This morning I reviewed Sarah Strohmeyer’s wonderful book The Sleeping Beauty Proposal. One of the nifty things about that book is the way in which Strohmeyer takes the concept of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ tale and applies it to modern-day life:

“For the last four years,” she explained, “your life has been on hold. You haven’t grown or changed or anything. You’ve just been washing Hugh’s socks and doing his bidding, waiting for him to ask you to be his wife so you can start your life. …

“You remind me of that idiot Sleeping Beauty, lying around like a zoned-out zombie waiting for your prince. Well, guess what, he rode right past your castle tonight and now you have a choice—you can either go back to bed or you can wake up.”

Take another fairy tale and apply its basic concept to a modern-day relationship (romantic or otherwise). Take any approach you like, from literal to figurative, from physical to psychological. Try to do at least something interesting and ‘different’ with it. You can free-write your ideas on one side of a sheet of paper, brainstorm a story, start free-writing a piece of fiction, free-write an essay on the relationship between your chosen fairy tale and modern-day relationships, or anything else that occurs to you.

Mystery Addict

One thing that fascinates me is discovering that what seems like a simple plot idea has been turned into an entire mini-genre of its own. I’m still agog at the wealth of Scottish Highlands time travel romances out there—who knew authors could come up with book after book from the idea?

Today, create or choose what seems to you like a basic plot idea, seemingly too narrow to be a genre or sub-genre. Then spent 20 minutes brainstorming different ways to approach that idea, such that by the time you’re done you hopefully have a whole list of book ideas, as though the plot had become a genre.

This kind of flexibility and expansion exercise can be very helpful when you’re looking at commercial outlets for your work.

Today, from Freelance Folder’s 7 can’t-miss ways to kick-start the writing habit:

Write nothing but headlines. Sometimes the thought of writing an in-depth article is too much for your brain to deal with after a long day (or at the start of one). Spend 15 or 30 minutes just churning out headlines without worrying about how catchy they sound.

So today, write headlines. You might choose an area to write headlines in beforehand (sports, local news, fashion, parenting, pets, farming, health, science) or just go crazy. Check out the above link for more ideas! Or go on and read more of Freelance Folder for plenty of ideas that span the wider world of freelancing.

Still looking for my muse

I was over at Two-Fisted Freelancing Tales and stumbled across an awesome discussion of the Coen brothers’ movies. I got distracted, however, by the following:

[T]he scene starts in a suburban living room containing a man in an iron lung and ends with Walter destroying a sports car with a golf club while screaming, “This is what happens when you f* a stranger in the a*!!!!” (Or as the censored version on Comedy Central would have it, “This is what happens when you meet a stranger in the Alps!!!”)

Normally the nonsequitors used in place of profanities when the censors get hold of a movie just make me roll my eyes, but this one is hilarious in its own right, just because it’s so silly. So today, pick a book or movie that has some profanities in it (if you try to avoid particularly profane reading material, you can always pick one whose profanities are very mild) and find creative and entertaining ways to ‘censor’ them. Do this to at least three separate profanities (if you can’t find a page with multiple profanities on it, pick non-contiguous paragraphs). Try to free-write possible replacements in list form, then go back afterward and pick the most interesting or entertaining results.

Imagine that you wanted to write more than one book on the same topic, and had to figure out a way to legitimately stretch the topic out over multiple volumes while making sure readers feel they’re getting their money’s worth. First, pick a topic that you know something about. You don’t have to be an expert, but you should at least be moderately well-versed in it, and capable of researching what you don’t know. Brainstorm the various sub-topics you might tackle, the kind of mileage you could get from them, and how many books you might be able to stretch them out across.

This morning I came across 50 Writing Ideas I Couldn’t Find on Another List. There are definitely some unusual suggestions there! Today, pick one at random, pick one that inspires you, or, if you need help choosing, try the following, which is one of my favorites from the list:

11. Write a review of a book that hasn’t been written.

Another article from that same blog that you could use is 5 simple ways to get out of a blog writing pickle. Coming up with ideas for writing in your blog can be very similar to looking for ideas for writers’ exercises.

I recently started reading & reviewing titles from J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts’s ‘in death’ series, starting with a random book in the middle, going back to the first book, and then leaping forward to the most recent release. Each book in the series has a title that fits into a certain format (Naked in Death, Memory in Death, Strangers in Death), with the variant word having something directly to do with the mystery at the heart of that particular installment in the series. This is a popular format for the titles within an extended series of books because it makes it easy for readers to know that a given book fits into the series they know and love.

Today, come up with your own base title format that could be used in this manner. It doesn’t have to be for a mystery series—it could be for any genre you prefer, or even a non-fiction series. Then brainstorm at least five different variations on the title and a quick summary of what each one would be about.

Quick! Without thinking, pick one of the choices in each of the following sets (or some subset thereof), and then write a paragraph as to why you chose each one:

• Ninja, or pirate?
• Glass, or plastic?
• Hardwood, or carpet?
• Plastic, or paper?
• Chocolate, or vanilla?
• Television, or books?

In the spirit of Bill James’s Wolves of Memory, here’s a particularly tricky exercise for you today. In my review of that book I said:

Bill James fascinates me as an author. He does several things I’m not accustomed to seeing and makes them work so beautifully it’s amazing to behold. Very few things actually seem to happen in his books, and yet it doesn’t matter. Most of the story takes place in people’s heads. Even action-filled events are told as recollections, something that in most authors’ hands would rob them of their power and energy. And yet what really drives James’s books are the internal workings of the characters, who are so fascinating that you don’t mind and even vastly prefer spending whole chapters inside their oh-so-bizarre heads.

Today, write a full page of internal monologue from the point of view of a fictional character (preferably one of your own, but you could use another author’s character if you don’t have one of your own to work with). Try to make it quirky, memorable and fascinating. Try to make it say a lot about the character without simply droning on about the character directly.

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!