Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

Today I’d like to welcome Kathy McIntosh to the blog. Kathy is an editor, PR expert, professional speaker, and professed word lover.

BRAINSTORMING FOR FICTION WRITERS: Get Drenched in Ideas

Whether you have a novel plotted in your head, or have a few simple thoughts about a character, an event, or a terrific action scene, the end product can benefit from a good initial brainstorming session with trusted writer colleagues.

Brainstorming is particularly useful if you’re both at the point of beginning a new novel.

Brainstorming allows you to dig deeper into ideas and find fresh dirt. When you’re seeking a word or a phrase, the first three are often trite. If you scribble down a few more, you get past the top of mind, often-used, dusty ones to something with sparkle.

The same holds true for your plot and characters. Having one or two trusted friends help you dig makes the work easier and faster, and you get the benefit of someone else’s creativity.

You also have the opportunity for fun with other scribblers, a rare treat for solitary writers.

Suggestions for better brainstorming:
1. Be certain you trust the person you’re sharing your precious ideas with. Although some would argue you risk having your ideas stolen, my concern is for your self-confidence, your fragile writer’s ego. Your team members need to be able to accept your ideas or challenge them, suggest adaptations and alterations, without ever attacking you as a writer (or as a person!). Of course, you need to remember not to take comments personally. This is work and the words and ideas are not you; they are words and ideas.

2. Have a flip chart with lots of paper for taking notes on ideas. Record everything!

3. Come to the brainstorming session with your ideas or problems in mind. No make that with notes on your ideas and problems. These thoughts will be the board you’ll jump from to brainstorm. (Would that then be brainswimming?) This can be just notes you’ve dashed down, stream of consciousness ideas or more structured, depending on your style. Some people even have drawings to stimulate their thinking.

4. Have yummy snacks and easily prepared meals. Do remember to take breaks, possibly a walk. Refresh your creative mind.

5. Spend time before you begin to set discussion parameters:
Will one person who is a wiz at brainstorming lead all sessions or will each writer lead the discussion on his or her work?

Decide how far you want to go. Some writers think they need only a bare bones idea and then will be able to run with it. Maybe so, but the purpose of brainstorming is to pick the brains of another writer. He or she might head in a different direction and you might LOVE that direction.

6. Follow the rules of brainstorming:
No bad ideas, everything is written down.

Don’t worry about repetition. The same thing said at a different time may spark new ideas.

Don’t stop and discuss. Just record lots of ideas first and think about them later. Do ask for clarification. Be sure what you write down is not edited but is clear to all (a one word idea that’s perfectly clear in the morning may be meaningless by midnight)

Before you start, set time guidelines and stay within them. Maybe 50 minutes on each person’s main plot problem and the ways things get worse; 20 minutes on each protagonist and each antagonist; 20 minutes on the secondary characters. If you’re really on a roll that you don’t want to stop, decide together how much more time to allocate to that topic.

Think outside the box. If an idea comes to you, don’t let your internal editor tell you it’s silly. Speak up and share it. Trust that no one will belittle your contribution. (And if someone does, provide a gentle reminder of the guidelines)

7. Ways to Generate Ideas
Try using the question “What if…” when considering your plot and your characters.

What if your protagonist is a dwarf instead of an executive for a conglomerate?

What if your villain has always wanted to be on Survivor?

Use mind mapping or clustering, too! Start with a word (perhaps a description of your character) in a circle and branch out from there. I posted about mind mapping last year.

8. Be flexible.
Get up and stretch from time to time.

If one approach isn’t working to get ideas flowing, try another. There will be moments of silence, empty of ideas. Allow them.

Thanks so much for guest blogging today, Kathy! You can visit Kathy at her blog, Well Placed Words. I’m curious to find out everyone’s techniques for brainstorming—do you write it all down? Try to keep it in your head? What works for you?

And please join me tomorrow when Kit Dunsmore posts on Hiking Through A Quilted Garden: Metaphors For Writing Fiction.

All day on Monday, I had the feeling that something was wrong.

I’d set my writing goal for the day. I had a couple of errands that I needed to do.

But I felt completely lethargic. And I couldn’t think very well. I wrote some pages and looked at them with disbelief. I’d written this?

The kids came home from school. I started going through backpacks and getting supper ready…very sloooowwly.

Finally I realized—I needed to go to the doctor.

Sinus infection.

If I’d only paid attention to myself earlier, maybe I could have started on an antibiotic the day before.

Y’all know I’m a fan of editing after the first draft is finished. But sometimes there’s just something wrong with the manuscript—an underlying, bad feeling that you get when you sit down to work with it.

If you don’t address that feeling that something is wrong, you could get so frustrated with the manuscript that you give up on it.

Yesterday I focused on potholes in stories to be edited out at the end. Below are some big, content-type problems that sometimes need special attention—maybe even while writing the first draft.

Signs Something Isn’t Working:

• You can’t logically explain what motivates the protagonist’s behavior.
• Along the same lines, your character has completely changed with no reasonable explanation.
• The plot is too derivative. You haven’t spun the old plot until it seems like something fresh.
• You can’t get into the protagonist’s head. They seem flat. You can’t identify with them at all.
• The plot limps along with no discernable conflict.
• There’s too much conflict and it changes from one thing to another. There’s no primary focus. There’s no theme, just ‘the world vs. John Smith.’
• There’s no hook to the novel.
• There’s only external conflict and no internal conflict for the main character.
• The protagonist is unlikeable.
• The protagonist isn’t interesting enough to carry a story.
• The reader might not be able to tell who the protagonist is.
• There’s no readily-identifiable antagonist. There’s just bad stuff that happens.
• Your content is a mess with flashbacks, backstory, telling instead of showing, too many dialogue tags, and point of view issues.
• Your characters aren’t original. They’re more like stock characters (the alcoholic cop, the snooty society lady, the shy librarian).

What do you do when you realize one or more of these things are happening? Some people start over from scratch. Some people will finish the manuscript and then do major revisions afterwards.

I like to just mark the point in the manuscript that I realized the problem with Microsoft Word’s highlighter…and start, at that point, writing differently for the rest of the book. I fix the original problem during revisions.

Have you run into these problems before? What do you do when you realize they’re happening?

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Tomorrow, my guest at Mystery Writing is Murder will be Kathy McIntosh. She’ll give us 7 tips for better brainstorming with her post “Get Drenched in Ideas.” Please join us!

Potholes aren’t usually a problem here in Matthews, North Carolina.

That’s because we’ve been in a drought for years–there wasn’t any moisture on the roads to cause any potholes.

Now, of course, we’re caught in some crazy monsoon pattern and my simple suburban drive to the store is now a treacherous route embedded with potholes that seem to reach down to China. And somehow, I never realize they’re there until I’m in one.

My first drafts are just as susceptible to potholes.

Things I look out for when revising:

Character Issues: Are there any secondary characters that need more depth? Are the characters all clearly different from each other? Do they have realistic motivation? Do they stay in character?

Plot issues: Is the plot fairly linear? Does it make sense?

Conflict: Is the conflict strong enough to power the plot? Is the conflict major or is it just a minor misunderstanding that could easily be resolved? Is there both internal and external conflict?

Scenes: Are they necessary? Do the scenes impact the main plot or the subplot?

Mechanics: Check for word repetition (I know my favorite words that need to be cut.) I read aloud for sentence and word flow. Is something awkwardly constructed? I look for typos and spelling. Are the dialogue tags okay? (For me this means I might not have enough tags to attribute the speaker. For others it might mean that tags or adverbs should be cut.)

Pace: Is the story moving fast enough? Too fast?

Voice: Did I maintain it? Are there sections that sound flat?

Beginnings and endings: Will the beginning hook readers? Is the ending satisfying and have I tied up all the loose ends?

Timeline errors: Are the events of the story in order?

Continuity errors: Is someone wearing one outfit at the beginning of the scene and something different by the end of the scene (without changing clothes?) Does it change from day to night and back again in the course of a page?

One more thing about the potholes here in Matthews. They’re allowed to happen. There’s no road crew perched at the side of the road in an asphalt truck, filling holes as they appear.

Instead, the prevailing attitude here seems to be that they wait until the rainy spell is over and then they fill all the holes at once.

Either way, whether they’re fixed as they open or after a whole minefield of them has sprung up, the potholes do all get filled.

You wouldn’t think those three inches of snow we got Friday would make such a mess of the roads. The brine and the melting, muddy snow was tossed up on my car from cars and trucks and sent me off to the car wash Sunday.

As I do any time I’m waiting for longer than 5 minutes, I pulled out my notebook and started writing, right there in the car wash waiting room. I even had a handy dandy note to myself at the top of the page, to remind me where I needed to pick up the story.

A couple of minutes later, someone plopped down in the seat next to me. This was a little annoying to me, since the car wash waiting room had plenty of extra seats. But I’ve gotten really disciplined, so I kept writing without even looking up.

“Hi babe,” said this really odd voice. Oh great. I leaned way over to the right, away from the weird man and continued writing (although I was pretty sure I was writing complete crap by now.)

“Come here often?” asked the strange voice. “Whatcha writin’?”

I drew in a deep breath and looked up, scowling in a most discouraging, icy, and—I hoped—unattractive way.

And saw my husband grinning at me.

I could have wrung his neck. He’d done a great job disguising his voice and wasn’t supposed to be there—but he was getting his car inspected next door (North Carolina has annual emissions and equipment testing) and had seen me drive in, so he’d walked over.

We had a nice little conversation…although, technically, he was keeping me from my goal. My plan was to get some work done in the 15-20 minutes that it took to wash and vacuum my car. It was a very small hiccup in my plan to fit writing in on a chaotic Sunday, but I had been thwarted. In the nicest possible way, of course.

I realized, later, that I’ve written a lot of little hiccups in my plots, too. It doesn’t always have to be Lex Luthor armed with Kryptonite to temporarily keep a protagonist from their goal and create a little stress. Yes, I have a killer on the rampage, throwing up all kinds of roadblocks and determined to keep my sleuth from finding out his identity. But there are other small obstacles for discovering the truth.

It can be an ordinary or trivial thing that takes the day on a new path:

An unexpected visit by a well-meaning friend.

A long phone call.

Car trouble.

Power outage.

Computers that aren’t working.

Characters who discourage or doubt our protagonist’s abilities.

A broken alarm clock.

Poor health.

Lies our protagonist believes are truths (my suspects lie to my sleuth all the time.)

These are small things…but they make believable conflicts that can put our protagonist at the wrong place at the wrong time, send them off in an unproductive direction, or temporarily keep them from their goal.

You still have the main conflict going on in the background. We still need the Lex Luthors in the story. But it’s great to work in extra bits of conflict, delays, and distractions, too.

And the nice thing is that readers won’t even think our storyline hiccups farfetched.

Because our days are full of distractions.

I have a hard time keeping my seventh grade son in books. It’s a nice problem to have.

After scouring some book blogs, I came up with four books that had been highly recommended by (admittedly) adults.

I put the books up in his room. After a few hours, he came out.

“Mom? I don’t mean anything by this…but I hate all those books you got me.”

I sat back in the chair and stared at him. “But they’re supposed to be good!”

“They’re depressing. I read the first four or five chapters of all of them. I feel like I know the characters and they’re in these hopeless situations and depressing things keep happening.”

“Well, but honey, I’m positive the books will end happily. They’re YA.”

He gave a short laugh. “No. They don’t end well. Because when I realized I’d never in a million years read these books all the way through, I read the endings. They all had these awful endings. And now I can’t get the stories out of my head!”

I’d spent a good hour researching books for him. I thought that at least one of the books would make the cut.

This made me realize that many books and movies that are critically acclaimed aren’t the happiest stories in the world. And they might not be right for everybody. I seemed to have wandered into the literary fiction area of YA.

My son seems to like stories of people in difficult circumstances that rise above them. He likes steps toward conflict resolution fairly early—with setbacks and challenges continuing. I see him as a fantasy/sci fi reader mainly.

The books he wasn’t interested in seemed to have this sort of a pattern:

Opening crisis.
Deepening crisis.
More characters are introduced and they are sucked into the crisis, exacerbating the tension.
The characters encounter setbacks as they struggle for conflict resolution.
There is some hope offered in a couple of plotlines at the end of the book. But not for the main character at the end.

In fact, these books follow a Lord of the Flies pattern almost exactly.

My own stories seem to follow this pattern:

*Initial sunny, happy, quiet scene. (Apart from a foreshadowing prologue.)
*Major conflict. (In my books, this is a violent death.)
*The protagonist takes action to resolve the problem (whodunit).
*A major setback.
*More action by the protagonist. Some progress.
*A confrontation.
*A resolution.

Are your books heavy? Do they end with a happy resolution? Do you see patterns in your plots at all?

If you were following the discussion Friday on genre blending, pop over to the Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen today where guest poster, Dead Air author, and clinical psychologist Mary Kennedy shares insights into developing her character’s personal life at www.MysteryLoversKitchen.com