Sorry for the lack of posts recently—things have been crazy! Here’s something that ought to make up for it: in addition to collecting character-inspiring art for you, I’m also collecting art to inspire plots! These might be images of situations, strange items, etc. Here’s one of my favorite examples. Click through and click on the image at DA to view the full-size image for all the wonderful details:

Cold Trap by ~Sarienn on deviantART

You might use any one of these images to trigger an idea for an entire book’s plot or a simple twist in a pre-existing plot. They’re particularly handy for game masters looking for inspiration for this week’s adventure or magical artifact.

Imagine that one of your fictional characters is getting married. How would it happen? Write the scene.

Alternative #1: Imagine that someone close to one of your fictional characters is getting married.

Alternative #2: Imagine that you are getting married!

Weddings can bring out the best and worst in people. They’re watershed moments that tend to be remembered for decades. They can be small or large, happy or bittersweet, tragic or uplifting. And like many other such moments, they can tell you so much about all involved.

As an illegitimate daughter, Cea had only been allowed to attend her father’s wedding as any other unrelated member of the house might: standing anonymously amongst the other unmarried, low-ranking sons and daughters of the house. At the reception she hung back, away from the wedding party, sipping her drink to cover the disconnected feeling that haunted her.

Her father’s new wife was barely two years her senior.

This shouldn’t have surprised her—didn’t—but it certainly felt awkward. She hadn’t even met the young woman, and had no idea what to call her.

It was late when Cea’s father steered his new wife toward Cea. His handsome face was impassive; she knew the wedding hadn’t been his idea, and he likely hadn’t met his new wife before the wedding was arranged several weeks earlier. He obviously wasn’t pleased with the turn of events, but she knew he’d do what the family required of him. The young woman at his side had long brown hair tied back in a thick braid that hung below her waist; she was a vision in silks and velvets. Her face was flushed; some observers might mistake her high color for excitement, but Cea saw the flustered look on her face as she glanced at her new husband. And who could blame her? Dern was a handsome, highly sought-after match; she’d probably hoped to be swept off her feet, not to find that her spouse could hardly even look at her.

Dern lowered his hand to Cea’s shoulder and gifted her with one of his small smiles. “This is my daughter, Cea.”

Cea watched the young woman’s eyes widen. She would have been told of Dern’s daughter, of course, but she’d probably imagined someone rather younger than Cea’s sixteen years.

“Cea, this is Selena.”

Cea curtsied to her father’s wife, lowering her eyes. “Lady, welcome to our home,” she said softly, an almost-undetectable note of sympathy in her voice.

“I see someone I should speak with; why don’t you two get acquainted?” And just like that, he was gone, abandoning his new wife to his daughter.

Cea suppressed a sigh. “Most of the guests you should meet have gone; if you’d like, I could give you a tour of the house.”

Selena pulled herself up as tall as she could, which was several inches short of Cea’s height. “I don’t need the charity of an illegitimate daughter.”

Cea saw one or two heads turn, and again suppressed a sigh. “Of course, Lady. If you change your mind, any servant can tell you where to find me.” She turned and walked away, placing her empty glass on a table and fisting her hands to drive down the frustration that built inside of her. As she left the room she felt a cold chill pass through her hands. She rubbed them together to warm them, stretched her fingers out as she uttered a frustrated oath, and caught her breath as a small, glowing bolt of cold flicked out from her fingers to leave a pock mark in the wall. She stared in shock for a moment, then glanced around quickly to make sure no one had noticed. Seeing no one, she ran all the way to her room, closing and locking the door behind her.

Visit this page and, for the moment, simply look at the photograph without reading the text. (Just in case you read this entry sometime months from now and the picture is gone, it’s an old black-and-white photo of young men in suits marching down a road carrying signs that read ‘WE WANT BEER’.)

Now, you have two options.

1. Read the hysterically funny ‘explanation’ stumbleupon user kish-me concocted for the photo. Then go out and find your own photo of who-knows-what and write your own creative tale to go with it. You don’t have to emulate kish’s style; do anything you want!

2. Before reading the explanation for the photo, write your own. When you’re done you can read kish-me’s hilarious creation.

The stories we can come up with when inspired by an innocuous image can be touching, hilarious, moving… anything at all. Let your imagination run wild.

I apologize for the length of time between posts; it’s been a crazy month! Anniversaries; endoscopies; cooking and planting; furniture shopping; reading like crazy; T-shirt redesigning like crazy… time flies! So today, let’s play with the concept of absence. Imagine that you (or one of your fictional characters) has been absent from home, friends, and family for some time with no word. As far as those people are concerned, the absence has been unexplained. They might have at least known that you planned to go away for a while, or they might have reported you missing.

Write the scene in which you or your character returns home.

Story starters are simple lines or paragraphs that you can use to start off a writing exercise. Just put it at the top of a piece of paper or file and go. You can use it directly as the first line of a piece, or use it as inspiration. Of course you could also get a bit more creative and use it as the last line, or incorporate it into the middle somewhere. You could re-phrase or re-write the starter if it better suits your story. But for the purposes of a quick exercise, it’s usually easiest to just use it as the first line of your writing. Today’s story starter is:

“The smell is coming from that ambulance.”

There’s a meme going around the book blogging community that goes roughly like this: you open a book to a certain page, find a line a certain number of sentences into that page, and then quote the next several sentences. At face value this sounds kind of uninteresting, but in practice it results in some absolutely fascinating out of context quotes. When you reach deep into a story and take several lines on their own like that, they can often spur the imagination in interesting ways.

Today, pick up a book and open to a random page, preferably one at least a little ways in and preferably among pages you haven’t read yet (even better, from a book you haven’t read yet). Locate the third sentence on the page, and then copy down the following three lines.

Using these three lines as the beginning or end of your piece (or inserting them somewhere in the middle), free-write for five to fifteen minutes.

Mystery Addict
Where’s the body?

You wake up one morning to find that a deep crevasse has opened up in front of your house. What do you find inside of it?

Obviously this can go in almost any direction, from the completely mundane to the utterly fantastical. Start free-writing and see where your own mind takes you.

My grandfather, who moved to the United States from Holland when my mother was just a child, had some interesting habits. One of them, apparently, was to keep several gold bars which he buried somewhere on his property. Now and then he would move them from place to place. He grew up in Europe during troubled times—lived there through (and was involved in) both World Wars—so I don’t think keeping this sort of cache is particularly odd for him. However, it makes for a fascinating story, as does the fact that after his death, the bars were never found despite the use of a metal detector around his property. They could be there still (it wasn’t a particularly small property—we’re talking rural Vermont, and his home included a pond and an apple orchard), or maybe he sold them at some point in order to buy items from the companies that kept trying to convince him he’d ‘already won’ this or that sweepstakes. (He was a brilliant man, but that was one of his quirks as he aged—he was very prone to believing those claims.) Regardless of what happened to those bars, it makes a great set-up for any number of stories.

Your story could start with the new family that buys the property and eventually finds Opa’s cache of gold bars. It could center around what he did with those gold bars and why they aren’t on the property any more. It could center around the last years of a fascinating man’s life—the kind of man who would bury gold bars on his property yet fall prey to sweepstakes scams as he passed into his nineties.

By the way, here’s another cool detail about my grandfather: he’s the Dr. Jacobus Rinse mentioned in this article. He was indeed diagnosed with heart troubles in his 50s such that he was given little time to live, and, in a move that was far ahead of his time, he went on to perform research on such things as cholesterol and trans-fats that led him to develop a breakfast formula that helped people worldwide. After that diagnosis he lived to be 94, and even then he died not of natural causes, but when he attempted to save the life of a younger friend who started to drown while swimming in the pond on his property. Right until the end he was walking his own dog and chopping firewood.

So today, write about a grandparent, or someone old enough to be a grandparent. We so often think of the elderly as not terribly interesting, when the exact opposite is true: these are people who’ve lived terribly rich lives and have abundant stories to tell. Try to write a short story that hints at these stories through details (such as the moving gold cache and entering every sweepstakes) without spelling out the person’s history. You might even tell the story through the eyes of that family who subsequently moved into the old man’s house, creating an image of a man without his direct presence.

You can use my grandfather’s details as the basis for your story, use a relative of your own, or make up a fictional character.

Edited to add: I happened to find a brief tale of gold that made me think of this.

I got the idea for today’s exercise when I was reading Bibliolatry’s review of Immortal. The character at the center of this novel is, as the title implies, immortal, but he doesn’t know why. The reviewer spends some entertaining moments pondering what she’d really do with her days if she were immortal, and that led me to this.

Today, imagine you (or a fictional character of your creation) are immortal—you do not age and cannot die of natural causes. You or your character has been alive for at least several hundred years.

Put aside grand plans, twisted plots, and questions of how and why you came to be immortal, and focus on one single day. Wake up at the start of the character’s day, free-write through the course of it, and end at the end of it. What is a typical day like for this immortal?

I’M DEAD
I just wear it well

One great way to pull a reluctant character into all sorts of devious dealings is to spring a family secret on him. Today, choose a character you’ve been working with and brainstorm a secret his family has been keeping from him. This could be a short-term secret of his parents, or a long-term secret that’s been handed down in his family through generations. It could be a horrible shame, a dark fate, or a deep responsibility. What is this secret? Why hasn’t he known about it before now? What effect will it have on his life? Why can he not hide from it?