For the past nine years, I've always looked forward to November for the National Novel Writing Month challenge. Writers all over the world try to nail down a first draft of 50,000 words in 30 days. With the right time management and motivation, it can be easy and breezy. But with creative blocks, lack of motivation or inspiration, or lack of energy, it can seem insurmountable.
I've always been the type of writer that just makes things up as it goes, from page one onward. No outline. No character sheets. No plan. Nowadays this is referred to as "discovery writing," but it's sometimes referred to as "pantsing," as in writing by the seat of your pants. As years have gone on and I have a bunch of messy first drafts that were "pantsed," I find that there is value in outlining at least something. Especially when NaNoWriMo comes around--having a clear outline and detailed plans can made the words fly out the fingers at light speed.
Thus, I've committed myself to joining the local regional group to participate in online exercises designed to help brainstorm and plan for the next big project. For this first session, we went through the steps listed on the NaNo webpage and explored four ways to find an idea.
I kinda have an idea already for what I want to do this November. Instead of something new, I'll probably resurrect an old manuscript and rewrite it to fix a number of issues. In spite of that, these exercises offer little to something where the idea is already developed. However, these prompts did have the benefit of creating some interesting new ideas I could use somewhere else.
Exercise 1: Borrow A Plot
First, write a summary of 3 books or movies or stories you love. Include important characters, major plot turns, and setting.
With no shortage of plot ideas from movies and the few books I've read, I came up with the following examples:
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the novel by PKD, but I dig the movies too). The story of Rick Deckard, a (blade runner?) bounty hunter who's saving up money to buy his own animal. He takes on a job to hunt down four escaped androids and "retire" them.
- Alita: Battle Angel (manga, anime, movie). It's the heart-warming story about a cyborg that's discovered in a trash heap and brought back to life by a doctor, and is named Alita. Though she has no memory of her past, she quickly learns that she has expert combat skills and she becomes a hunter/warrior. A whole bunch of stuff happens that pits her against the city of Zalem and forces her to fight for people she cares about.
- Fahrenheit 451 (the Ray Bradbury novel). The future in which books are burned by government "firemen." Montag is a fireman who becomes disillusioned and finds a companion that shows him the joy of reading books. He inevitably defects.
The next step: choose one of the summaries and start changing around different parts - characters, setting, plot turns, adjectives, verbs, anything else you like! See where those changes take you, and keep writing when you get inspired.
- Rick is saving up money to buy his freedom. To do so, he's given a task to find four aliens and terminate them. But will he?
- A cloned popstar winds up in the sewer and has to get back on her feet. She quickly learns combat skills and she becomes vigilante. She embarks on a mission to find those that wronged her and take revenge.
- In the past, as Rome is sacked, all its books/scrolls are burned. A character discovers the value of knowledge and reading, and seeks out to salvage other texts all over the Mediterranean sea and save them from being destroyed.
I did cheat a little in the sense that the middle one based on Alita is actually the plot of my planned novel. I'd go so far to say that Alita is one of the primary inspirations for it, so it wasn't a stretch to bend that premise to mirror what I've written before. The other ideas, however, I just twisted around as I thought about what would be opposite or different (past instead of the future, aliens instead of androids, and so on). I honestly had the film Agora in mind when I came up with the third idea.
What's cool about this exercise is that I have three possible novel ideas already. The first bullet I came up with can be easily tweaked further to become a more enigmatic, surreal thriller about a guy hunting aliens, then becoming influenced by them. This would fit in perfectly with other works I've conceived, especially since I've been trying to tie them together with the unified mythology of higher beings. The second paragraph is pretty much already there. The third, I see as a possible historic drama or adventure--it would need a ton more research, and it would be beyond my comfort zone, but I see potential.
Exercise 2: Borrow A Character
Invent a history or future for someone. Maybe it’s a friend you lost touch with after college, a teacher you had, a family member you’ve heard stories about, or just someone you’ve seen in photos or on the bus. I’d like to write a novel starring my great-grandmother someday, inspired by the pictures I’ve seen of her (I’ve never really heard anything about her!).
Who is the person that intrigues you? What was their childhood like? What did they dream of? What was their greatest desire? What obstacles did they face? What was their greatest triumph?
I was a little tripped up by this step because I couldn't see how these new characters would fit into the stories I came up with minutes ago. Then I realized they don't have to be connected, they can be imagined and tucked away for another project. Then I spent way too much time trying to pin down a specific person I wanted to base this character off of.
I wound up picking T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia. Not that I'm an expert on the guy's life, but I learned one or two things about him beyond the movie, and I consider him a fascinating figure. With this fellow in mind, I wound up penning this rough sketch for a character by changing a few key details:
- Terry was born in Yorkshire, the year 2078, to a rural family that owned farmland. Terry spent most of his youth dreaming of seeing other lands beyond England, and even into outer space, and he fed his imagination regularly through reading. He wound up graduating from school highly educated with top honors, and he dabbled in all manner of fields concerning archeology, astronomy, history, and academia. Wanting to travel and make a bigger difference in affairs, however, he opts to enter into a military academy and become an officer.
- As it is, Terry has implicit conflicts between his lower-class upbringing and the elitist establishment that surrounds him. It builds up into a kind of mistrust of the system, especially when opportunities are constantly denied. Once he's finally given a chance to deploy to space and interface with an alien culture, he's not expected to succeed. Terry, however, will succeed in bridging a cultural gap and establishing an alliance--one that might threaten the integrity of his military masters, but could benefit mankind in other ways.
And with this I feel there's a potential sci-fi novel in this--one that feels a little like Dune. It's possible I could try and conjoin this with the one story idea about aliens I came up with above. In fact, doing so excites me a little and I can see it becoming a cool new thing. Some of the details in this write-up (especially the English upbringing) can easily be changed to accommodate whatever setting or genre I'd prefer.
Exercise 3: Use The News
Pick an event from the news. Imagine it from the perspective of different people involved with it. So a story about a river flooding might include the single mother driving her two kids on a camping trip, the park ranger called in to help, the farmer who lives down the road. Feel free to use the basics of the news story for inspiration, but make up your own details - change the place, the time, the specifics of the people involved (age, gender identity, personality).
What news stories have stuck with you?
This is 2020. All the news is sticking with me.
COVID-19 is probably the biggest and most obvious thing. Almost too obvious. It wasn't actually the first thing that came to my mind. Neither were the elections or the riots. Of all the issues that the media bombards us with every day, I fell back on one issue I sporadically watched or read about over the past couple of years: homelessness.
It's a very broad topic, but it's hardly uneventful, much less simple. Major cities like Seattle and San Francisco have seen a major increase in the homeless population, and it's become so prominent that tent cities appear beside streets, bringing garbage, disease, crime, and blight close to homes, businesses, and even public buildings. It's become so pronounced that the Bubonic plague has come back in some areas of LA.
To tweak this for a possible story, I took the issue and considered how homelessness could occur in the setting of my old biopunk novel.
- In Cascade City, a rising portion of the population lives in squalor in the southern districts. Labor in the city's factories, refineries, and piers become increasingly rare as automation continues to cut people from manufacturing and logistical processes, while high-profile occupations remain out of reach behind the walled districts of the rich. Those who can't work have no incentive to--with free food given by the city's administration, people take to the tent cities to squabble over places to sleep. Drugs, disease, and violence become rampant. Some are motivated enough to scavenge trash piles or become members of the local mafia, but thousands will never find a way out of poverty.
This is all a pretty grim piece of world-building, some of which already exists in the old draft, but this is a more streamlined conception of it. I suppose that the overall theme of social class divides is an ongoing news story as well, and that's also something baked into the old draft. In a way, this kind of setting falls in line with the trashy, impoverish settings we see in things like Alita or District 9, and like those stories there will probably be some focus on how technology impacts these areas.
Exercise 4: A Whole New World
Scroll through these photos until you find one (or more!) that sparks something for you, then pause and write your questions, wonderings, and ideas.
https://www.roughguides.com/gallery/20-seriously-weird-places-around-the-world/
https://traveltriangle.com/blog/50-weirdest-places-across-the-world/
What kind of place is this? How did it get this way? Who might live or travel through it? How do they feel? What is it like for them there? What challenges do they face?
To be honest, our group didn't even get this far and I haven't had a chance to peruse these galleries. I do have a Pinterest board going for the biopunk story (a work in progress though). Much of this novel is pretty clear in my head anyway.
Looking over the first link now, I'm inclined to single out this photo as a possible inspiration:
- Plugging this into the biopunk novel, it's not too hard to imagine this kind of scenery since the story is set in a world affected by climate change, and the sea levels had risen. And with it, world societies had become ruined, wars happened, and billions of lives were lost. This ruined ship could be one of hundreds littering the bays and harbors where cities once stood, but now have become flooded and overgrown.
- The story specifically takes place in some of the last cities left on the Earth, collectively holding together a billion or so people. They still have the benefits of technology, industrialization, and organized society (albeit it is a controlled elitist rule rife with corruption). Trade still happens among these last cities, with fleets of scrappy merchant ships criss-crossing the ocean daily. Some folks can make an independent living in the open sea by scavenging ruins or harvesting sea life. For the most part though, sunken and overgrown ruins are a common sight on most landmasses. Outside the cities, people just kinda live and work around them. Some become hedonistic, only caring for the comforts and pleasure the cities provide. Others, however, do face the decline of the human race but remain powerless to change it.
- There is even more behind the powers that run the world's last cities. I just won't spoil those details here. But I will say that people struggle to adapt to the changing Earth, so some people believe that mankind itself has to be altered to change with it. Even if this means artificially forcing evolution.
It might not be fair to fall back on some recycled ideas, but the unexpected benefit of this exercise is to organize and streamline the many ideas I've had. Chances are that I'll get them more straightened out in the next draft.
This first session of brainstorming turned out to be quite a bit more fruitful than I imagined, and I wish I could have discovered these kinds of methods earlier. Even if I can't roll all these nuggets into my NaNo project, I will have fodder for possible future works. These techniques can be useful any time of the year.
