Posted by aidan in writing advice, writing process, writing tools | 7 comments

Lateral Thinking for Writers

The term lateral thinking was invented by Edward de Bono in the 1960s.  The basic techniques of lateral thinking involve coming up with new ideas by looking at problems in a different way and by introducing random thought stimulation.

Douglas Adams once talked about how he had got stuck writing The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.  The heroes had just been thrown out of a spaceship and he needed a way of rescuing them.  Given the sheer vastness of space it was exceedingly unlikely that another spaceship would be passing by in time to save Arthur and Ford.  Adams couldn’t think of a plausible solution so he decided to think of it in terms of judo, where you use your opponent’s strength against them.  He used the extreme unlikeliness of a rescue scenario to his advantage and invented the infinite improbability drive, which became a major plot point in the story.

De Bono has written lots of books about the subject that outline a variety of methods for generating ideas.

One of the best books I’ve read on the subject is Michael Michalko’s Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques.
Although many of the examples are aimed at business (how do I think of new ways to market my widgets?) they can be easily adapted to generating new story ideas.

One of the simplest techniques is introducing a random idea and seeing how it relates to your story.  For example, randomly choosing a word from a dictionary.  How does this new word relate to your story?

Brainstormer is a web site and iPhone app that provides random word prompts for writers.

For example, let’s say you were writing a story about a magic sword and wanted to come up with some new ways to make the sword intersesting.  (Stormbringer: the sword that drinks souls, The Misenchanted Sword that once it has been drawn has to kill someone before it can be sheathed).

You spin the dials on Brainstormer and get: Adultery, Americana, dwarf.
Hmmmm… A sword that changes size based on the wielder?  A sword that ended up in a kitsch shop?  A sword that guarantees its wielder will fall in love with the spouse of anyone they kill with the sword?

Another spin produces: Self-sacrifice, Viking, downtown city.
More ideas there.

Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold wrote a great article for the Internet Review of Science Fiction called Tapping the Idea Vein.
They give the situation of taking two words and juxtaposing the ideas associated with them:

Look around the room you’re in right now. Play Sesame Streetin your head. “One of these things is not like the other…” Perhaps something in a photograph or picture on the wall, set alongside the messiest object near you. A picture of a cow and a toner cartridge, for example.

What’s the story there?

Cows symbolize agrarian civilization, food, domestication, leather goods, milk, the American family farm, fertility. A toner cartridge is color (or the soot-black lack thereof, and by extension, Manichean dualism), disposability, the Gillette model of razor marketing, the democratization of print publishing. Now we have two sets of concepts to pair together:

Agrarianism	Color
Food	Blackness
Domestication	Dualism
Leather	Man-made materials
Milk	Marketing innovation
American family farm	Print publishing
Fertility	Disposability

Story titles leap out from this list. “Black Milk.” “Fertile Leather.” “Disposable Fertility.” Likewise ideas, or at least their building blocks. For example, a story set on a book farm. Characters who follow a dualistic religion founded on food groups.

Another technique is reversing the problem.  Perhaps you have a story where the hero’s wife is kidnapped.  A simple reversal would be to have the hero kidnapped and have his wife rescue him instead.  Or perhaps the hero decides to have his wife kidnapped. (Fargo).  Or perhaps the hero is happy his wife has been kidnapped. (Ruthless People).  Or maybe she hasn’t been kidnapped but someone keeps sending him ransom notes. (The Big Lebowski).  Or maybe he finds his wife has kidnapped someone.

Some topics have been written about so often that it’s very hard to generate any new ideas.  Vampires?  The Simpsons had reverse vampires that could only come out during the day.  Try reversing some of the stereotypes.  Vampires are usually portrayed as suave and sexy (Dracula, Interview With the Vampire, etc.) or as monstrous (Nosferatu), but how about fat, white trash vampires?  (Fat White Vampire Blues).

Using lateral thinking can be an excellent way to generate story ideas and solve plot problems.

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Posted by aidan in writing tools | 4 comments

Digital Immortality (the Importance of Backing Up)

Backing up is one of those things that most people think sounds good in theory, but in practice rarely bother about.

When you had to go to the effort of burning things on DVD or even worse backing up stuff on floppy drives or tapes, it was just too much of a hassle for the average computer user.

But if you’ve ever experienced a hard drive crash or had your computer stolen, then in hindsight backing up your computer wouldn’t seem like much of a chore versus the idea of having to rewrite almost your entire novel from scratch.

These days there are a few tools that make backing up easy and quick and well worth the small investment in time it takes to set up.

External USB hard drives are cheap these days.

I use Back2Zip a free program.

http://free-backup.info/back2zip.html

You choose which directories you want to back up, how often you want them backed up, where you want them backed up (e.g external hard drive) and that’s all you have to do.

Later versions of Windows include backup software and many external hard drives come with their own backup software.

There is also the very important issue of having an off-site backup.  A former co-worker of mine (in the days of floppy disks) was fanatical about ensuring his computer was backed up every night.  Unfortunately when his house was broken into, the thieves took his box of disks as well.

There are plenty of sites that offer free online storage space.  You should keep online backups of your documents.  Then if the worst happens, at least you’ll be able to recover your stories.

I use Dropbox.

http://www.dropbox.com

It offers 2GB of free online storage.  There are lots of other choices, but I’ve found Dropbox the most convenient to use.

I’m more technically inclined, so I’ve set up a script file which automatically compresses my documents directory and sends it to my online dropbox storage.  But it’s easy to backup files just by using a file browser, such as Windows explorer.

If you find all of this just a bit technically daunting, then at the very least you can email yourself a copy of your files.  Gmail has more than 7GB of storage, so it can be used as a way of keeping backups of your next award-winning novel.

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Posted by aidan in writing process | 6 comments

Choosing What Not to Read

Two of the most common pieces of advice you’ll hear about writing are:

* Write more

* Read more

I’ve also read many interviews where writers say they no longer have time to keep up with other novels published in their own genre.

Sturgeon’s oft-mentioned law is that 90% of everything is crud.  These days even if you only concentrate on a particular sub-genre (e.g space opera), the amount of reading material available means that the 10% is far more than anyone has the time to read.

In the pre-Internet days it was much harder to get recommendations for books.  Now it only takes a little bit of web surfing to uncover a slew of interesting sounding books.

Add to this the amount of free online material (magazines, blogs, podcasts, discussion forums, etc).

Another factor is that the more serious you get about writing the more likely it is that you’ll make friends with other writers.  It’s only natural to want to support your friends and read their books.

I keep a file on my computer with list of books I want to read.

There are now more than 600 books on that list.

It’s no longer the case where I’ll read a book simply because I want to read it.  I have to want to read it more than I want to read a lot of other books.

I used to decide which book on my bookshelf I wanted to read first, with the understanding I would read the other books later.  I own at least a couple of hundred books I haven’t read.  Given on average I read around 50 books a year, even if I stopped buying books and going to the library, it would take me a few years to clear my backlog of books to read.

With all of the information and book recommendations available online sometimes less can be more.  The more recommendations available, the strength of each particular recommendation can diminish.  They get lost amongst all the noise.  If someone gives you a list of their 100 favorite books how likely is it you’ll read a particular book on that list versus a book they place in your hand and tell you that you have to read?

Another factor I’ve noticed is that once writers are published they tend to read less fiction and read more non-fiction.

If you’re writing science fiction or fantasy it pays to do a lot of technical or historical research.

I’m working on a novel set in a monastery in an alternate-world feudal Japan and so I’ve been reading books about the history of Japan and  a book written by a Japanese salaryman that spent a year studying to be a monk in one of Japan’s strictest Zen monasteries.

The amount of available reading material has also changed how I read.  I’m a lot less patient.  If a short story hasn’t grabbed me by the first page I move on to something else.  I’m quite happy skimming non-fiction books looking for the parts that interest me.

I’ve also noticed I’m less inclined to read novels by authors I’ve read before.

One of the reasons I read is to encounter new ideas (hence my preferences for science fiction, fantasy and non-fiction).

Of course I still try and read books by my favorite authors.  But if I enjoyed a novel by an author and it’s not one of my favorite books, well maybe I’m more likely to try something from a new author I’ve heard good things about.

There is also the consideration of timing.

Controversial new books (especially non-fiction) can get bumped up my reading list, because it’s fun to read them while others are discussing them.  There’s also the sense of not wanting to be excluded from the conversation when people are talking about books that have made a big impact, such as Harry Potter.  But it would still take a lot more than that to get me interested in reading the Twilight books though.

What you’re currently writing can also influence your choice of fiction reading.
Some writers don’t like to read works in the same genre as they’re working on because they feel they might be influenced too much.

I’ve noticed it can be distracting for me to read works in a different genre from the one I’m working on.  If I read a great dystopian monkey comedy of manners novel, that makes me want to stop my current project and write my own dystopian monkey comedy of manners.

How do you decide what you’re going to read?

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Posted by aidan in reviews, writing advice | 0 comments

Writing the Breakout Novel

I recently finished reading Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel.

Maass is an author and literary agent and the book has lots of practical and useful advice on how to make your book more readable.

The book concentrates on the key parts of successful books: premise, stakes, setting, characters, viewpoint and themes.

Salon recently published an article on a reader’s advice to writers.  This was a response to the recent Guardian article on writers giving writing advice.  The Salon article contained some similar ideas to those in Maass’ book, such as making your characters want something.

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/02/23/readers_advice_to_writers/

A few commenters on the web site criticised this advice, accusing the article of just promoting formula fiction.

Similar accusations have been labelled at Maass’ book.

But this is missing the point.  Even if you’re writing the most literary of books, it helps to make your characters and settting more interesting.

Maass doesn’t advocate writing cliched books.  He argues against the idea that anything that is widely commercial successful is badly written.  While some recent bestsellers might not have the most engaging of characters, at the very least they’re able to maintain the tension and conflict enough to keep a lot of people interested.

The book was published in 2001 and while the overwhelming majority of advice is still relevant for writers, it’s interesting to note where the book has dated. When talking about how to make thrillers exciting and convincing Maass writes:

Easiest of all to make convincing are military foes, geological disasters, bad medicine, serial killers and courtroom justice. These threats are better understood, more widely documented and are more commonly experience [sic] by the public. You or I could fall victim to any one of them. In contrast, we are not terribly likely to be hurt by drug cartels, Middle Eastern terrorists or militia-type isolationists. As sources of potential disaster, they do not inspire visceral fear.

The book also has a couple of amusing typos:

Janellen and Bowie’s love transcends pubic pressures, a strength that Lara and Key must learn.

One of the suggestions for trying to find the focus of your book is to imagine that for one reason or another you can only write 10 pages on your novel.  What part of your novel would you choose to write about?  Then condense these 10 pages down to a single page and Maass suggests you might have a better idea of your novel’s key themes.

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Posted by aidan in writing advice | 0 comments

Advice on Writing Query Letters

The Top Ten Query Mistakes
http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2010/02/top-ten-query-mistakes.html

What You Need Before Your Query
http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-you-need-before-you-query.html

The Batch Querying Theory
http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2010/02/batch-querying-theory.html

Querying When You’ve Written a Trilogy
http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2010/01/writing-series-and-trilogies.html

Non-Fiction Book Proposals
http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-is-book-proposal-for-nonfiction.html

Query Shark: How To Write Query Letters…or really, how to revise query letters so they actually work
http://queryshark.blogspot.com/

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