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.
Read MorePosted 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.
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.
Read MorePosted by aidan in writing process, writing tools | 4 comments
Distraction Free Writing
Cory Doctorow has made the point that although many people complain about being unable to read a novel on a computer, these days most people are comfortable reading equivalent amounts of text on web sites. One of the problems with reading a novel on a computer is that there are a lot of other distractions. Email, instant messaging, games and web surfing. The same is true with writing.
There are many times I’ve sat down at my computer with the aim of putting in a solid hour of writing to find that after ten minutes I’m reading web sites. When I had a dialup modem, it wasn’t as much as issue. But with a wireless connection, the Internet is always there.
Some writers such as Charles Stross use a dedicated computer just for writing (no games installed and limited net connectivity). Jeff VanderMeer goes so far as to ask his wife to hide the modem and not to reveal its location until he’s completed a certain amount of writing.
Another solution to this problem is to turn off instant messaging programs and email notifications and hide the icons for web browsers. There are a few free programs that offer full screen editing mode. Sure you can always switch tasks and check your email, but the fact that the web browser is hidden from view does make a difference.
Most of the programs available are simple text editors. You probably wouldn’t want to keep your main story document in there. After you’ve completed your set writing time, just copy and paste the text into your main file.
Q10
Q10 is a free fullscreen text editor for Windows. It’s default sound options makes it sound as though you’re typing on an old-fashioned keyboard. (Of course you can turn this off). It also has a useful alarm option. Just choose a set writing time (e.g an hour) and then the program will let you know when your time is up and how many words you produced).
http://www.baara.com/q10/
CreaWriter
CreaWriter is a another free Windows fullscreen text editor. It allows you to choose your own background. The default sound that comes with the program is incredibly annoying. I’m sure turning that off is the first thing that most people do.
http://www.creawriter.com/
DarkRoom
DarkRoom is a similar free Windows program.
http://they.misled.us/dark-room
WriteRoom
For the Mac, there’s WriteRoom, a paid product.
http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom
DarkCopy
If you don’t want to worry about installing software, there’s a web site that offers a simple full screen editor (although it won’t hide your Windows taskbar unless you have set your taskbar to auto-hide).
http://darkcopy.com/
Posted by aidan in writing tools | 0 comments
Using Text to Speech
When you’ve just written something it’s hard to get a distance from it. Typos are easy to miss.
The best way to distance yourself from your work is to put it aside for a while. But if you have a deadline then sometimes this isn’t an option.
Ben mentioned in an earlier post about ways to get some fresh perspective on a story – changing the formatting of the story (printing it out with a different font or color) and using text to speech programs. If you listen to your story, you’ll notice things you might not have picked up on if you just reread it.
Text to speech programs have improved in recent years and some of them sound reasonably natural. (They’ll still struggle with foreign words and names).
The ATT web site can only convert a small amount of text, so it’s not much good for reading entire stories. But it gives you an example of the capability of modern text to speech.
ATT Research Labs (It has a 300 character limit)
http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
Natural Reader
http://www.naturalreaders.com/
Natural Reader have both free and professional versions for Windows and Mac. The free version only includes one voice and it sounds pretty mechanical.
TextAloud
Windows software with a variety of options and voices.
4 writers.
1 long haul.
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