Tag Archives: inspiration

Expose Yourself

04 Friday May 2012

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I’ve mentioned before how much I dislike the old “Write what you know” advice and instead advocate “Write what you want to read.”

Expanded out a little, that becomes, “Tell the stories you want to experience.”

But to know what kinds of stories those are, you need to do some homework. What, homework? Yes. I know it will be terribly rough for you, but you need to expose yourself to stories.

Note that I very specifically avoided saying “…but you need to read a lot of novels.” If you want to be a novelist, you obviously should be reading a lot of novels, but you shouldn’t limit yourself to just them. Watch movies. Read webcomics. Try graphic novels. A story is a story, and although the way they are told varies by medium, the basics of good storytelling transcend those limitations.

When I wanted to be a fantasy novelist, oh so many years ago, I heard the further piece of advice, “Read a lot of novels, including those outside your genre.” To this day, I believe this is excellent advice for all storytellers, from novelists to webcomic artists to screenplay writers to graphic novelists.

Why?

Well, a good story is a good story, regardless of its medium or genre. Regardless of the often arbitrary category in which it is filed. Don’t be embarrassed by these labels assigned to stories by publishers, bookstore owners, or movie theaters. There are amazing stories told in every kind of genre, in every kind of medium.

Want examples?

When I was an aspiring fantasy novelist and heard that advice I went to my mom and asked her to recommend a good romance novel. She went through her collection and found me a historical romance. I read it. I enjoyed it. I remember little about it except the lead character’s surname, which I later co-opted into my own stories because I thought she was cool. The story was inspiring in at least some way, even though I was so far outside the target audience.

Except I am, because I’m someone who enjoys a good story. And that’s another related point: as a storyteller, you are the target audience of everything.

Let’s go with another example. I have a friend who recommended The Hunger Games trilogy to me, although he was a little embarrassed, because they are YA. I told him it didn’t matter, because of my mantra, “A good story is a good story.”

So go forth, friends, and expose yourself to stories. Not just those in the genre you want to write. Not just those in the medium you want to create in. Experience stories all across the spectrum, from dystopian YA to historical romance to mainstream tales, as novels or movies or sequential art.

Finding Inspiration

13 Friday Apr 2012

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Where do you find inspiration? What makes you want to sit down and tell a story?

This past weekend I attended Sakuracon, a Japanese-culture convention in Seattle mainly but not exclusively dedicated to anime and manga. Although I’ve been a bit out of touch lately with the Japanese pop-culture meta-fandom, I still found parts of the convention to be very inspiring, particularly as a storyteller.

The greatest inspiration came from the AMVs (or anime music videos) I saw. An AMV is a fan creation that marries a song to a collection of clips from one or more video sources (usually but not always anime).

I don’t know about you, but music alone can be very inspiring to me. Sometimes I hear a song and I get a great swelling of emotion and thought and some story element pops suddenly into my mind, even if I’ve heard the song hundreds of times before.

What’s that got to do with AMVs at Sakuracon?

Sitting in the AMV room at Sakuracon (or, I imagine, any anime-related convention) exposes you to a lot of music and animation (both of varying quality), at least some of which you’ve inevitably never heard or seen before. Every few minutes there’s an entirely new mix of sound and images, and your mind is under a constant barrage of creative energy—the song, the animation, and the mixture of the two. For a storyteller (or any creative person, really), the combination of disparate pieces can really excite the imagination.

Neil Gaiman once said the secret to this creativity is combining two things that have never been combined before, and although I’d like to talk more about that someday for now I can tie it in with this topic. While it’s definitely possible to find inspiration in the work of one creator, I would encourage you to find places where the creative endeavors of multiple people come together to create something entirely new. If AMVs aren’t your thing, I understand that similar things exist for non-anime shows, like live-action television programs. If that interests you more then you should hunt those down instead.

Ultimately, what I’m getting at with all this is that you can find inspiration in a lot of different places, some familiar and some not; some created by a single effort and some a combination of multiple creators. The most important thing is to keep looking for inspiration and to remember to act on it when you find it!

Start Again?

10 Tuesday Apr 2012

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We as storytellers often get very attached to our words and ideas. We write something, and even if we’re willing to revise it, we still won’t change it that much. If we’ve written words, we want to fix those words. If we have written a character or a plot point, we try to shape those over and over again, to get the right image.

What if you started over completely?

Author Jodi Meadows mentioned recently that she had wholesale “deleted” the first draft of the third book in her series. Why? She had made so many changes to the first and second books after they were edited and revised for publication that the third book would require an intense amount of revision just to fit with the other two books. Instead, she decided to start over.

Are words sacred? Sometimes it feels like it, especially when we’re carving out time to tell our stories and just starting. Every hundred and thousand words feel like they were written in blood. But the truth is, they weren’t. Storytellers are creative people, and although it might not always feel like it, our creativity is endless. However, that creativity can be stifled, and it can be stifled by our own stories when we stubbornly hold on to a story that isn’t quite right.

A while back I realized many of my stories had the themes or plots or other elements in common. The stories themselves probably wouldn’t be recognizable as “same” to someone else (unless they were really analyzing them), but I saw those similarities. I realized–no, not that I had a limited amount of stories in my head and I was completely unoriginal–but that there are themes, plots, and other elements that I will hammer out over and over. Why? Near as I can tell, it’s because there is this formless, unspeakable idea in my mind, and I keep writing it over and over again in different ways until I finally hit upon it in a way that will satisfy my subconscious and my muse. Then I will theoretically move on to something else.

(It might also be that you’re attracted to a certain theme or story type. The advice still holds true.)

Are you stuck on a story that just doesn’t seem quite “right?” Try approaching it in a completely different manner. Change characters, settings, or story arcs, and see what happens. (If you’re feeling really brave, you could even change your medium.) You aren’t wasting words. You’re exploring ideas. You might not keep one or the other, or you might keep both. What you discover in your multiple versions might help another, or they might be completely distinct to one another. You might even find yourself able to take a story, such as Jodi did, and restart it from the beginning–same world, same characters–and turn it into something new.

Be brave. Every time you challenge yourself, you improve yourself as a storyteller and you are not wasting your words.

What You Know Can Help You Write

06 Friday Apr 2012

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On Tuesday, Ann talked about six techniques you can use to interact with your story without working on your story. Her post inspired me to change my plans for this week and write today’s subject. I’ll come back to finish up my thoughts on antagonists some time in the future.

It’s possible–likely, even–that you possess detailed knowledge about something, be it a hobby, an academic subject, or a specialized (or not) occupation. That is knowledge you can include pretty easily into some stories you might tell. It can even be the background, inspiration, or major element in a story.

Now, before I go much further let me clarify that I’m not advocating the old advice, “Write what you know.” No. I think that is generally terrible advice and instead advocate the “Write what you want to read” approach introduced to me by my friend Sean (who I think heard it elsewhere).

What I am saying is “What you know can inform what you write.” Some extreme examples of what I mean are John Grisham,  a lawyer who now writes bestsellers about lawyers doing stuff, or Tess Gerritsen who is a doctor most famous for her mystery novels starring a city medical examiner. You needn’t go quite that far, of course, to find inspiration in what you know, what you’ve done, and what you’ve lived.

Whatever you know, whatever you do (both occupationally and leisurely), you can integrate something from your life into your stories to give them that added touch of realism–or to heighten the drama.

The things you know and do might not be appropriate to all stories, genres, or media, of course, but you can almost certainly pull from your experiences to add gravitas, weight, and depth to your stories.

Let me indulge here in a personal example. Some years ago I worked in the on-call courier business in Portland, Oregon. I have all kinds of stories–vignettes, really–from my five years on a bike, in a car, and behind a desk in the Portland courier biz. For the longest time, I considered that universe–of snarky beer-swilling bike messengers and bitter beer-swilling car couriers–as a background to a movie screenplay, novel, or other long-form narrative. In truth, though, the nature of on-call delivery is more appropriate for episodic narrative. Were I to go back to that time I’d consider turning my experiences–and those of other messengers and couriers in Portland and elsewhere–into a webcomic or other short-form storytelling medium.

Instead of writing about being a courier, though–instead of writing what I know (or knew, really; I imagine much has changed in the past nine years)–I use those experiences to feed into my stories and settings I create today. No, I don’t focus the action around couriers, but over the body of my work it’s hard to not see couriers and messengers sneak in here and there–almost always in important ways. It’s something that is, or was, a significant part of my life, and it’s something I feel comfortable going back to and talking about.

Your own knowledge is probably very different from mine, of course, but my base advice remains the same. You know something you can include in a story. Slip it in when you can!

Six Ways to Interact with Your Story that Aren’t Writing It

03 Tuesday Apr 2012

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Sometimes, you need a break from your story. Not a real break, but a break from the pounding of words on the narrative you’ve been plotting. Sometimes, you need to let your plot sit and bubble while you figure out what happens next. Sometimes, you need to dig deeper. Sometimes, you’re in the middle of a revision, and you know you want to improve something, but you just don’t know how.

During these times, instead of abandoning your story completely, consider these ideas on how to interact with your story without writing your story:

1) Visit a local (or, if you have the means and ability, far off) place that reminds you of a setting, character, or situation in your story (or the actual place, if it’s based on a real location). This could be a park, a city, a pub, or even a section of the museum. Even if your story is set in a fictional world, there are places you can go that might remind you of these places. A lot of my fictional cities tend to be hybrids of Seattle and San Francisco, which means I can visit them and be inspired. A science museum might give you some atmosphere of your science fiction setting, as could hiking in the mountains for your high fantasy. If you’ve got a Victorian setting, maybe there’s a tea room or museum you could go to draw in atmosphere.

2) Try doing something your characters are doing. Just reading about something isn’t the same as doing it. (Stay safe and legal, folks. Our characters are often doing dangerous and daring things, and while I think we all owe it to ourselves to be daring, I don’t want anyone breaking an arm on my advice.)

3) Create art related to your story. Whether you draw it or make a collage, even if you don’t think you have visual artistic skills, you can put together something that keeps your mind on the story or characters.

4) Write something related to the story. Vignettes about your characters, songs, poetry, setting descriptions, news articles, literature in your world, love letters, undirected freewriting–whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be part of the story at large. I think we often get hung up on the idea that everything we write on a story must appear in the story, and that’s just not true.

5) Create a soundtrack. Find music that fits your characters, story, mood, or themes and put together a playlist. At one time, I used to play my character’s theme songs (which I’d spend hours deciding on) right before I began to write a scene from their point of view, although nowadays I tend to listen to instrumental sets that fit the story’s mood.

6) Read books related to your story–but don’t default to this one in replacement of option 1 or 2 unless those one are completely undoable. I know it’s easier to look up information about the forests in Wikipedia, around the web, or a library book, but it wouldn’t be the same as going to your large city park or hiking trails and experiencing it for yourself.

These suggestions are the most obvious ones to me. Please feel free to share your ideas below.

How Spinning a Yarn Brought Me Back to Spinning a Yarn

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by in Ann, Experiences, Inspiration

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I was at a fiber arts workshop this weekend, so I have yarn on the brain. (She said, as if she doesn’t usually have yarn on the brain.)

Three years ago I stopped writing. Instead, I invested myself in an MMO, and I told stories with my roleplaying guild, all the while telling myself I didn’t have any stories left in me. I started some novel ideas and just as quickly abandoned them. The stories I was telling with others were newer and more exciting, but eventually I began to feel a void. Writing my own solo stories was deeply ingrained in me, and I felt strange and empty having let it go. The group roleplay also lacked a sense of completion and finishing that I got with my own stories.

Over time, the guild died away, and one day, sitting at my computer, I was inspired by whim to pick up a long-abandoned yarn-spinning kit.

This action, so innocuous and random that day, brought me back to writing my own stories, and changed my life.

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It didn’t start that way–at first the spindle overtook me (later, a spinning wheel), and then I returned to knitting (which I had also flirted with in the past). I began going to fiber arts workshops and participating in online communities. I loved it, I learned all kinds of cool things, met all kinds of cool people, and it did dozens of things to repair my emotional, mental, and creative health–injuries that had long kept me from recognizing my internal stories.

Several months after I became obsessed with knitting, I publicly forgave myself for not writing. I said to my friends, “I’m not writing anymore, and that’s okay. I’m creating something, and I’m happy with what I’m doing right now.”

And it’s funny–because a day or two later after I forgave myself my lack of writing, the stories returned. I didn’t do anything with them right away (and I’m still trying to figure them out), but they were there, telling my brain to let them in.

So what changed?

1) Non-professional creativity. The thing about hand-knitting is that it’s not really a viable career path. There are things related to knitting (design, teaching, workshops, yarn production, etc.) that are viable career paths, but that actual act of sitting there and pulling loops through loops with two sticks? Not so much. So, knowing that, I was able to take part in the joy alone without worrying about whether or not my creation was marketable (“publishable”), a mindset that plagues me whenever I tried to write. I was able to experiment and play around just for the sake of doing it.

2) Physical accomplishment. The trouble with a lot of digital accomplishments is that they tend to be pixels on a screen. Even writing can feel that way at times. Knitting and spinning gave me something immediate that I could hold in my hands or give to loved ones. Completion begets completion.

3) Generosity. I make no bones that I knit for me first, but I also enjoy giving my knits as gifts to friends and family. This makes everyone happy, and re-instilled a sense of community and giving in me. That feeling led to this blog being created.

4) Meditation. Once I became competent at knitting and spinning, it became a meditative task. I spent a lot of time thinking about my life and what I most wanted from it. I made changes based on those reflections. Suddenly, when the chaos of my brain had finally become quiet, my stories returned. (Well, and after I killed my Netflix subscription.) I now oftentimes knit or spin with a notebook and pencil nearby.

I’m not saying that every writer needs to be a knitter (although I wouldn’t complain) or you’ll get exactly what I did out of another creative endeavor, but I want to illustrate an example of how a strange and whimsical moment in my life–one that I thought would take me further away from storytelling–brought me right back to it.

Be open to opportunities. Try new things. Let your muse sweep you off into another creative craft, art, or hobby for a while–chances are, it’ll lead you right back to your stories and infuse them with your new perspective.

If it doesn’t? Well, maybe writing was the path intended to lead you to another creative passion you didn’t know about. Are you creating? Are you happy? That’s what’s most important.

Seeing Someone Else

12 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Inspiration, Mike

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For more than a decade I thought I wanted to write an epic fantasy novel. I diligently outlined the story, started it, and subsequently restarted it numerous times. One day, though, I realized I hadn’t read a novel in that genre for years. I was no longer in love with the genre. I felt a little lost. The oldest memory I have of my mom reading to me was The Hobbit, when I was around four. Fantasy had always been a part of my life, and indeed I have written many thousands of published words within the genre (and edited countless more).

It might happen to you as well someday. Maybe not the same genre and maybe not after a lifetime of reveling in it, but one day you might realize–as you agonize over a story you’re struggling to even write a love letter for–that your tastes have changed. That you have moved on. That realization can be scary, but don’t panic.

This is an opportunity.

The first thing you should do is stop. Stop feeding your brain with the stories you no longer love. If you can find other kinds of stories to write about, or draw, or film, or otherwise create, then by all means continue to do that. But stop putting into your story brain things you don’t like.

The second thing you should do is start. Start looking at other kinds of stories. Don’t limit yourself to any one kind of genre, medium, or set of tropes. Explore what exists. And a lot exists.

When you’re exploring, remember to not just look outside the genre you no longer love but also the medium in which you create. Novels remain a dominant storytelling form, but movies, sequential art (comic books, webcomics, manga), modern computer roleplaying games, and even some television programs (not reality TV) offer compelling and well-crafted stories. Thanks to the Internet, other forms of storytelling keep cropping up as well (such as Youtube, Escape Pod and its kin, Echo Bazaar, and Homestuck). The Kindle might also bring a resurgence of short stories and novellas.

Ann and I will undoubtedly revisit this list in the future, but the important thing to note for today is that you have many, many options when you’re ready to feed your brain with new kinds of stories. (To say nothing of opportunities for telling stories!)

Of course, this advice is helpful even if you are still madly in love with the genres, media, and tropes you’re creating in. Storytelling isn’t a monogamous relationship; you should experiment around a little. You don’t have to dump your true love to learn something new, and the stories you tell in your chosen genre will be better for your exposure to other types. If you haven’t had enough analogies yet, think of it as cross-training for your story brain.

Today, epic fantasy and I are on friendly terms. Fantasy still informs my works; it continues to have an impact on the stories I tell. For now, though, I have a pretty good idea of what I love and the stories I want to tell, but I also know those might change in the next ten years–and if the change does happen I won’t panic, because I’ll know what to do.

Writing a Love Letter to Your Story

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

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A couple of years ago, I had this idea for a reincarnation story set in an art school.  I wrote a lot of notes, abandoned it, remembered it existed every few months, but never got anywhere with it.  In the last few weeks, I’ve been going at it fervently and it has gone through a series of revisions.  For example, it includes neither an art school or reincarnation anymore.

At least, I don’t think it does.  It has ghosts now, and I think if they’re still ghosts they’d have trouble reincarnating (Geoff would know the answer to this one, I think).  I think it’s a haunted house story now, but I’m not sure.  There are still artists.

This is one of the many issues I’m running into to.  The themes have been changing, too.  The characters have largely stayed the same, but their evolutions are getting stunted as I figure everything else out.  I even changed the working title, and that’s a big deal because the old working title was the culmination of the story.  If I changed the title, does that mean the entire point of the story has changed?

Um, maybe?  I’m not sure.

There’s a lot in this story that’s just not going right for me at the moment.  I’m doing a lot of free-writing, list-making, and brainstorming trying to figure it all out, but I’ve run into a lot more walls than doors.  Yet I still want to tell this story.

It’s at this point in a story that I need to stop and evaluate it.  I don’t need to evaluate what’s wrong with it–at least not right now.  That’s too large of a subject, and I don’t have any direction.  I need to evaluate what I love about it.  I need to sit down and gush about what gets me excited about this story, and why I so want to see it come into fruition.  This is where I talk about themes that speak to me, the characters who drive it, and the scenes that inspired me to want to see how the rest of the story unfolded.

This is where I write a love letter to my story. Instead of throwing myself against walls and going through doors just because they appeared–and not because they were the door that would lead me back to my love–the love letter tells me what’s right about the story and re-kindles the passion. And once I know what I’m in love with, I can better figure out how to build the rest of the story around it. This is not a time to be critical.  This is a time to be completely subjective and self-absorbed with your story and characters.

Are you working on a story right now that you’re stuck on?  Feeling like you’re not getting anywhere or want to give up or put it away for a while?  Do you not even remember what the point of the story was that inspired you in the first place?

Try writing a love letter to your story.  It might help.

There is No New Thing Under the Sun

05 Thursday Jan 2012

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The title of this post comes from the Bible (an under-appreciated source of some very interesting stories), in the book of Ecclesiastes, which was written about… oh… two millennia ago. While I think perhaps the writer was using a bit of hyperbole to make a point, the attempt to do something completely unique can seem pretty daunting. We’re faced now with four thousand years of world literature, and the number of stories being told every year is not going down.

Don’t worry about it.

You can spend all your life wracking your brain to create something wholly new and not at all derivative of anything else ever done since the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BCE)… or you can just tell the story you want to tell, with the characters you like.

Guess which will let you get more done?

Sometimes you won’t realize how much you’ve drawn from some source or another until you’re all done and can see the big picture. Don’t despair! Try to resist the urge to go back and redo the parts you feel aren’t new or different enough, because chances are (1) you’re the only one who notices and (2) whatever you change it to is also inspired by stories you already know. (There’s probably a neat creative exercise we could do about exchanging one inspiration for another, but let’s save that idea for later.)

How about a personal example of what I mean? I spent months writing this week’s Open Doors column and it wasn’t until my third read-through that I realized how Arthurian it is. The King Arthur stories never consciously entered my mind the entire time I was writing that piece, and yet the inspiration is clear to me now. (The blatant call-out to Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, though, was completely intentional from the beginning.)

I could go back and rewrite it all again, of course, taking out all the bits I feel are too derivative, but in so doing I’d likely just put in something inspired by some other story I might or might not remember, and then I’d be right back to where I am now (minus the self-awareness, most likely). That would be a waste of my time; I have other stories to tell now! Were I not writing this post shortly after scheduling that column I probably never would have mentioned the perceived link to anyone, but it happens to be a pretty good example of what I’m talking about here.

So, in short (too late!): go tell your stories. Write. Draw. Film. Whatever. Enjoy the stories you are telling. Enjoy the act of creating them. Because even if they are “just like” something else out there, whether you’re aware of it or not, they are still your stories–your take on something that you and others clearly enjoy.

Story Papers is not the first blog about telling stories, but it is for us! We hope you enjoy our insights from our own processes of creation and that you join us when we challenge you (and each other) to try new creative techniques and new ways of telling stories. We’d love to hear back from you, so please always feel free to leave a comment or email us! Thanks for reading!