Jef Peckham writes to ask…
Your latest encore post reminded me of a question that I've thought about for a while. How do you come up with ideas or plot points on which to hang a story/script/article, and then expand it into a full story/script/article?
I'm not talking about "fat cat jokes about Garfield. Hilarity ensues," although after 37 years it may be difficult to find new ones. I'm talking about some new project using characters you may not be totally familiar with, or ones you create yourself.
I've had a few small ideas crop up from time to time that are not in my comfortable wheelhouse, and I'm lost when it comes to expanding them beyond a paragraph. It could mean these ideas may not be worth expanding any further, but since I've never made it beyond that point, I don't know.
Well, if I were you, I'd try an experiment. I'd pick my best idea and I'd commit to writing it to its completion. Don't worry about what might happen if it's not good. Nothing will happen except that you'll have wasted a few hours and probably learned something in the process. Too many new writers write like the minute they finish something, it's going to be read and judged by everyone they know.
They need to get over that. One of the emotional controls a writer requires is to be able to write something, spend days or even weeks on it and then to review it and say, "This isn't good enough" and toss it out and immediately start on a rewrite or something else. It's easier to do that when you're prolific but even if you agonize for hours on every word, you need to be able to do that. (I just wrote a long blog post about Donald Trump, then gave it another read and decided it didn't really say anything that was worth saying. So into the "Probably Not" folder it goes…)
Just write something — and here, I'll give you a push. If you don't have an idea, pick one of these…
- Think of someone in your life you really disliked…someone who wronged you horribly. Then write a fictional story of that person getting punished, humiliated, arrested…whatever they deserve. And don't forget the scene where he or she comes to you and begs you for forgivance.
- Think of someone in your life you lusted after…someone with whom you wished you'd had a romantic involvement. Then write a fictional story of that person coming to you, confessing that the feeling was mutual and the two of you do act upon your mutual yearnings. Make it as dirty as you like.
Pick one, write it and show it to no one. You can delete it once it's done…or for extra credit, leave it for a few weeks, then come back and read it and see if it reads better or worse to you then. The point is that you don't have to write for publication. You can write for yourself. Most of us spend a certain amount of time writing for ourselves whether we know it or not at the time.
I suspect that if you can't write one of the above stories, you can't write much of anything…at least of a fictional nature. But you can write something, Jef. You wrote me that message. You've written many to me and they all seemed reasonably intelligent even when I thought you were dead wrong about some political belief.
You had something to say so you said it in a message. If you have something longer and more important to say, you could use the same muscles and say it in an article or essay. That's what I do. I write messages and then I write essays and I write stories. The software differs and if I'm addressing a large audience instead of one person, I'll probably make an extra effort to be witty or funny or understandable…but it's the same me at the same keyboard.
A lot of folks who want to write but can't need to demystify the act. They think of it as giving a speech in front of the whole world when, in fact, a new writer's efforts aren't much different from writing a letter to a friend. You do that all the time.