularly. If you’ve had success with another company, list it in the comments.

    He names eleven tips. Link to the rest at JA Konrath’s blog.

    This goes back to something Blake Russell said in the myth posts I pointed to a few posts ago. There are some folks who suggest that you can either write the next book or you can promote the current one.

    Folks who suggest it’s either/or leave me scratching my head. Why not do both?

    Applying to BargainBooksy or BookSends takes less than 30 minutes. Sending a review copy out to a decent review site takes about the same amount of time. If I spend just one hour a week on promotion, I can do all three of those things each month plus something else.

    Some folks suggest that promotion doesn’t work when you only have a few books out. And forget about it if you only have one. Promo can’t do anything for you if you only have one book out. At least, not as much as completing the next book can.

    Let me ask a question.

    If I open a McDonalds down some back road where nobody sees it and nobody travels, do we think that releasing a second McDonalds down some other back road where nobody travels is going to increase sales?

    Nobody is going to go down those roads except by accident.

    Is that how McDonalds or Walmart or whatever company you want to name built their vast empire? They did it by accident? How about the diner everyone loves in your town? They hid it at the end of a dirt road, told nobody about it, definitely did not put up a sign (good grief, not a sign), and, shazam!–the customers started rolling in?

    Mcdonalds11

    Some folks say, no, you’re missing the point. The purpose of a promotion is to get people to buy other books in your list at higher prices, so if you don’t have a lot of other books, your promotion can’t do anything for you.

    Using loss-leader or sampling strategies with one book to sell others is certainly a smart thing to do. Because it works. With cheeses at Sam’s Club, with books, with a lot of things. But is that really the only thing you’re trying to do?

    How about building a base of readers who have some degree of loyalty to your brand? You don’t need ten books to start to do that. You don’t need two books. You can start with one.

    I started two series last December—a thriller and an epic fantasy–and (writing gods willing) will be releasing book 2 in the fantasy series this month. Since December I’ve sold close to a thousand in each series. It was easy to see that at least half of my sales, maybe more, came because of some type of promo. I know this because I watched the numbers.

    This means I now have hundreds more folks waiting for book two than I did for book one in both series. I’m going to be releasing book two in both series with a bigger customer base than I would have had without promo. Why would I not want to start at a higher level for each successive book?

    More readers means more word of mouth. Why wouldn’t I want more word of mouth about my books?

    More word of mouth means higher odds that an influencer will hear about, try, like, and then promote my books. In fact, I’m looking at at least double the odds. Somebody remind me: why wouldn’t I want those better odds?

    One of the main keys to this business is to get a big enough customer base so that the word of mouth takes on a life of its own. I am building that base more quickly with promo than without. Why would I want to build that base more slowly?

    Finally, I have twice the money I would have had otherwise to invest in promo and covers and editing etc. Or just go spend on my wonderful wife and girls. Why wouldn’t I want this revenue?

    Traditional publishers have built reader bases for an author one book at a time, often spaced a year apart, for decades. They put money into the promo that works in in-store venues: covers, pre-release reviews and the necessary ARCs, catalogs, a sales team, and co-op visibility in the stores. And while that promo didn’t guarantee anything, it made the odds more likely the book would get readers to sample and build that reader base.

    Why shouldn’t we put money into the promo that increases the odds for online stores?

    What business out there can’t benefit from good promo?

    Of course, the next question is what methods of promo work? There are a many methods that are a waste of money. But not all of them are. I think it’s our job as entrepreneurs to test and find ways that are effective a la The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

    Anyway, Konrath’s advice to not self-ignore, and Blake’s “do both” approach make a lot of sense to me.

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    Workshop: The 3 Things You Must Learn to Write Killer Stories

    ByJohn Brown

    Where: Salt Lake City at CONduit 

    Date: Saturday, May 24, 2008

    Time: 2 PM – 4 PM

    I had tons of great feedback from the last workshop. It seemed to be helpful to quite a few people. There are a number of other good workshops for writers going on before and after mine that you’ll want to look into as well.

    For more information go to the CONduit website.

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    I want to be Scott Westerfield

    ByJohn Brown

    Laura Miller at Salon.com has it all wrong when she says promoting books with movie-style trailers is a silly idea.

    Here, watch this book trailer for Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan.

    Yeah, I know you want to–go ahead, watch it again.

    Miller looks at book trailers, sees that the vast majority of them are lame, lame, lame (actually, this is the FIRST I’ve seen that’s any good). Sees that they reach no markets and then concludes that all trailers are silly. It’s true: lame trailers ARE a waste of time and money. But ANY advertisement (print, video, audio, whatever) that’s lame is a waste of time and money. Making killer trailers that nobody sees is an even bigger waste of time and money. But that’s true of ANY killer advertisement that nobody sees.  

    Look. I’ve never read Westerfield. Don’t know much about him or his books. But I saw that clip and now want to read that book. Hum, trailer worked for me. I AM a reptoid mutant, but I suspect there are others out there like me. I mean, come on. Good gravy, woman–“Do you oil your war machines? Or do you feed them?” Killer!

    Movie trailers, book trailers–any advertisement–isn’t about delivering what the person is going to experience on the spot. If that were the case, then you’d never show a print ad of a meal at Olive Garden because it doesn’t deliver the goods right there on page 10 of Woman’s Day. Nope, all you’d do is go around giving out samples in places with Italian mood.

    Miller’s error is not understanding the difference between making an offer and delivering on one. What an ad is supposed to do is make the offer. Let you know this thing is available. Because you’re not delivering the actual experience,  you can make the offer via all sorts of media. Now, if you can give them a taste, that’s great. But you don’t need to deliver the full deal right there.

    So what do you need in an offer? You need the offer to say, “Hey, I’ll deliver this type of experience.” It needs to call to some action, either directly or by implication–“buy this” or “be here.” You also need it to say, “You can trust this will be worth it” and make the consumer believe that’s likely to be true. It communicates this last bit by being a quality piece of work.

    Making an offer is exactly what book covers do–they make the offer and give the consumer a little taste. And book covers matter. This has been proven over and over. Just like most people, when I see a cool cover, I pick up the book and check it out. When I see a lame one, or one that offers something I’m not interested in, you’re going to have to threaten me to pick that book up. Or it better dang well have some righteous word of mouth. It’s that simple. We all judge books by their covers because the cover is making an offer. And lame offers don’t get very many takers.

    Book trailers are nothing more than deluxe book covers. The cool thing about them is the cool thing about movie trailers–you can make the offer by providing a little taste. You do that by giving the audience the story situation, the pitch. You do it by communicating the feel of the experience and raising curiosity. You do it by making it a pro job. The good  ones make you laugh, say cool!, or raise curiosity and expectation.

    And that Westerfield trailer does that.

    Dang, “Do you oil your machines? Or do you feed them?”

    Run that on TV. Run it on the radio. Put it up on sites where people are likely to see and click. Confirm it in print. Make the offer to real people. Get it infront of young readers. I’ll stake my eyebrows that ad can sell as many books as a good movie trailer can sell movie tickets.

    Crimeny, now I want to be Scott Westerfield.

    Edit, I lied

    I have seen another book trailer that’s as good as Westerfield’s. Do you remember this: http://thesecret.tv/movie/trailer.html ?

    Very effective advertising for the book. I think the content of the book is crap, but that trailer made me pick it up just to see what it was all about.

    Do you notice that this one and the Westerfield one combine extreme professionalism AND they make the pitch in a clear and grabbing way? The pitch for both was what the book was about. For fiction it’s the concept. For non-fiction how to it’s the promise.

    So many of the book trailers lack one or more of those things. For example, look at the book award finalist for THE FALLEN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsLE6bNaIrk. I don’t know what the heck the book is even about after a long 2 minutes. They’re trying to make a movie.

    Something else. On both of these you have a voice over PITCHING the book to you just as someone might do it in person or to an editor. It’s a powerful method, I think.

    Notice also how short the Westerfield one is. Just over a minute. Westerfield’s really is like a query pitch or cover copy–in just a few lines tell me what your story is about. We get genre, setting, character, and the story problem or concept.

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  • Generating Story 5: Hunt Zing

    ByJohn Brown

    Even after you choose a genre, you still need to develop ideas for character, setting, problem, plot, and text.

    What do you do? How do you develop those ideas?

    The first thing you do is hunt zing.

    Feeding the beast

    Zing is any idea that turns you on, sparks your imagination, or stokes your desire. Zing tingles your cool meter. Dude, yes, ah, oh baby, man-o-man, great oogily boogily–these are all common responses when you come across these types of ideas.

    Most zings are small tingles. Sometimes they’re zaps. Rarer still are the freaking gigawatt monsters that shake you about and leave you breathless. But I’ve found I can’t wait for those. Or maybe I should say that they often come only after I’ve caught smaller prey.

    Your imagination is a beast. Feed it and it will get up and terrorize the neighborhood on its own accord. Starve it and it will lie there like a gigantic dust mop and gather flies.

    Nothing in, nothing out.

    YOU MUST FEED YOUR IMAGINATION!

    Some of us might feel we don’t have much to feed our imagination. Most of us are not Ann Franks or CIA agents or little old ladies caught in terrorist plots. But we don’t have to be.

    I once taught teen writers workshop where we met one day each week for three weeks. During the first class I introduced zing and told the students they were to hunt for 10 zings each day.

    They were dismayed. They groaned. Ten? Was that possible?

    The next week all of the students came back bubbling about all the things they’d found. One of them said it had changed things for her: her world which had been relatively hum-drum was suddenly filled with the cool. The other students agreed.

    We all are limited by what we can perceive and focus on. Our working memories are so small. And so it’s easy to focus on so many mundane business-of-life things and miss the wonderful show of lights that goes on around us.

    This is what hunting for zing does for you. It quite literally changes your world.

    Be a hunter.

    Capture the zing.

    This is the first step. You have to gather interesting material. Lots of it. Which means you must turn your zing sensors on.

    What do I mean by this?

    Open your eyes and ears and heart. Be on the look out. When something cool comes along, capture it. Use scratch paper, the back of a receipt, get a notebook, a folder file, a camera, a sketchbook. Just capture it when it comes. And it will come.

    Most of the ideas are never used, but unless you capture them, i.e. notice them, you won’t get the ones that do develop into something special. For many of us writing them down is the way to really give them the attention they need. I promise you: these little scraps and snippets have a way of combining at the oddest moments, and suddenly you have more than an itty-bitty old zing, you have a freaking power plant!

    The Drag Net

    Having your sensors on is like deploying a drag net—it catches whatever swims into it. One of the benefits of this is that you get ideas you’d never in a million years come up with on your own. Here are some random things I caught in my drag net.

    Some people actually raise chickens in their apartment (from a book I happened to pick up while browsing a section of the library).

    Hum, what if my character’s neighbor does that? What if it’s his kooky sister? Maybe his wife decides they need to be more self-sufficient. Or maybe she’s told a neighbor she’d take care of her chickens.

    A girl was sold to cover her father’s debts (while reading an article about ancient history)

    Could that happen today? How would that work? What if it was someone else kidnapping a girl to pay off debts?

    “The monkey, which costs $15,000, is what Truelove envisions as the ultimate SWAT reconnaissance tool. Since 1979, capuchin monkeys have been trained to be companions for people who are quadriplegics by performing daily tasks, such as serving food, opening and closing doors, turning lights on and off, retrieving objects and brushing hair. Truelove hopes the same training could prepare a monkey for special-ops intelligence.” (From an online newspaper that’s sent to me each week)

    A SWAT monkey? Come on! Could this primate be put to nefarious purposes? What if he stole something incredibly valuable? What if a major thief uses them? What if it’s a boy in the neighborhood?

    There’s a guy who lets his toenails grow to horrible lengths; they look like claws. It’s incredibly disgusting (Something a friend said about one of his friends in an email)

    Does your main character have a partner? Someone they work with in the office? A mate in their medieval army squad?

    GARDEN GROVE (CBS) — An Albertson’s supermarket on Harbor Boulevard was evacuated Monday after a burglary suspect fell through the ceiling to the ground near a cash register.

    What if that’s your main character? What was he doing stealing copper? Maybe he was forced to?

    Headline in Daily Mail Reporter: Ghurka kills 30 Taliban. ‘I thought I was going to die… so I tried to kill as many as I could’: Hero Gurkha receives bravery medal from the Queen. Corporal Dipprasad Pun defeated more than 30 Taliban fighters single-handedly.  Used the tripod of his machine gun to beat away a militant after running out of ammunition.

    Could this be used as a scene in the story? What about the tripod business?

    In this May 2011 security camera frame grab provided by the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office, dogs are seen at the home of a resident near Deer Park, Wash. A pack of dogs has killed about 100 animals in the past three months while eluding law enforcement and volunteers in northeastern Washington state. The killings are happening in a wide area of mountains and valleys west of Deer Park, a small town about 40 miles north of Spokane, authorities said. (AP Photo/Courtesy of the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office)

    What if these guys are roaming the neighborhood where your character lives? What if it’s a fantasy story and these are not just dogs? Are they bewitched? Trolls? Something come in from the woods?

    As far as pictures go. How about this gal? Would she fit in a romantic comedy? A murder mystery? What if she went missing? What if someone kidnapped her son?

    What about this newspaper clipping? Click on the image and read the fine print.

    All you have to do is start asking questions of these zings and they can’t help but produce character, setting, problem, and plot.

    Deploy your drag net.

    Do it now.

    Hunting With A Purpose

    Even though your drag net is out, you cannot rely on it to deliver all the ideas you need. Very often you need to go hunting with a purpose. In fact, whenever you have development objectives, you’ll be on the lookout for that thing you need to develop.

    Let’s say you want a funny and new fight scene in your story. Look at the stuff above.

    • A fight including that gal in the wedding dress?
    • One in the space the copper thief fell from?
    • How about one in a chicken apartment?

    Maybe you need a new love interest.

    • What if she’s the copper thief?
    • What if she’s out hunting the wild dogs?
    • Maybe he’s the guy who kidnapped the nun?

    Do you see? When you have a purpose, you look at the things you come across with a different lens.

    But you might need to be a bit more active in your hunt. You might need to do some things to find what you’re looking for. I’m talking about directed research.

    An Example

    I attended Orson Card’s literary boot camp. He had us take a day and develop five story ideas (or seeds) which we were to write down on ONE side of a 3×5 card (hum, sounds a bit like the story setup we talked about in the previous blog).

    2 of the cards were for story ideas we developed from research conducted at Barnes & Noble or in a library

    2 were for ideas developed from a drag net of events or curious things I saw that day

    1 card was for an idea developed from an interview with someone.

    The assignment was to look at things as a writer, to exploit what I see as a writer. On the card we were to tell a story. The fundamental idea–what happens and why. Just the idea and some events. The space limint on a 3×5 card forces you to think of story and NOT the writing.

    Oh, and the research was supposed to be for something we didn’t find interesting, which meant we didn’t know squat about it.

    I researched Iroquois Indians, women who did crazy things like going over Niagra Falls in a barrel, and some other crap I can’t remember. I also read a bit about an American Indian in 1614 who was stolen as a slave, taken to Spain, got his freedom, went to England and then back home.

    I interviewed two women in a music box shop and worker in a Thomas Kindcade art gallery. The gallery gal was blonde and rode Harleys. Had tattoos. What in the world was she doing in a THOMAS KINCADE gallery?

    I used the Elizabeth Smart poster (abducted girl) and an empty music box as my curious things.

    I worked from 5PM until 9PM on the ideas and never really got anything. Went up on a hike up Rock Canyon still thinking about it. Saw a cave; evening came; the canyon was beautiful. Marvelous. Almost stepped in a snake. Worked and worked on the music box idea and the kidnapping idea. More on the music box.

    No ideas really pulled me.

    Next morning I woke at 6 AM and started thinking. Decided I had no time AND I WOULD HAVE TO FOLLOW NELLIE’S [my wife] ADVICE and simply go with what I had. I made a decision and go with it even though I didn’t really feel it inside.

    During class, someone else talked about bone magic. It was cool! I stole the bone magic idea and crossed it with the Iroquois stuff I’d looked at and suddenly started liking my story a whole lot more. Decided the tribe that lost their only bone breaker (that’s how the magic was obtained) in a raid (he was sold to the French as a slave) and sent out a woman who knew French and a warrior to retrieve him.

    The next day I was supposed to write the story. I found I didn’t really want to write that one. Spent all day at the library reading juveniles and encyclopedias on Iroquois and Eastern Indians. Read for 5 hours then began to try to write.

    Now, let me stop here.

    Through my directed research I had collected gobs of zing. There were Indian names like “Handsome Lake” and “He Who Keeps Them Awake,” the fact that the Iroquois had a peace sachem (leader) and a war leader. The peace leader was a woman and chose the male war leader. I had stories about abducted Whites and Indians being sold into slavery and escaping. I read about men purchasing Indian wives. I added tidbits I knew from the Netherlands and Bible. It went on and on and on.

    I had TONS of cool material to work with because I’d actively gone on the hunt for it.

    If you look back as the example I shared about the golem story in the previous post, you’ll see I researched golems and Croatia and found TONS of cool material. I added to that other tidbits I already had. And the result was massive zing.

    So what happened with that Iroquois story?

    Well, I finished it, and it went on to sell multiple times. It’s called “Bright Waters”. Here’s how it starts. But the thing to remember is that it all started with the directed hunting for zing.

    Bright Waters

    In the spring of 1718 Jan van Doorn returned to his log house with a load of molasses, flour, and a fine green dress for his new wife. He found she had run out on him and taken half of his goods with her.

    She was the second wife he’d bought. And the second one to run away before a season was out.

    Her name was Woman With Turtle Eyes, an older Huron of 23 years. He had thought an older woman would be more stable than the girl he purchased the first time. Besides, she said she wanted him to buy her.

    Jan didn’t understand how the men in the settlements courted and kept their women. And it couldn’t be because he was ugly. He’d seen plenty of ugly men marry. The only ones that seemed to have any interest in him were the whores at Fort Montreal, and when he’d given in to his urges that one cursed time, they took far more from him than his money.

    There was nothing to do about Woman With Turtle Eyes. If he hunted her down, she’d just run away again. He could beat her, but she’d run nevertheless. Besides, her theft meant he’d have to start working his old claim, and there were precious few weeks before the beavers began to shed their winter coats. No, there was nothing to do but fold up the dress and put it in the cedar chest.

    He looked down upon the dress for a few moments admiring the fine, shimmering cloth. Then he closed the lid.

    That night Jan cooked himself a meal of kale and old potatoes. When he finished, he rubbed deer urine onto his traps to prepare them for the morrow. Then he went to bed.

    Remember: zings are almost always small. Don’t be looking for the ONE killer idea. Usually the killer story is made up of a bunch of smaller zings.

    “What generally happens is that I’ll be reading up on some topic just for entertainment — spies, pirates, the Romantic poets, mountain-climbing — and I’ll notice a few indications that the situation might do as the basis for a novel. At that point I declare that this isn’t recreation anymore, it’s research. So I start reading lots of books and articles on the subject, even if they’re not entertaining. And I follow any side-paths that show up — for one book, Tarot led to Poker which led to Las Vegas which led to famous gangsters. And while I’m reading all this, I’m looking for bits that are “too cool not to use.” When I’ve got a dozen or so things that are too cool not to use, then I’ve got — obviously — a dozen elements of the eventual novel.” ~ Tim Powers

    Your Zing, Not Mine

    Again, you don’t want any old idea. You want good ones. So how do you recognize a good idea?

    YOU FEEL IT!

    Good ideas carry current, they spark your interest, they tug your heart strings, they turn you on. This is what I’ve learned: a good idea is like an electric jolt. Sometimes it’s very small, sometimes it’s overpowering. It’s the feeling of “cool,” “whoa,” or “oh, boy, this has possibilities.”

    But notice I said they spark your interest.

    You’re not looking for what turns me on. For you to write a story, you have to follow your zing, not mine or your friend’s or your mentor’s.

    The trick is finding your zing and then sharing your zing with people who have similar tastes.

    Where to find zing

    There are a few places where I seem to find TONS of zing. Maybe they’ll be productive for you.

    Source 1: Other stories

    I get an unlimited supply of ideas from other stories. Here are a number of sources.

    • The news
    • History
    • Friends and acquaintances
    • My past
    • Strangers
    • Scripture
    • Gossip
    • Fairy tales
    • Poems
    • Movies
    • TV programs (fiction and non-fiction)
    • Summaries of actual court cases
    • Novels
    • Magazines
    • Biography
    • Interviewing a relative or friend for their life story

    Source 2: Snippets of life

    Every week I run across interesting conversations, lines, facts, events, images, and people. These things aren’t stories but they can be used to enhance or generate one. In fact, part of the joy of writing is finding ways to incorporate the cool things I encounter into the current story. There are many places where I find these snippets of life:

    • People I know or talk to
    • Science
    • History
    • Poetry
    • The Discovery Channel and its many cousins
    • How-to books, videos, tapes
    • Current or historical issues
    • Books on how people used to live
    • Photographs of other lands and cultures
    • People I see (The hero of my Writer’s of the Future story was based on a transient I picked up one night who lived in a storage space at the town’s used bicycle shop)
    • Learning about other people’s professions
    • Trying new things

    Source 3: Research

    This is just another way of coming across stories, facts, events, people, and trying new things, but it’s more directed.

    • Do it
    • Visit it
    • Talk to those who have done it or been there
    • Watch movies about it
    • Read about it, starting with Juveniles & Encyclopedias and then moving to thicker texts

    When I moved up into the hinterlands of Utah, I found out they had an annual local testical festival. As a regular joe I might have gagged and moved on. As a zing hunter, I couldn’t afford to do that.

    No, they do not taste like chicken.

    They do taste like something many people find delicious. But I’ll let you identify what that is with a little research of your own.

    When you get a chance to try something new–try it. You get marvelous details, wonderful ideas. And you just might find you enjoy life a little bit more. Or at least be grateful you’re not trapped in a coffin.

    I was writing a scene for one of my books, where a secondary character accidentally locks himself in a casket. Not having experienced such a tragedy, I began winging that thread on imagination alone. But the scene simply wouldn’t jell. When I finally finished the first draft and read it, it felt two-dimensional. So I wrote it again. It still stank. By the third draft my frustration level had peaked, and I shoved my chair away from the computer, knowing there was only one solution to this two-dimensional problem. I would have to experience it. Now you would think a logical person would take into consideration that the number of readers who’d actually been trapped in a casket was minimal enough to make the whole issue moot. Then again, we’re talking about a rational person…I’ll tell you, I’ve pulled some crazy stunts before, all in the name of research, but this one ranks in the top three.  ~Deborah LeBlanc

    Nobody can copyright an idea or technique

    Don’t worry about stealing ideas from someone else or using a technique you find in another story. Don’t worry that something’s already been done. What you want to avoid is copying the writing. But take any idea or technique and run with it–in your own direction. Remember: The Terminator & Back to the Future have the same premise but are two totally different stories. So go wild.

    Be a hunter.

    Capture the zing.

    Start gathering your writing material today.

    For more in this series, see How to Get and Develop Story Ideas

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