From Jan 9th Meeting

Jan 9th – Picking your topic

“Coax new stories from classic plots by setting them in a different time and place; search through the timeless motifs of myth, fairy tale, and folklore; scour the expanses of your own experiences to spark new ideas. Let your memories come alive!
Some memories inspire us, other haunt us. Some memories cling to things we own, others hover around places we’ve been. Start with what you have, then nurture that fragment of memory: your teacher’s face, the smell of your grandmother’s cookies, the charming way your father used to whistle, the chill in your soul as you rushed to the hospital, the taste of salt spray that summer at the ocean, how it felt to hold your daughter’s hand for the first time. Turn those memories over in your mind, flesh them out, allow them to breath.”

L.I.F.E. – Literature, Imagination, Folklore and Experience

“Creativity isn’t seeing what no one else sees; it’s seeing what anyone else would see – if only they were looking. Ideas come when we peer at the world through another set of eyes.
So, look at your story from another person’s perspective. Step into the shoes of your main character and write a journal entry, a complaint letter, or a love note. Switch your point of view. Write a few paragraphs in first or third person. Think of how you would respond if you were in the story. Walk through the action, stand on your desk, crawl on the floor. And keep your eyes open for the doors no one else has noticed.”

“If you are drained of ideas, you might be trying too hard. You can’t make happy chance discoveries until you step away and stop worrying. Relax. Worrying about problems is like looking at bacteria through a microscope – it doesn’t help ‘em go away, t only makes ‘em look bigger.
So work smarter, not harder. Break your routine. Go to a movie. Have a cup of coffee. Abstain from octopus. Try writing in a different place or at a different time. Lift weights. Get up in the middle of the night. Place yourself in situations where you’re not at ease – risking and responding to new challenges forces you to think creatively and opens the door for serendipity.”

“Writers don’t have a viewfinder. The lens we look through is as large as our imagination. And when we can’t think of what to write next, we often try generating more ideas when we really need to set more limits. Skilled photographers carefully frame their shots just right. Skilled writers carefully fence in their ideas.
Nothing stalls writing more effectively than lack of focus. Freedom to write anything usually ends up as an excuse for not writing anything.”

“Question where you’re going. Don’t assume that you’re heading in the right direction just because you’re picking up from where you left off yesterday.”

Edited by Meg Leder, Jack Heffron and the editors of Writer’s Digest. The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing. Steven James. "Pumping Up Your Creativity". Pp 204-208



“Write about what you know. On the other hand, some writers advise: Write about what you don’t know because you will be free to imagine; knowledge will constrict you. James’ method of writing from a glimpse- so that you don’t know much about the people in particular but do know about their world (James’ novelist knew a lot about French Protestantism)- should give you a perfect compromise: enough knowledge but also enough ignorance and darkness to guess and imagine.”

“I must say, however, that I have seen many people blindly follow an outline of an event in a story (they say, “But that’s what happened!”) even when some simple, made-up adjustment might lead to a better more rounded story.”

“How much one needs to know about what one writes varies from writer to writer and from story to story. As you write, let that be a constant assignment: Find out how much you need to know about the raw material from which you make a story. If you find out that you persevere in reconstructing events from memory as faithfully as possible, without following impulses to make up anything, or even to exaggerate and beautify or uglify details, you are a natural nonfiction writer. You might still call what you write fiction, if you like, though the term will then be the only fiction in your writing. If you can with a straight face tell people that what you write is fiction, you will often find yourself in a precarious position to explain how you made something up. I would then advise you to acknowledge that you write nonfiction, and enjoy the apple of that tree of knowledge. There’s no reason to consider fiction more glorious than nonfiction.
The reverse also can occur. You might want to become a nonfiction writer, and yet at every turn you distort things, exaggerate and embellish them, and even introduce characters, places and events that had nothing to do with the original material. In that case you are a born fiction writer, which is nicer than saying you are a born liar. Fiction is a lot like lying. You start from something real, but for some specific purpose (not to get caught, to trick, to get money or whatever) you change at least one key element of the account.”

“Robin Hemley (author of The Last Studebaker and All You Can Eat) says he works from dreams. One impression from a dream is enough to inspire a story. For example, he awoke with an image of a man digging a hole in his ex-wife’s yard. He wondered why one would do something so bizarre, and in trying to answer the question he wrote a story about a man and a woman whose baby dies, who divorce, and now the man, haunted by guilt and love, digs in the yard.”

Get ideas from your childhood, your ancestors, and books

Novakovich, Joship. Fiction Writer’s Workshop. Story Press. 1995.