Humour - like romance, like drama, like excitement - needs boundaries. It needs rules, lines, differences, be they social (as in Fawlty Towers), cultural (Borat), gender-based (Tootsie) or moral. As in sex.

This, arguably, is a primary purpose of organised religion. In giving us rules to break it lets us sustain into adulthood a child’s delight in naughtiness. Childish, sure, and deeply, almost definitively human, the urge to transgress is also a constant, renewable source of creative energy.

And the more forbidden the sex - the more illicit, immoral or commercial - the greater the potential excitement, creativity and fun.

The above entertaining quote comes from this opinion piece on legalization of the sex industry in The Sydney Morning Herald by Elizabeth Farrelly. In this case, however, I’m more interested in it for its statements regarding creativity, energy, and humor. Today, write about the subject of boundaries, mores, morals, and their relationship to creativity. How do you think a culture’s mores relate to the creative output of that culture’s people?

Today, write an over-the-top ad, article or essay enthusing about a new fad diet. Make up the diet to go with it, and it can be as strange or bizarre as you like. Try to sound as ‘real’ as possible while piling up stranger and stranger suggestions and/or claims. What unexpected conditions will this diet cure? What odious personal habits will disappear when you follow the diet’s dictates? What foods must you eat or avoid and why? How will this affect your body and mind? The exercise is to be as convincing as possible about as strange and unlikely a practice as possible. This will certainly exercise your ability to be believable on paper!

There are so many things we don’t understand or don’t know about the world, and we’re so accustomed to seeing them and not knowing them that we forget to question them. Children ask those questions—”Why is the sky blue, dad?”—but as they grow older they almost always stop. This morning I reviewed Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison. It’s a compilation of column entries from Outside Magazine, in which people write in with the silly, everyday, weird, ridiculous, stupid, or seemingly obvious questions we all forget to ask, and the magazines editors track down the experts who can answer them.

The ability to ask questions everyone else has forgotten is an extremely valuable trait for a writer. Take a look at the review linked to above and note the types of questions asked and answered in the book. Then take a walk around your house, your workplace, your neighborhood, the woods, a business, or any other place and make a list of basic questions you don’t know the answer to. Make it as long as possible; try to at least fill up a sheet of paper.

Being able to come up with questions is, if anything, more important than answering them when trying to train your mind and eyes. However, if you want to take this a step further, answer these questions. Come up with your own creative, fictional answers, research the real ones—whatever you’d like. The former is more useful as a world-building exercise for fiction writers, while the latter makes a great exercise for nonfiction freelancers looking for inspiration for articles.

One popular form of question you’ll find in memes, online quizzes, and some exercises is: “If you could be any [fill-in-the-blank], what would it be?” Possible types with which to fill in that blank range from serious to incredibly silly, and might include:

• color
• ice cream
• historical figure
• world leader
• cocktail
• flower
• movie

Today, turn this into a two-part exercise. Both ask and answer this question: fill in the bank with your own word or type that you think might lead to something interesting, and then answer it. You can use this as a journaling exercise or answer it on behalf of one or more of your fictional characters.

For all that this has become a quick question tossed out in memes and quizzes, the results can sometimes be interesting, particularly if you delve into “And why?” instead of answering with a phrase, name, or word.

Writers hang around shady characters

Over at the Booking Through Thursday site you’ll find a weekly question about how, when, and why you read. Pick one today—it doesn’t have to be the current question—and journal about it. The folks who participate weekly often write just a paragraph or three, particularly as it’s a blogging meme, but for the purposes of journaling, try to fill one side of a sheet of paper. Either that, or commit to using it as a weekly blog prompt for at least one month, and each week check out at least five other bloggers’ answers to see what other people do in comparison to you.

Here’s another round of a few questions you can ask of one of your fictional characters to help you flesh him or her out a bit more. The number you decide to answer will probably depend on how much detail you go into—the more inspiration you find in a single question, the fewer you need to explore on the whole.

• Bravery: How does your character define bravery? Does he see himself as brave?
• Brat: Who’s the most bratty person your character knows, and what’s her relationship with him?
• Baffle: Write a list of things that confuse and baffle your character.
• Bulldoze: If someone tried to run roughshod over your character, figuratively bulldozing him out of her way, what would he do? Write about a scenario in which this happens.

As I’ve noted before, I like having a wide variety of questions to choose from simply because you probably want to answer different questions for each character you explore, and you might find one question inspiring but not another. However, I don’t recommend trying to answer a huge number of questions for a single character—you can end up burning yourself out on the character before you get to your actual writing! Just pick a few highlights and use those. Even one or two good questions can teach you a lot about a character.

If you prefer to write non-fiction rather than fiction, always feel free to ask character-building questions of yourself and journal about the answers.

Not long ago I found a post on George RR Martin Defends Genre on the Reading is My Superpower blog. My review of Robert Masello’s Bestiary this morning made me think of it.

First, here are a few brief thoughts of my own regarding genre so you’ll have some context:

• Genre can be a handy convention for matching books to readers. If you know you prefer fantasy or romance, genre is what lets you go to a particular part of the store and know you’re likely to find books you’ll enjoy there.
• Genre, to me, has only minor implications regarding quality, and those are not causative. By that I mean there’s no inherent reason for, say, a romance or a fantasy novel to be in any way inferior to something described as ‘literary.’ Any qualitative limitations are a result of two things in my mind: the market, and the evolution of the genre. If a genre is young and undeveloped, then the taste for it won’t have evolved yet, and the knowledge of how to write it well won’t have evolved yet. Also, if there’s a huge demand for novels of a particular genre then they tend to get rushed out to press, often with less thought to quality overall.
• Genre is a slippery thing. It has no exact definitions; everyone will set the boundaries of what constitutes a romance or a thriller a little differently. I like this—after all, the only way to work with exact definitions is to work with very formulaic material. The fact that genre is so slippery just means to me that genre writers are branching past the early formulas that got put in place to define their genres.
• There are certain expectations, however, regarding genre once you start a work. I’m not speaking of formulas such as the ones I referred to in the last point. I’m speaking of the expectation that, for example, you won’t suddenly and unexpectedly change genres in the middle of a book with no warning. Your perfectly normal mystery won’t become a paranormal thriller three hundred pages in, and so on.

That last point is the one I want to talk about this morning. In Bestiary, Masello didn’t seem to have a good handle on his genre. The book was kind of paranormal, and kind of not, and kind of thriller, and kind of not, and it bounced back and forth between these things in confusing and inelegant ways. There are authors who can make the sudden genre-shifting revelation work, but they’re few and far between, and it isn’t a wise thing to try if you can avoid it. In this case there was very little reason for confusing the genre—it didn’t add to the book at all and certainly subtracted from it—so the author would have been better off, in my opinion, keeping a more consistent genre-feel.

Today, pick up a genre novel you’ve read recently (or go read one) and pay attention to how the author conveys the genre throughout the book. How does he give you a sense for the genre right off the bat? How does he bolster that feel throughout the book? How does he make the various plots and characters feel appropriate to it?

Never let anyone tell you that this has to boil down to some sort of formula. However, you do need to work to consistently convey your world and its feel throughout your story. That’s a much larger thing than simply genre, but genre is an integral and important part of it.

‘True ease in writing
comes from art not chance.’
—Alexander Pope

Here’s another round of a few questions you can ask of one of your fictional characters to help you flesh him or her out a bit more. The number you decide to answer will probably depend on how much detail you go into—the more inspiration you find in a single question, the fewer you need to explore on the whole.

• Altars: What are the most private and personal day-to-day expressions of religion or spirituality in your character’s life?
• Alterations: What changes would your character most like to make to his or her daily life?
• Acids: What has the greatest ability to eat away at your character’s strength or resolve?
• Application: What motivation best serves to convince your character to apply him- or herself most fully to a task?

  Any evocative word can serve as a starting point for such explorations; you can always open a dictionary to a random page in order to look for more. I like having a wide variety of questions to choose from simply because you probably want to answer different questions for each character you explore, and you might find one question inspiring but not another. However, I don’t recommend trying to answer a huge number of questions for a single character—you can end up burning yourself out on the character before you get to your actual writing! Just pick a few highlights and use those. Even one or two good questions can teach you a lot about a character.

  If you prefer to write non-fiction rather than fiction, always feel free to ask character-building questions of yourself and journal about the answers.

The next time you read a book or story that you really don’t like (or, if you can think of one you read recently or remember well, go ahead and use that), sit down and fill at least two sides of a sheet of paper (or set a timer for 15-30 minutes) and dissect not just what you didn’t like about it, but how you would go about improving on it.

If you think the characters are flat, how would you make them interesting? If the characters take actions to further the plot that make no sense for them, how would you alter the plot or create a justification for those actions? If the author brought up a plot point and then dropped it again without resolution, how would you either excise that plot or, better yet, bring it full circle and complete it? If the book’s climax lacks punch, how would you amp up the tension? If the pacing of the action is off, how would you improve it?

These are the sorts of things it can be difficult to do to your own work because you’re so close to it and have difficulty seeing it from any sort of distance. Sometimes it’s much easier to learn on other people’s work and then apply the same techniques to your own. A great way to do this is through critique groups or workshops, but if you don’t have access to those, you can try this method instead.

This morning I discovered a site called Disgraceland, PRC. To quote from the page,

Once upon a time in a land called Xi Pu, just west of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in the People’s Republic of China, there was a tourist theme park… The World Landscape Park. As a business venture it failed, and today the park lies abandoned and decaying. Personally, I think it’s a lot more interesting this way than it could ever possibly have been when it was open.

The site is filled with a series of curious photographs of this unusual place, including such oddities as banyan trees built of concrete and rebar(!), and of course the requisite irreverent commentary. The place is largely deserted, a sort of cultural ghost town, and contains some fairly strange sights, such as the following:

The accompanying commentary reads,

The Tomb of the Unknown Exhibit. What was it? Where did it go, and how, and why? Is this proof of ancient astronauts visiting the Earth and taking home souvenirs?

Today, narrate your own walk-through of a derelict theme park meant to represent cultures from around the world. Here are some options you might take:

• If you have artistic talent, sketch the exhibits instead of just narrating them. Or, collect images from the internet and use them.
• Use either the real world or a fictional one. Pick a particular culture to view the world’s cultures through the eyes of.
• Be totally serious or completely tongue-in-cheek—your choice.

Word Nerd