[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.
Next time you find yourself having trouble solving a literary problem in your writing, use colors to help you brainstorm an answer.
Say you find yourself uncertain how your main character will get out of a seemingly hopeless situation. What would a purple solution to the problem be? Purple might lead you to think of royalty, twilight, grandmothers, or magic, any of which could suggest a solution. If that color doesn’t work, move on to the next. You can go through the colors in order, or pick one at random.
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.
Today’s Booking through Thursday meme encourages book bloggers to think about what book(s) they would want to change and how if they wielded the editor’s pen. I can certainly understand the various people who felt that they couldn’t answer that, that by suggesting changes to a book they’d be turning it into a different book. However, I have a different take on that.
First, a good editor knows how to suggest changes that work with the author’s style and voice. Even the best writer needs a good editor, because a writer is generally too close to his or her work to see the holes and problems. Having someone make suggestions for changes doesn’t somehow rip it out of the author’s control; a good author will weigh others’ suggestions and opinions and decide what will work best for his project.
Second, the kind of strong imagination it takes to come up with alternate versions of an existing story is the same kind of strong imagination it takes to create your own stories. If you’re too busy telling yourself that your opinion of what could be changed in a piece of writing isn’t worth anything, then you’ll never learn how to write good material of your own.
So today, do the BTT meme. Pick a book in your chosen field of writing that you weren’t entirely happy with, and detail as precisely as possible how you would change it. Try to make those ideas suit the style, voice, and structure of the existing piece of writing as much as possible.
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:
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.
Many writers advocate judicious eavesdropping on others’ conversations as a means to gain inspiration. This morning I stumbled across a blog called Eavesdrop Writer that’s all about this particular form of inspiration. Today, visit that site and pick a conversation from those related on the front page. Use it as part of a longer scene, or use it to inspire one or more characters who might have uttered those bits of dialogue.
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.
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.
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.
