Tag: brainstorming ideas

The Self-Aware Writer – Self-Awareness & Ideas

Posted on by Ian Dawson

You are an endless supply of ideas and stories.  You’ve lived life, have had good and bad experiences, and have grown from those situations.  How you interpret what’s happened to you can influence how you react in future situations, and this self-awareness and hindsight can help you create and develop stories.

Creating grounded characters and situations that others can relate to is a way to utilize self-awareness as a writer.  This is where your internal self-awareness comes into play by exploring and analyzing real-world events and emotions from your own life.  You can discover relatable moments that readers can connect to that will keep them glued to the page. 

The key phrase here is connection.  You aim to create characters that allow the audience to empathize and sympathize with them and their struggles or triumphs.  Even in fantasy stories, we are drawn to characters who have relatable emotions, goals, and setbacks.  While we all may not go on a journey like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, our Hobbit hero’s emotional arc allows us humans to relate and connect with him.

This week, take the time to sit and write down five or six events from your life that could be the inciting incident of a new story.  Take yourself back to those moments.  What was going through your mind at the time?  Feelings?  Thoughts?  What was your emotional journey through each of your chosen events?

These don’t have to be tragic; you can also utilize positive moments.  The key is to explore the realness of each situation.  How can those emotional beats be part of your protagonist’s larger character arc?  How would an audience empathize or sympathize with your character?

Only some ideas will hit, and only some life events are worthy of being committed to paper.  As you develop a keener self-awareness as a writer, you’ll gain perspective on when an idea isn’t worth pursuing over one that is.  

It’s all part of the creative process, the ability to prioritize ideas worth your time, effort, and energy over those that aren’t right now.

By digging into your life and past, you can mine stories that aren’t carbon copies of the latest bestseller or Hollywood blockbuster.

Once your story idea and characters are locked in, you can take the following steps: development and drafting.  We’ll talk about those in the next post.

Happy Creating, and I’ll see you next time!

Writing Tip of the Week: Your Story’s Opening Sentence

Posted on by Ian Dawson
I would recommend NOT starting your story with this sentence.

You’re finally ready. You’ve crafted a detailed outline for your story with compelling plot points, dimensional characters, and a twist-filled finale. Readers will be talking about it for weeks after finishing the book. You sit down in a comfortable chair, your computer at the ready. You’ve opened a new word processing file and saved it with a file name of your story’s title and the date you’re beginning this draft. Chapter One…

…

…

“How the heck do I start this thing!?” you yell to the sky.

Writing that first sentence for any story can be a daunting task. You want to entice the reader, bring them into the story’s world, and make them curious about what type of adventure they are about to embark on. How can you craft this perfect sentence that will keep the reader reading?

Let’s talk about it!

Experiment

You know your story, what the first chapter is about, what’s happening in those initial moments when the story begins, and what characters are present. Using the information, write 5 to 15 sentences that could be used as your story’s opening sentence.

Once you have a list, pick three you like and fine-tune them so they are compelling and can grab a reader’s attention.

Then, you can…

Test It Out

Ask friends, family, or coworkers which sentence grabs their attention and makes them want to read more. Don’t tell them about the story or characters; just have them read the three sentences you crafted and see which one grabs the most attention.  

Use this information to decide what the opening sentence should be. If it’s a unanimous vote, that’s a good sign. If it’s mixed, ask people why they chose a particular sentence. Feedback is always helpful.

The Placeholder

Still stuck? Leave it for later and move on. Write the rest of chapter one, which will ignite a creative spark leading to the opening sentence. You can add something in brackets, like [Great opening sentence to go here!].  

Remember, just because you can’t develop something solid now doesn’t mean you should stop writing. Keep going, and the sentence will eventually materialize.

Start Somewhere Else

If that opening sentence is too distracting, move to a section of the story you can focus on in the meantime. Working on the story and inhabiting its world can help you find that elusive opening.

Examples

For fun, I grabbed five random fiction books from my bookshelf to read their opening sentences. I present them below. Which ones caught your attention and made you want to read more?

[I will be using the first sentence of Chapter One and not from any Prologue.]

“Half an hour after Tim Jamieson’s Delta flight was scheduled to leave Tampa for the bright lights and tall buildings of New York, it was still parked at the gate.”  

– The Institute by Stephen King

“The prophet was drowning men from Great Wyk when they came to tell him that the king was dead.” 

– A Feast for Crows (Game of Thrones, Book #4) by George R.R. Martin

“When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.” 

– The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkein

“When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” 

– Circe by Madeline Miller

“I spent the last afternoon of Before constructing a 1/10,000-scale replica of the Empire State Building from boxes of adult diapers.” 

– Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Final Thoughts

Your story’s first sentence should grab the reader, but its initial absence shouldn’t keep you from writing.  By brainstorming ideas, getting feedback from others, moving on without it, or looking at examples from other authors, you can craft an opening sentence that will bring readers in and keep them engaged.

Happy Writing, and I’ll see you next time!

Writing Exercise: What Could Go Wrong?

Posted on by Ian Dawson

We do a lot of things every day.  Some we want to do, others not so much.  Whatever the activity, there is potential for things to not go as we planned.

The Activity

Think about an activity you do that has the potential for things to spiral out of control.  This could be driving to work, dealing with customers, picking up your kids from school, etc.  We do plenty of things every day on auto-pilot, so these activities are a good place to start.

The Exercise

Picked an activity?  Great.  Now, write a list of every possible situation or scenario that could go wrong while doing this particular task.  It can be a minor inconvenience or one that’s exponentially catastrophic.  No matter what it is, write it down.

If you have had bad experiences in that situation that you can utilize, that’s even better.

Once you have a reasonably long list, pick out the ones that could be placed in order of escalation from minor to major.  Now you have a rough outline to work with.

Create a short story using the scenario and these escalating elements.  It can be comedic, it can be tragic, and it can be hyper-realistic.  Whatever tone you want to use, take advantage of your list of bad things that could happen and have fun with it.  If you come up with new things that can go wrong as you write, feel free to add them!

The Example

So, I drive on the 405 in L.A. every day to work.  There is potential for many things to go wrong in this location.  If I chose this as my activity – Driving to Work on the 405 – I could come up with some things that could go wrong based on my own real-life experiences: 

  • Car breaks down in traffic during heatwave
  • Car’s transmission dies in traffic
  • Hay truck on fire shuts down freeway
  • President Obama leaves LAX, freeway closes
  • Car chase
  • Multiple lanes closed during afternoon for cleaning
  • Roadwork
  • Car accident – three cars or more
  • Car fire
  • Multiple cars on fire
  • Plane does emergency landing on freeway
  • Big rig tips over
  • Rock smashes windshield

Next, I would take the list and figure out a way to incorporate as many as possible into a short story.

Final Thoughts

When we get stuck as writers, it’s important to brainstorm many ideas to help our characters get into or out of challenging situations.  This can help keep your writing interesting and keep your reader engaged and interested.

Happy Writing, and I’ll see you next time!