How Do You Come Up With GOOD Ideas?



 Sometimes, even for those of us who are comfortable spending a lot of time in our right brains, it's difficult to come up with a GOOD idea. It's like sifting through my mother's old button box to come up with exactly the perfect button: it can't be one of those clear ones with the four little holes because they're [pardon the cliche] a dime a dozen.

Sure, we come up with ideas--but they're mediocre. Or as the late Nancy Bulk (aka Dee Holmes) once explained in a writing workshop she conducted 20 years ago, they're the same ideas other people come up with. As in: our readers are going to spot what's going to happen two seconds into the scene.

Based on Nancy's excellent advice, whenever I'm plotting or searching for a GOOD idea, I use the 10 item rule. I'll grab a pen and paper and cluster (i.e., brainstorm or free-associate) to come up with a scene, or some dialogue, or character motivation that will knock my readers' socks off.

This is how it works. Let's say my heroine is in her house, alone, at night, and we know the stalker's coming to get her. How can the stalker get into the house without her knowing and then scare the pants off her?

1. He'll use a key he stole from her purse or beneath the flowerpot outside the back door.
2. He'll cut through the screen in the spare bedroom.
3. He'll sneak in through the bulkhead door in the basement.
4. He'll climb a tree in the back yard, spider-walk across the roof, and get in through the attic vent.
5. He'll knock on her door, claiming to need to use the phone because his car broke down.
6. He'll make a bunch of noise out in the back yard so her dog barks. When she lets the dog out, he temporarily immobilizes the dog. When she goes out in the yard to see why the dog doesn't respond, he sneaks into the house.

I've just run out of quick and easy responses. Now I have to put my thinking cap on to come with another idea. Which means that none of these is going to knock the socks off my readers ... because they came easily to me. If they came easily to me, guess who else will they come easily to? Right. My readers.

So where do YOUR good ideas come from? Can you give me numbers 7 through 10?

[photo credit: http://www.bigfoto.com/]

More Thoughts About Inspiration

I've recently discovered that old photographs are an incredible source of inspiration.

When visiting my family in Massachusetts earlier this month, my sister and I stayed up late several nights, talking. Okay, I admit it, every night!

She showed me some old family photos, like from the 1920s and 1930s. We speculated about our family, our grandparents, and our great-grandparents. We tossed around old stories, old rumors--both hilariously funny and tremendously sad. 

As we speculated, my imagination went wild, and so did Celenie's. I came up with a terrific plot idea for a family saga-type story that includes romance, betrayal, and all kinds of other heartstring-tugging emotions.

It's amazing how you can what-if your way into creating a reality. (I guess soap operas do that on a daily basis, eh?)

Anyway, this photo of my daughter dressing up as a hula girl is just a visualization of how wonderful it is to pretend and what-if. Care to dig up and share any of your inspiring photos? If so, send them to me and I'll post them and we can get some really wild stories going!

Has Your Imagination Ever Taken A Vacation?

My imagination has been AWOL for the past couple of days.  Has that ever happened to you?

I have the time and the inclination to plot something out and ... poof! ... nothing useful comes to mind. Sure, I come up with a scary scene, or a romantic scene, but nothing that works in my WIP.

I regularly use clustering to tap into my creativity and that's not working lately. I almost always come up with something good in the shower--you know, where pens, paper, and the voice recorder are inaccessible? That's not working these days,either, and I have the pruney skin to show for it!

I'm coming up with bupkis, nada, or crap-poopie.

HELP!

Should I dive into the Jameson? Any other suggestions?

What Spurs Your Creativity?

Personally, I prefer quiet when I'm writing.  No radio.  No music.  No sounds of traffic, ambulances, or barking dogs.

Definitely no TV.  The voices distract me.  You know, all those words...  Not to mention the hollering, screaming, and other idiocy.

Some people have told me they MUST have music playing in the background when they're writing or painting or in the midst of other creative efforts.  Bach and Beethoven do it for some of them, heavy metal does it for others.

Other people report they like to write in a coffee shop, while commuting on the bus or train, or outdoors.

What spurs YOUR creativity?  I'm curious.  Curious enough to give a few other things a whirl.  Every so often I like to shake things up ... this week, I'm into shaking myself up.  That's what four days at home does to me...

How to Get the Creative Juices Flowing

My blogging buddy, Bill, whom I've mentioned before, illustrates a terrific example of creativity in the most recent post on his blog.  (I'll give you the link later, so as not to encourage you to click away from me!)

He yammers on in his post about the way he routinely attributes human qualities to inanimate objects, such as vitamins and toilet tissue.  His blog post is hilarious and brings to mind the way children can take a mundane event and spin a wild tale.

Which, in turn, leads me to think about free-association and how we writers can utilize the same creative skills when the failure to come up with a single good idea plagues us.

Gabriele Lusser Rico wrote a book called Writing the Natural Way, which focuses on right brain/left brain issues and how a method of free-association she calls clustering helps writers access their creativity.  It is possibly one of the best books I've ever read. By using techniques she recommends, or by following Bill's example and pretending to be a pretzel and imagining what will happen when some human's hand reaches into your home (er...bag), you can access creativity you never realized existed.

When my children were very small, the four of us used to climb onto my bed before bedtime, and create stories.  One of us would begin with a premise:  Once upon a time, a gerbil escaped his cage and climbed into a bird cage inhabited by...  Another of us would continue the story and we'd take turns, transforming a silly premise into a wild and hairy adventure.  Much like the story I tried to get going several blogposts ago with the handsome couple sitting on the bus.  The assassin is my son's girlfriend and the handsome guy is--you guessed it--my son.  (Thank goodness they both have good sense of humor and love me!)

What do YOU do to get those creative juices flowing?

P.S.  Here is the link to Bill's funny blogpost and to Gabriele Lusser Rico's website.

Song Lyrics

Have you ever had a song lyric prompt a book?  A scene in a book?  A short story?  Or just simply get your mind running along a track it couldn't get off of?

I have.  Here are a few that have gotten me thinking in recent weeks.  Feel free to share yours.

• ...I realize you're easy on the eyes, hard on the heart...
• ...dancing backwards in high heels...
• ...and when he died, all he left us was alone...

Am I Related to the Energizer Bunny?

Yes!

In addition to working at the two businesses I own, and progressing on my current mystery, I have been fortunate enough to secure some businesss writing contracts.

Funny how life works.  I deliberately eliminated virtually all of my business travel in 2010 so I could focus on my writing.  Then along came this wonderful opportunity.  You'd think that spending hours each week writing insurance texts would slow my fiction writing down.

NOT!

I'm on a roll.  And writing better than ever.  One thing about writing business stuff:  you don't have to worry about not having an idea or figuring out what comes next.  That confidence (and the organizational skills) seem to be worming their way into my fiction.  Lucky me.

Yup.  I'm loving 2010.

And so long as it's only my page-output that keeps reproducing, I don't mind being related to that pink bunny.

P.S.  The Energizer Bunny's website is:  http://www.energizer.com/Pages/default.aspx