Tag Archives: imagination

Little Stories

02 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by in Advice, Inspiration, Mike

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Humans love to tell and hear stories, and every one of us has several of our own to tell. Facebook, Twitter, the evening news, anecdotes we tell at parties–we fill our lives with little stories.

Sports commentators know this; they fill dead airtime between the action with little tidbits about players’ lives. The coverage of the Olympics (which happen again later this year!) does this quite well, and you can bet I’ll be doing at least one article about Stories in Sports while London hosts the Games.

But even better than sports commentators at telling little stories are children. In fact, they excel at it, when allowed. Children at play spontaneously create little stories in many of their undirected activities (and some of them even do so in their directed activities!). Play with a child and let her drive the interaction. Eventually, she’ll almost certainly begin a little narrative and assign you a role; sometimes you might even be told what your role is supposed to be, but don’t count on it! You might never know the story she’s telling herself, of which you are a part, but you can be assured that there is, in fact, a story being told.

As with many parts of society that people reject, we can learn a lot from children in this regard. When we’re kids, society encourages us to tell stories. To use our imaginations. Unfortunately, this means society views storytelling and imagination as child’s play, and as we grow older we tend to give up creating stories and only tell those that actually happen to us.

Society makes us dull.

To Hell with that, I say! Telling stories is what we do, and those stories needn’t always be merely shared experiences.

If you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly interested in telling imaginary stories. In that case, it’s time to embrace the ways we used to tell stories.

Little stories.

Look around. There are lots of opportunities to get back into the practice of telling ourselves little stories. Those little stories will help us when we want to tell bigger ones. They’re practice for us, but they’re more than that; they are also inspirations. Some of those little stories we tell ourselves will eventually grow into the bigger ones we wish to share with other; some will become just parts of those bigger ones.

Most of your little stories won’t go anywhere, but you should write them down nonetheless–even if you don’t share them. Even if they only stay in your journal or your 750 Words account, don’t worry about it. These stories still serve an important purpose. They are practice.

But how do you practice these little stories?

People watching is an excellent way. The stories you create about those you watch can be as fanciful or plausible as you like. It doesn’t matter. Just tell a little story, no more than a sentence or two. “That woman with all the tattoos? A professor of applied mathematics.” “The bald old man? Vampire hunter.” “That collection of teenagers? Theater troupe.”

Games lacking a built-in narrative (like chess) can also supply you an opportunity to tell simple, little stories, as can those with only a minimal narrative (like The Settlers of Catan). Although telling those stories to yourself are fun, it’s even more fun if your opponent(s) join in with you.

There are lots of opportunities to find little stories in our lives. It’s just a matter of us embracing those opportunities.

Lists and Possibilities

24 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Ann, Inspiration

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“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” -Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

We use lists all the time–to-do lists, shopping lists, bucket lists, etc. But what about lists as a set of possibilities for your story?

When I’m feeling stuck on a certain situation or character in my story, I oftentimes just start rapid-fire listing all the possibilities I can come up with. All of them–good and bad, serious and silly–and seeing which strikes me the most.

For example, if I’ve created an event in a story, but I’m still not sure who is responsible for it, I might start by listing potential suspects. (I’m notorious for coming up with problems before I assign people to cause them.) Or, in reverse, I have this cool antagonist group, but I’m not sure what to do with them, I might start listing ideas about them–their wants, their motivations, their fears….

Perhaps I’ll do a list for my protagonist, too. If I later compare those lists, I might find intersecting points in which their interests cross or conflict, which will be the impetus for a story to happen. This might even happen between two protagonists and two antagonists, depending on the depth of your story’s characters.

Listing can also be used for plot points–simply writing out all the scene or moment ideas you have and figuring out how or if they fit into the overall story you want to tell. One exercise in the Donald Maass Breakout Novel series (which I highly recommend) has you listing out the stakes of a story, and then, when you think you’ve thought of all the ways the situation can get worse, to list out even more things. And when you think it can’t get any worse, think of even more things that will make it worse. It’s quite the exercise, and I’ve applied it to other parts of my storytelling as well.

There are a hundred ways you can use lists for your writing–but I think one of the most important things to remember is that you don’t have to keep anything on your list. It’s an exercise, not a contract set in stone. By using lists and whipping out ideas in short form as fast as you can come up with them, you’re able to exhaust your possibilities and find the ones that work best or are the most exciting among those that might be bland, predictable, or otherwise undesirable.

When you are listing, I suggest free-forming it. Don’t bother with what kind of numbering or lettering or which bullet-points you should use (unless that will help spark your creativity). Possibilities might be as serious as the death of a protagonist’s loved one to as whimsical as unicorn farts. All that matters is that you exhaust your ideas, and when you think you’re done, come up with even more. Anything. Everything.

Ideas are a dime a dozen and we’re under no obligation to use every idea that flits across our imagination (I suspect even the most prolific of storytellers would have trouble doing this). For all of the awesome ideas we have, we usually have had a thousand zip by. But sometimes all those extras come in as noise that block us from hearing another possibility (or they might even belong in a different story). Use your lists to get everything out–the good, the bad, the irrelevant–and then keep only the ideas that really sing for the story at hand.

And don’t censor yourself–you’re the only one who is ever going to see it, and sometimes our best ideas are the ones we’re afraid to write down. That might not be the case every time, but you’ll never know if you don’t try it, right?

The Virtue of Being Bored

17 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Ann, Inspiration

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Why do we get our ideas in the shower?

Those of us in American culture take pride in being busy. Really busy. We have to fill every moment with something “productive”–checking our smartphones at the bus stop, taking part in a ton of organizations, working late, jotting down a few hundred words for the day, or a thousand other ways we cram something into every second so we’re not caught doing nothing and can continue to check things off our to-do lists. We feel a strange, sometimes distressing, pride when we can say, “Oh, I don’t have time for that kind of stuff; I’m way too busy.”

And when we’re not “busy?” We collapse in front of the TV or something else mindless to get swept away in.

I recently read about a study on how children who are over-scheduled–those whose every moment of their day is packed with clubs and activities and school and homework–come out with stunted imaginations. They’ve never been bored. They’ve always had their activities provided for them, rather than thinking about how to entertain themselves.

Since the imagination is also critical for storytelling (and other creating) adults, I’ve been wondering just how much of this relates to adults who are always busy and over-occupied. Some people manage to carve out writing time, only to be disappointed in the results because they only think about their story when they sit at their chair to make their daily word count. When you’re dealing with something that is completely in your head, thinking about it is a key factor in creating it.

Let’s return to my original question–why do we get ideas in the shower? I believe it’s because that’s one of the only times we slow down. We can’t have our smartphones with us in the shower (yet). We can’t be checking our email or doing business. We’re doing something monotonous that we’ve done every day for tens of years. Those are precious, guilt-free moments of nothingness that let the brain noise quiet just long enough to let our imaginations play. There are other moments like this, like when our brains stop just enough for us to fall asleep.

Today, I give you permission to under-occupy your brain and think about your story.

Take a walk. Sit on the couch with a warm beverage. Take a long bath. Stare out the window while you ride the bus.  If you can’t stand the lack of background noise, turn on some music. Don’t turn on the TV, an audio book, or talk radio. Don’t dink around on your phone, update Facebook, play Angry Birds, or check your RSS reader. Let your mind wander. Don’t try to force yourself on to the story, but when something mundane demands its way in, acknowledge and then dismiss it. This will probably happen a lot at first. Have paper and pen nearby if you like, but this isn’t carving out writing time, this is carving out thinking time.

Chances are, you’re going to feel restless, edgy, and–dare I say it–bored, if you’re one of those particularly busy-busy sorts (guilty!). You might even feel lazy. But keep at it, and see what happens when you give yourself permission to do nothing but think.

See where your mind goes. See where your story goes.