Category Archives: Kickstart Your Writing

Kickstart your writing: Generate it until you make it

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We all have periods where our inspiration dries up. Sometimes a long walk, a good book, or a hot shower can help rev our brains back up again. Sometimes none of those things work.

When you just wish you could write something, anything, I humbly suggest using a plot generator.

Plot generators are pretty much a dime a dozen, but here are a few favorites.

Archetype Writing’s Plot Generator a straightforward gen, includes a first idea and a line about a secondary character.
Evil Overlord Plot Generator is Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s delightfully silly SFF generator, which is based on “advice” for the main and secondary characters, and includes 3 “Murphy’s Laws of Combat”. After refreshing a few times, my current favorite Murphy’s is: If you can’t remember where you put it, the claymore is pointed at you. So true, Teresa. So true.
Seventh Sanctum has a whole directory of generators.
…and for when you don’t need plot help so much as name generation or a character building aide, Manon’s Serendipity directory takes prompting in a whole new direction.

Now the obvious temptation with generators is to just keep refreshing and giggling at the results, but exert a little control, remind yourself why you’re at the computer in the first place, and take the first prompt you get.

Seriously, no matter how crazy or “not you” it is.

Because, having a plot prompt be “not you” is a GOOD thing. It’ll make you stretch your limits, and help shake up the stymieing idea that everything you write has to be beautiful, genius, and SRS BSNS.

And even if you don’t like the results, at least you know you CAN write about a discontented secretary and her obsessive love for Post-Its. Or, it could end up being the most beautiful thing you’ve ever written. Whatever, you don’t know until you try. So take your prompt, set the alarm on your phone, and write for 10 minutes. Free-associate. Stray from the prompt, even. Just keep going. If, after 10 minutes, you really can’t squeeze anything out, refresh for another prompt and repeat the process.

If, after two attempts, you’re still not having any fun, it may be time to go load the dishwasher or something. But hey, you just wrote for 20 minutes, and when it comes to writer’s block, movement is everything.

What To Do When You Don’t Know What Happens Next

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This week the PLC is recycling some of our favorite posts, so as to spend more time with our families. Happy Holidays to all, and we’ll be back live next week.

Some writers are born outliners, start to finish. These lucky folks don’t understand why everyone doesn’t do it this way. I’d outline if I could, but my left brain is so shriveled it’s more like a tumor on my right brain. I often know my beginning and ending, but I have trouble with those murky middles. Here’s what I suggest for those troubling times when you‘re stuck somewhere between point A and point B.

Talk about it with someone who understands you, someone who has read a lot of your writing. This might be a sibling or spouse. In my case, it’s my best friend. Whenever I get so garbled I don’t know what I’m trying to say anymore, I go over to her place and we hash it out on the back porch. As in critique, another set of eyes may see what you are missing.

Ask the character themselves. Sure, you might be used to hearing voices talk in your head, but this time bring the conversation to them. Get out a notepad and ask your protagonist what he thinks and feels about what just happened to him, what he wants to do about it, and if that is the same as what he is actually going to do. My characters always take prodding before they spill the beans, and sometimes they get rude, but if you’re persistent they’ll tell you what you need to know (and probably a bunch of other stuff that you weren’t looking for but may be of use).

Draw an arc and plot the chapters you know. Here’s a generic example of a half-plotted arc below.

Now work backwards and forwards, using logic to fill in the blanks, until you know every twist and turn in Thor’s epic quest for his teddy. This method is how I most recently unstuck myself, but each trick has its place for me. Sometimes I graph, sometimes I chat with my friend, and sometimes I interview the people in my head.

So those are my tricks, but I’m always looking for more. What do you do, when you don’t know what happens next? Drop a comment and share some insight into your own creative process.

(originally posted Jan 25, 2010)

Plotting for Pantsers

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To plot or to pants-it, that is the question. Or, can you be both a plotter and a pantser? That’s another question.

I think all writers naturally gravitate towards one or the other, but I would argue that a middle-of-the-road approach is best. How to do that? Well, I can’t speak for Plotters, but I can offer some thoughts on how a Pantser can plot without doing all that full-outline-with-notecards jazz. Honestly that stuff fills me with befuddlement. I know it’s a successful tack to take. But it’s just not how my mind works. I start writing a story because I get a flash of something- a scene, a person, or sometimes a voice speaking directly in my head.

Whenever I get stuck, writing the same scene over and over to my dissatisfaction, it’s because I’m not listening hard enough to the voices. Whenever I get lost, it’s because I don’t know where I’m going anymore, and the voices don’t either. Stuck and lost feel similar, but they’re not the same thing at all.

In either case, this is the point where I need to morph into a plotter, or the story will die on the page. I’ve developed some weird moves that work for me. If you’re a pantser they might work for you too. If you’re a plotter, you might try them instead just to see what happens.

plotting gone awry

When Stuck: I get a spiral bound notebook and “call the characters into my office.”

Basically I do a character interview, but instead of the one-on-one getting-to-know you questions one usually asks when writing a character interview, I ask everyone involved in the sticky scene directly: what’s wrong? Usually they tell me right away what I’m doing wrong, and what should happen instead. Sometimes they call me names too, but I don’t mind a little sassing, as long as I put down the pen knowing exactly what to do next.

When Lost: I sit down and ask myself some questions: What is this story about? What needs to happen? How can I create a narrative arc?

I’ll then do some brainstorming and create an extremely brief outline that gets me where I need to go. I write just enough so that I can look back on my notes later and remember what I was thinking about, but not so much that it kills my energy. Usually just a phrase per scene, or a line of dialogue that pops into my head while I’m brainstorming.

For me, taking a step back and talking myself through the plot allows me to run through many different ideas, discarding what doesn’t feel right without spending too much time with any given thought. And having a pow-wow with my characters directly is just another way to tap into the creative subconscious, putting me back in the pantsing groove. It’s not a lot, but it’s just enough of a push to get me where I need to go.

3 Tips to Make Your Writing Stronger

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This week’s 3 Things… theme is 3 Things I wish I’d known then. Here are three pieces of advice on writing I wish I had understood as a wee moppet with 12 point Courier twinkling in my eyes.


Cutting is Not Losing. You write your novel. You print it, read it, and realize something doesn’t work. An entire subplot doesn’t work. Maybe 10,000 whole words don’t work.

I used to cling to those smelly scenes, unable to “waste” my work by such merciless cutting. But here’s the thing:  Serious cutting doesn’t make your work disappear. Every word you write is a step in the right direction. Every word you write makes you a better writer. Being able to see that something doesn’t work just means you’re a better writer now than you were when you first wrote that storyline. Cutting 10,000 words that don’t work isn’t a loss. It’s a gain.


Take Tiny Bites. Writing a novel, revising a novel, these are huge projects. They can be overwhelming. And when you have a lot of work on your plate, it can send you into a tailspin.

I used to let the sheer enormity of my own ambition overwhelm me, sending me straight into writer’s-block-land. But I have found if I tighten the scope of what I need to do on any given day, my project becomes much less intimidating. Don’t worry about the next 50,000 words. Only worry about the next scene. One scene a day. Start with that, and you’ll find yourself doing more.

Don’t Use The First Idea. This advice came to me from the incomparable Jim Sallis. Once I really understood it, it became one of the most valuable pieces of writing advice I have ever received. Our first impulse is often generic. So don’t use it. I’m not talking about those brilliant-gut flashes you get, I’m talking about everyday writing-work.

Here’s an example:

One of the characters in my current work in progress is a servant. She was caught doing something wrong and was to be punished by her master. I thought I would have her whipped. Because when I did something very wrong as a child I would get a spanking.

I started to write the scene. As I wrote I realized a whipping would be boring. Everyday. So I stopped. I thought about my setting (a bedroom), thought about the disciplinarian (a power-hungry sadist), and I thought about my servant and what would hurt her the most. What I wrote instead of the whipping surprised me. It wasn’t obvious. It made me sick to my stomach afterward.

And every time I read that scene now, I get chills.

So what about you? What do you know now as a writer that you wish you’d known then? I’d love to hear it.

Tomorrow’s Guest Spot Tuesday at the PLC: an interview with Alan DeNiro, author of Total Oblivion, More or Less and Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead.

The Chopping Block: Find your Beginning, Make it Pop

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The Chopping Block is a multi-part series on how to lower your word count without losing everything. This is Part One of the series.

So you’ve finished your first draft. Congratulations! It’s 120,000 words long. You’re a monster, a marathoner! They call you Steelfingers, baby! 120k of blood, sweat and tears… and you know that as a brand new author you really ought to get it down to around 100k before you shop it. What to do? Do you start hacking away description and dialogue? Wait a minute, before you get out the axe.

Look at your story arc. What is the story really about? To figure that out, write your hook- your one line sentence that you’d put in a query or use for an elevator pitch. Yes, it’s a bear. Do it anyway. (You can read more about hooks here and here.) So, now that you know what your story is about, did you open in the right place?

Are you sure?

It’s pretty common for first draft stories to not really begin until the second or even third chapter. The first chapters are muddling around, setting things up, chock full of expository chunks that mean nothing to the reader. For example, my first draft of my first chapter involved my protagonist looking out the window at the moon and thinking about stuff while she waited for the right moment to make her play.

Looking out a window. Thinking. About Stuff. Yup. Cue the sad trombone.

I knew something was wrong, but I just couldn’t let go of my moon-musings. The reader needed all that information to understand my fantasy setting, dammit! So I trimmed and tinkered and farted about without ever losing the flat, passive feel of my opening. Finally I asked for help from someone who writes better than I do. He said, (and I’m paraphrasing)

“You’re starting in the wrong place. Start with her flight, her fear. Be visceral with your physical details, be brief when you explain the stakes. And then, once I am invested in her, do a jump cut and take me back.”

A jump cut. It never, in a million years, would have occurred to me to use a jump cut. I ended up killing the whole thing and rewriting it from scratch. Once I did this, I lost about 5 pages of flab and gained a dynamic opening.

So take a hard look at your opening chapters and find that moment of action, that moment where everything comes together (or starts falling apart). It might be page two, it might be page twenty. Cut everything that comes before it and drop it into it’s own document. Now you can fish from that new document to add in backstory later throughout the novel, you can use it as a jump cut, or you can get spartan and just close it without saving.

The last way really is best. After all there are thousands of words between you and the writer you were when you wrote those first sentences. You’re much, much better now. Thousands of words better, in fact. So don’t make a sacred cow of your opening. Chances are it’s more fat than meat anyway.

Next time on The Chopping Block, I’ll be talking about housekeeping scenes.

Fight Club, Epic Fantasy Style

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I love a good fight.

Writing realistic fight scenes can be hard. I suspect this is why so few of us do them well, and when they are done well, ala Joe Abercrombie, everyone talks about it. (If you like your fantasy bloody and haven’t read any Abercrombie yet, do yourself a favor and pick up The Blade Itself.)

I’ve heard not to describe a fight in too much detail, because a real fight moves too fast. And I agree- but as I am revising The Iron Key, I see that my own trend is to underwrite the scene. I think that a crucial fight scene should take at least a page. And I do alright with fisticuffs, because I’ve done a (very) little sparring in my time. But throw in an actual fantasy weapon? Problematic. And a two-blow-and-camera-pans-out fight scene wasn’t the kind of scene I wanted to write.

Part of my problem with the fight scene in question was that I wasn’t using a sword as a primary weapon. My fighter, Wilhem Imbrel, is a priest in a death cult. I wanted him to have a scythe-like polearm as a primary weapon, as well as the usual sword and dagger kit. Wil usually fights alone, so a polearm, like a stave, would give him advantage of reach.

I initially hopped onto Wikipedia (everyone’s favorite pretend research device) and clicked through Glaives and and Halberds, Fauchards and Spetums. Wikipedia gave me a photo and the history of each weapon, but didn’t really edify me as to practical application. Nothing I saw was quite right, so I invented my own weapon, something between a Glaive and a Guisarme, and called it a Glaeven. In my head it looked very like the polearms used in Curse of the Golden Flower (if anyone knows what they are supposed to be, tell me and I will be forever grateful).

I loved the way the polearms were used in this movie, and tried to mimic the lightening fast spins in my scene. But it still wasn’t holding together.

Suddenly I realized I was trying to write Hollywood polearm fighting, without still having any idea how such a weapon would actually be used. I was stuck again. Then, at my Beta Reader’s suggestion, I pulled out my 2nd Edition AD&D Arms and Equipment Guide and spent Saturday immersed in its pages. The beauty of the A&EG is that it is written with roleplay in mind. There is advice on when a weapon would be particularly useful, or useless. And the Guide pointed out something crucial to me: polearms are slow.

In the original fight, which is many-on-one, Wil whirled around, striking out with both ends of the glaeven, quick as a viper. More men fell.

Yeah, too bad that’s both generic and physically impossible (also, what a tired simile).

The rewrite:

Wil jabbed at him underhand with the butt of his weapon. The blow glanced against the smith’s shoulder, but he kept coming. Wil spun, kicked the smith in the stomach and danced back, swinging the blade end of the glaeven around in a slow arc. It sliced halfway into the smith’s skull and stuck. The smith’s arms flailed.

Now that I can actually see in my head. Gee, I wonder if Wil’s gonna get that blade out in time to deal with the next guy who comes at him. Probably not.

Anyway, I’m going to keep tweaking this scene, but I’m much happier with it now than I was. So if you’re having trouble with a fight scene, the AD&D 2nd Edition Arms and Equipment Guide might help you rethink your fight. Or, if you’ve got a good resource on weaponry and would like to share, please do tell! Clearly I need to keep doing my homework.

Setting Goals: Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew

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This week PLC will be talking about goal setting. Honestly, there isn’t a lot of point to setting goals if you never achieve any.  For example, say you currently write a short story a month and you want to kick up your output. You might be tempted to get crazy and commit yourself to 30 stories in 30 days, but deep down you know by day 30 you’ll probably end up with 3 pieces of microfiction, one 2k word story that makes no sense, 4 meandering beginnings that went nowhere, and a whole lot of shame. It’s self-defeating. Instead, consider the amount of time it takes you to complete a project (in this case, one story in a month), then cut that time in half. This will give you enough pressure to produce without setting yourself up for utter failure. Now your challenge is to write two stories in a month. That’s an attainable goal, and what you’ll get at the end has a higher chance of something you can take pride in, something that’s marketable.

My other deadline-oriented goal-setting suggestion is to mark your deadline on a wall calendar in red ink. Make sure the wall calendar is displayed prominently, somewhere you will look at it at least once a day. I like a wall calendar better than a phone calendar because it’s easy to hit the ignore button on your phone and go on your merry without ever really thinking about it, especially if you are out and about in the world when your reminder pops up. There is no ignore button for the wall next to your desk(or kitchen, or front door).  I also usually mark the weekend before my deadline with red ink. It helps kick in that deadline squeeze of panicked productivity that I sadistically enjoy so much.

So yeah, I like my goals bite-sized. I wonder if I’m in the minority here? Is it better to set yourself some mind-altering enormous goal, or a series of small ones? What type of goal pushes you to get more done?

The State of Our Literary Union

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By: Michael James Greenwald

Hello, again, PLC blog followers!!!  It’s your Sunday slice of lemon meringue pie.  Tastes cool and delicious, use that sugar rush to be productive (possible side effects include acne, obesity, diabetes, and death).

Last week, I talked a bit about “Making Time” for writing, related a current literary disaster in my writing life, discovering my 122,000 word manuscript had a torpedo hole the size of Pandora (the Na’vi’s home planet not the music genome project) in it’s bow and my efforts to plug it with duct tape and seances to Herman Melville (“I’ll take Mixed Metaphor for 500, mustache-less Alex Trebeck”) had been futile–duct tape being less than affective in slippery marine conditions and Herman Melville subscribing to the Terrance Mann, post-literary-success attitude.

So, after having the Greatest Freak Out Ever!!!!!!!! on Monday, I strapped myself to my desk chair at 7AM Tuesday morning and began again.

This week, PLC followers, we’ve been talking about “Kick Starting Your Writing” and on the heels of Barack Obama’s first “State of the Union” I thought I’d talk a little about the state of our literary union.  So, here we go…

“Madam Speaker Harper Lee, Literary Vice President F. Scott Fitzgerald, members of the Literary Congress (Dickens, Poe, Twain, Sallinger…), distinguished guest authors (Chabon, Lethem, McCarthy, King, Sallis, Nichols, Green, McLane…), and my fellow American writers:

Our Constitution declares that from time to time, I shall give to the Literary Congress information about the state of our literary union.  For thousands of years, our literary leaders have fulfilled this duty.  They’ve done so during periods of writing prosperity and tranquility.  And they’ve done this in the midst of character war and personal depression; at moments of great strife and great struggle.

Again, we are tested. And again, we must answer history’s call.

Years ago, we became writers, amid very different expectations from our parents, personal severe recessions, finances on the verge of collapse, and credit cards revealing deep debt.  Experts from across the friendship and family spectrums warned that if we did not change our minds about becoming writers, did not go to law school, did not sell car insurance, did not sell our bodies for money (it happened once, let it go), we might face personal depressions.  But we acted, didn’t we, immediately and aggressively.  We fought our fear and sat in on a workshop at our local library, fought an even greater fear and introduced a short story to be workshopped, only cried a little when it was torn to shreds, yet showed up the next week with another story and cried a little less following the second time.  We met other writers who mentored us, encouraged us to continue, told us we had talent, and if we could just work at it, it would happen for us.  Then we signed up for a class, maybe at a community college, maybe with a down-to-earth writer who frightened us at first but soon had us elevating our skill level higher than we ever thought possible.

And maybe a year or eighteen months later, we had several short stories we actually didn’t hate and bought manilla envelopes and bookmarked duotrope.com on our computers to sit down one Sunday morning, following a Jameson shot (okay, a couple…fine, I drank half the bottle and filled my query letters with death threats–if you don’t publish my story I’ll MURDER you!!!–misspellings–I kan’t see there toes–and pleadings–please accept my short story submission so my mother can quit telling her friends her son works at Arby’s and writes “cute little poems”) and licked the gluey envelopes closed, addressed them to Harper’s or North American Review or Playboy Magazine and waited patiently for fame and fortune to follow.

But the devastation remains.  We sent over two hundred short story submissions and only received a nibble, one time, from a tiny University press out of Alpo, Texas (which wanted to put our story on their dog food cans).  Then our Dodge Stratus died, credit card debt swelled, cash from our Aussie-chain restaurant bartending job could not keep up with our expenses, and subjecting ourselves to wearing twelve boomerangs on our bushman shirts drove us to a cocaine habit.  Our recession has also compounded the burdens that we have been dealing with for a decade–the burden of working harder and longer for less; of being unable to save enough to buy a house, start a family of our own, or touch the special parts of any sober girl/guy.

For us, change did not come fast enough.  We’ve been frustrated; we’ve been angry.  We don’t understand why it seems like bad behavior from those James Patterson types and reality stars is rewarded, but hard literary work isn’t.  The promise of the literary life we’d for so long dreamed about seemed like only fiction another writer, a capable writer, could come up with.  Our depression and financial pinch even drove us to fill out that Aussie restaurant chain’s management training application, three times.  Late nights, staring at the agave-soaked worm wriggling around in the bottom of our Jose Cuervo bottle represented the death rasps of our literary dream–and even then, with that beautifully original metaphor right there waiting to be plucked, could we go home and replicate it on the computer screen?

No siree, Bob.

But tonight (or today, this morning, this afternoon, next week, 7:30 in the evening Australian time, because you’re up for the Federer/Murray final…), tonight I’d like to talk about how together we can deliver on that promise.

It begins with kickstarting your writing.

Our most urgent task upon deciding to become a writer, is to write.  And if there’s one thing that has unified sci-fi writers and fantasy writers, and every writer in-between, it’s that we all sometimes hate to write.  I hated it — (applause.)  You hated it.  It’s about as popular as a root canal. (Laughter.)

But when we decided to become writers, we made a promise to ourselves we wouldn’t just do what was popular–we would do what was necessary.  And if we don’t write, we’ll never be published authors, will we.

So, how do we do this?  Well, once again, experimentation works the best.  For me, I’ve learned four things kickstart my writing the best.  1) Reading a book that in some way captures the voice or emotion I’m trying to create, 2) warming up by writing a blog (which I’m doing right now),

3) listening to Gillian Welch (love me some Gillian Welch), and/or 4) taking a shower (don’t ask, I don’t know, my mother refers to me as her Womb Baby, as in I never wanted to leave the womb).

Currently, I’m writing a family saga with a ghost story element, but I’m seeking to capture the raw emotion, the stripped down realism and noire feeling of a western. I’ve found if I read about one scene from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses I’m able to capture that voice in my head and by using this key everyday I have a good chance of replicating it. Flip Gillian on repeat on the iPod, write a short blog, and dump a bucket of water on my head, and baby, I’m SET TO WRITE!!!!!

Okay, you get yourself in the chair, put on Gillian Welch, warmed up with a blog and dumped a bucket of water on your head, but the writings still not coming.  I give you a free pass to get up out of the chair and leave the office (“no, he di-idn’t just say that”–”uh, yeah, I di-id”), go for a walk, either in the forest where you need to really listen and feel nature’s vibe (hell, hug a tree, man, smell the thing, you never know when you’ll have a character pushed up against a tree–whether salaciously or axe-murder-ly– and you want to inject a little sensory tree smell) or go to the mall and be the creepy guy sitting on the bench near the penny pool eating a charro staring at people…I’ll bet dollars to charros that creeper guy in the mall is a wannabe writer, so why couldn’t you be that creeper?

My point is, always be working, even when you’re not “in the room.”  Remember, another writer in the world is putting in the work (and will steal that publishing deal) while you’re watching TLC, taking your dog for a walk, or sleeping, so you damn well better be researching dress styles on “What Not to Wear”, working the kinks in your dialogue out with Fido, and letting your subconscious come up with some wacky plot twists.

I don’t know about you, but my writing career has had some literary setbacks this year, and some of them were deserved.  But we should wake up every day knowing that they are nothing compared to the setbacks all writers have faced.  And what keeps us going — what keeps us fighting — is that despite all these setbacks, that spirit of determination and optimism, that fundamental decency that has always been at the core of the American writer, that lives on.

The spirit that has sustained this profession since cavemen scrawled on walls lives on in you, its writers. We have finished a difficult year.  We have come through a difficult career so far.  But a new year has come.  A new decade stretches before us.  We don’t quit.  You don’t quit.  I don’t quit. (Applause.)  Let’s seize this moment — to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and to strengthen our profession once more. (Applause.)

Thank you.  God (insert your favorite writer here) bless you.  And God bless the United States of American writers.” (Applause.)

Okay, and that’s it for the State of Our Literary Union this year.

Please tune in Monday for Amy McLane, giving up her Progress Report (uh, oh, Amy, pop quiz time!!!) and I’ll see y’all next Sunday, same spot, same time, with an extra piece of lemon meringue pie just for you.

I wish you all good words!!!!!

MJG

By the way, if you all want to get to know me a bit better, check me out on FACEBOOK, follow me on Twitter, or at my personal blog.

Think, Dammit, Think

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By S. C. Green

S. C. Green

Let’s say you’ve just finished your novel. You’ve got the query letters out, maybe even a partial or full manuscript being looked over. What do you do in the mean time?

Write.

Simple, right? That’s not always the case. You’ve spent the last several months, if not years, perfecting your characters and their exploits, loving them, nurturing them, killing them. Sometimes it’s not easy to pick up another story and go. Even if you’re writing a series, it’s not a bad idea to try your hand at something else. I mean, what if that series never gets picked up? Do you really want to be five books in and realize nobody wants to buy it? Spread it out.

First of all, you’re remembering to write at least 500 words a day, right? Of course you are. That’s half the battle right there. Now the trick is to shake that brain of yours up a bit. Throw it off and make it think. Here are a few things that work for me:

1. Writing prompts

These are good to get the ink flowing. Typically a writing prompt will consist of a line or two that presents a “What If” scenario. It’s then left up to you to play it out. There are a number of sites online that offer writing prompts, like here, here, here, and that’s right, here. The only thing I don’t like about writing prompts is the ability of the writer to skip the prompts he or she doesn’t like to go to one that’s more within his or her comfort zone. How are you shaking things up by doing that?

2. Eavesdropping

This one feels shadier than the rest. That might be why I like it. The trick here is to listen with only half an ear. For one it helps keep you from looking like that crazy stalker guy at the coffee shop. You know who I’m talking about. Everyone does there best to sit the furthest away from him. Mainly you only want to get snippets of the conversation. Try to catch their tone. Then turn on the creative brain and fill in the rest. Why are they there? What lead to this coffee encounter? Why are they staring at you while you dictate their conversation?

3. Two-Second Channel Surfing

Be forewarned, this is hit or miss. When I was much younger, a friend of mine showed the wonder of flipping through the TV channels, spending no more than two seconds on each channel and hearing what comes out of it. This could lead to things like “That’s why I use… the captain’s on the… eco-friendly and safe for… come on down!” Then you can tweak it a bit and end up with, “Why, I used the captain of course. His eco-friendly approach made it safe for our group to come on down.” I have no idea what that means. But whether I like it or not, my brain is trying to figure it out. If I dwell on it enough, I’m sure a story would present itself.

This could also be done with the radio. Be careful, though. If you last longer than two seconds on any channel, you’re liable to end up watching instead of writing. That’s how your brain turns to mush. That’s what my mom always told me, so it’s must be true, right?

Those are just a few things that I do to stir up the gray matter. If it doesn’t work for you, then don’t use them. I’m by far not the end all, say all. I’m convinced of this however.

As a species, we love to solve problems. If you find a puddle on the floor, don’t you want to figure out what it is and how it got there? Whenever something falls outside of the norm in my little contained world, I have to know all about it. So if you stay within the problems that you already know the solutions for, what’s driving you to solve it again?

Shake it up.

That Is the Question.

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By Amy K. Nichols

This week our subject is kick starting your writing. I planned to write about my favorite writing prompt and talk about how I get my stories off the ground. But I just read a chapter from Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod — chapter 13, “If you accept the pain, it can’t hurt you” — and it kind of hit me like a two-by-four.

Here’s the gist:

Any creative endeavor is going to require you making necessary sacrifices. Making sacrifices is painful. If you succeed in your creative endeavor, the sacrifices were worth it. If you don’t succeed, you’ve still gained valuable experience from trying.

But not trying? Not trying brings a pain worse than failure.

MacLeod suggests it’s best to undertake any creative endeavor with the idea you won’t receive any recognition for your work, and that it won’t be worth the time or effort or sacrifice. If you take on a project with this mindset, you strip away any frivolous or secondary motivations (e.g., money, fame, movie options, awards), and you’re left face-to-face with a simple question.

“Do you make this damn thing exist or not?”

When I read that question, I set the book down and took a mini existential trip. I analyzed my motives. Why am I a writer? Why do I sacrifice time with my family and friends to write? What if my work amounts to nothing? Do I still sit my butt in the chair? Do I still stare at that blinking cursor and wait for my characters to whisper in my ear?

Is holding a completed manuscript in my hands worth the effort, even if I’m the only person who ever reads it or even know it exists?

MacLeod then says, “Once  you can answer that honestly for yourself, the rest is easy.”

He’s right. After I thought about my answer, I felt liberated. All that other stuff fell by the wayside and it was just me and my story. It was simple. And I couldn’t wait to get back to work.

I guess that’s one way to kickstart your writing. (Or, I guess depending on your answer, kill it completely.)

What do you think of MacLeod’s idea? How do you answer his question?