ANYTHING'S A STORY

When you're stumped for a great idea to write about, lock your creative focus around ONE single, solitary thing.  It can be concrete (like a birdhouse) or abstract (like insanity).  Then, build a brief mental summary around that one thing.  Think of where the story begins, gets interesting, and (if possible) how it ends. 

Then you just sit down and write the f*cker.

Beginning
For example, imagine you're a little kid moving into a quaint suburban home.  Your mom notices a birdhouse hanging from a tree in the backyard, gives you some bread crumbs, and has you load it up.  She has a thing for birds.  You think they poop too much.  Anyway, you do as she says and notice something shiny inside of the birdhouse's round entrance.

Interesting
You pull out a small black remote control with a tiny red button.  When you press it, a section of the backyard slides open to reveal a flight of descending steps.  Stupid and curious, you check it out and stumble upon a secret lair.  Apparently, the previous owner was a super hero who went missing months ago.  But all of his toys are just lying around . . . begging to be used.

End
You and your idiot friends save the hero, stop the villain, and maybe even save the world.  The hero, impressed by your luck/grit/genius, offers to train you all as sidekicks.

All of that came out of a friggin' birdhouse.  If you have a wicked imagination and something to focus it upon, there's no telling where you can go wtih an idea.  This little technique is similar to a writing prompt, but not quite as restrained. 

Okay, now for an abstract idea.

Beginning
You're driving from a party.  While you've had a few drinks, you're not drunk.  Still, your brakes are crap, the road you're on is wet, and your big car slams into a compact and kills four innocent people.  You pass the breathalyzer test (barely) and the whole thing's deemed an accident.  While you feel bad about what happened, you don't think it's your fault.  It's just an act of God.  As you leave the courtroom, the elder sister of one of the victims warns you that you're gonna pay.

Interesting
A week or two, you're off to work, minding your own business, and folks start giving you evil looks.  You notice it when you get your coffee, board the subway, and sit in your cubicle.  By the end of the first day, even your best buds at work are inexplicably mad at you . . . and barely hold it back.  On your way home, folks start attacking you.  At first, it's one or two people.  But then it turns into an angry mob.  Even the cops are shooting at you.  After a few failed attempts at getting help, you hide out in an isolated area. 

You can still safely contact people by phone/e-mail.  But person-to-person contact makes those around you downright hostile toward you.  Then, one day, the elder sister contacts you and tells you that she's leveled an "insanity" curse upon you. 

Anyone you're around will hear "voices" telling them to kill you. The longer you're around people, the more persuasive those "voices" get. In time, even your own mother would kill you.  If you get away from someone affected by this insanity curse, they'll be fine in about a day's time . . . and forget ever trying to kill you.  When you ask her why she did it, she hatefully explains that those four victims meant everything to her.  By killing them, you condemned her to a painful life of solitude.  She's merely returning the favor.


End
Fast-forward a few decades and picture yourself as a lonely old man in a remote cabin.  You invite a reporter to stop by and record your story.  And as you tell the reporter about those terrible days, you wait for the reporter to go berserk and kill you ('cause you want to die).  But nothing happens.  The reporter laughs off your story and leaves.  You ask around and learn that the witch undid the curse years ago, while on her deathbed (but never told you).

Now that's messed up.  And I spent all of twenty minutes spitting this concept up, just by putting a slant on insanity.

Pick something average, ordinary, and boring.  Then make it different, twisted, and part of greater whole.

Adios.    

TWO HAPPY TIMES

Aside from these days, when I'm living my dream, my happiest days of life would probably have been in college.  While I liked to have fun, I wasn't much of a drunken party animal.  I actually hated beer and hadn't yet discovered the magical elixir which we mortals call "mixed drinks".  So, I'd simply swill cans of Coke/Dr. Pepper, mingle, and be weird.  In general, John Carroll University (my alma mater) was NOT a party school.  Oh they tried.  But it just wasn't that kind of place.

What made JCU so awesome for me?  I lived on campus.  Through crappy cafeteria meals, cramped dorm rooms, broke-assed weekeneds, and funky Ohio weather, I chilled out with tens of thousands of people.  And it was awesome!  Yes, there were some pricks amonst them.  But overall, the students were pretty cool to me.  My nerdy, introverted self chilled out with people from different social cliques, ethnicities, and world views.  I even met some like-minded weirdos, some of whom became the best of friends.  While I wrote a teensy bit back then, I was too busy learning and living.

Then came graduation, two-plus miserable years of grad school, backstabbing "friends", student loans, and temp jobs which paid far too little.  That gruelling "survival" thing beat the living shit out of my innocence and left me kind of . . . numb.  I looked ahead and realized that all of that "happily ever crap" were just damned lies that societies tell their young.  And all I was doing was limping along.

Luckily, I had a computer.  It was a gift from my Uncle Nate, just after I picked up my nigh-useless Masters degree.  He (and some anonymous family members) sent it my way, thinking I could pursue some kind of IT degree/training.  While I looked every part of the techno-geek, I didn't have the chops for it.  Instead, in my deepest most miserable stretch of life (since high school, anyway), I booted up that computer and started writing again. 

I've gone through . . . four computers, since then.  Just used 'em up and spat them out.  If I five bucks for every word I typed since '97, I could buy a yacht or two.  At first, the words were rough and raw.  I hadn't taken it seriously since I was a bored little kid.  And while the years to follow didn't get much better, my writing sure as hell did.

It's funny.  Somewhere in my mid-thirties, I looked around and realized that I didn't want to do anything else.  Grow a career?  Not really?  Marriage?  Hell no!  Kids?  Maybe after a frontal lobotomy.  In essence, I've painted myself into a corner.  It's sort of . . . "make it as a writer or bust".

So, those are the two happiest times of my life: college and now.  Are there similarities? Yep. I still mingle with all types of different folks.  I still live, learn, and have some (shreds of) hope that my life story has a decent ending.  And Ohio weather still sucks.  Are there differences?  Oh yes.  I'm older, heavier, and wiser. 

But most importantly, collegiate bliss only lasts 4 years.  Writing, if you love it, can give you a lifetime of creative triumphs and the thrill of creating something today that was only an idea yesterday.     

So if you're snugly in your writing phase, stay there.  It's more real than a college phase, a partying 20-something phase, or even a carrot-cake-at-Friday's phase (don't ask).  Hone your chops.  Devote years to it.  Never stop for more than two weeks at a time (seriously).  And then, when you're ready, share it with a grateful world . . . and (I suspect) you'll be happy while you're doing it.
And, to bastardize a line from Conan the Barbarian (the good one):

"There's nothing in this world you can trust. 
Not men. 
Not women. 
Not beasts. 
But WRITING? 
THIS you can trust!"

THE PERILS OF CREATIVE PARALYSIS

There oughta' be a Surgeon General's Warning branded onto the brain of any writer with a hyper, warped, creative mind.  If your mind's anything like this (mine is), it's full of so many goddamned ideas that you sometimes wonder if you're sane.  The creative tornado in my skull's one of the reasons I must write.  If I could draw beyond stick figures, I'd do art.  If I could carry a tune, I'd do songs (and make millions doing hard-core gangster polka).  Had I been trained to be master thief, I'd probably plan schemes by the dozens.

But thankfully, my Muse happens to involve writing.

Now, we've all heard of "writer's block".  That's when you sit down and try to write something and nothing comes out.  The torturous process of squeezing a story out of your brain's like trying to wring out a mostly-dried towel.  Know what I think of you folks with this dilemma?  I envy you.  Me?  I'm the opposite.  I've thought of five good blog topics in the last half-hour and was so annoyed with myself that I decided to write this one.  It's like having a swarm of garbage flies in my head and I'm unable to get anything done, due to their distracting nature.

Maybe there's a scientific/literary term for this.  Maybe not.  I'm gonna go in an odd direction and call this phenomenon "Creative Paralysis".  The most devastating thing about Creative Paralysis is that it's made me waste so much time trying to figure out which idea to run with that . . . I end up doing nothing.  Ever have that happen?  You've got 10 ideas for a story and none of them jump to the front of the line, so you end up writing zilch?  It's why I do short stories better than books or screenplays. I can "swat" these ideas in my head - one-by-one - much faster with shorter tales. 

It's annoying, believe you me!

So, how do you get past Creative Paralysis and get something done? 

Here are 2 suggestions:

#1 - Set yourself a span of time (say, having a new short story/chapter/poem done every 4 days).  Then go about your day and see what mad ideas scream out at you.  Have a scrap piece of paper and a pen handy.  Give each idea a story title.  And before you go to bed on Day 1, pick one.  No matter what "better" ideas assault you over the next 4 days, (try to) stick with that one.  No matter how crappy that chosen idea is, finish it off by the 4th day. You can always tweak it later.  One idea on paper beats nineteen concepts in your head.  If a newer, better, idea hits you like a school bus . . . jot it down and use it on the next 4-day cycle.

#2 - Go with your gut and wait for an idea to jump to the front of the line.  If you have nothing but time and inclination, just wait.  Don't pick up a pen or paper.  Let the ideas compete for your attention.  Some will stick (because they're that good).  Some you'll actually forget (which is kind of embarrassing at times).  But when a great idea jumps out of the murky depths, you must strike!  Work on it like the world's at stake.  Don't mess with any other project 'til that one's done.  Devote yourself to it like a new lover.

I've done both, with satisfying results.  Before I published "Unheroic", I used Suggestion #2.  I'd jump on a story idea with a lusty smile, finish her off, and move on to the next one.  If you can keep your life reasonably uncluttered, you could create dozens of strong-concept stories within a year.  Don't force it.  Stop whenever you feel burned out.  But don't stray away from it or you'll lose that flow. 

But now that I'm a "writer-businessman", I've gotta wear a lot of hats.  So, while I'm selling "Unheroic", I've also gotta write up X amount of new pieces for future works.  That requires me to use Suggestion #1.  Between my editor and I, any crappy first draft I make can be turned into a masterpiece: given time and rewriting.

Which one do I prefer?  Suggestion #2, of course.  That's how I whipped up over 1,000 pages worth of short stories in about 3 years.  But now, I'm no longer just a writer with an open schedule, a laptop, and a comfy couch.  I've got a teensy little company to run and dozens of books to set up.  Planning requires Suggestion #1.

Sorry this post is so long.  But Creative Paralysis bothers me. 

Hope it helps any sufferers out there.

TO THEME OR NOT TO THEME?

When I wrote "Unheroic", my first inclination was to slap a bunch of short stories together and call it a book.  Luckily, my editor (Ed) talked me out of it.  He argued that short story collections should be centered around a central theme.  This friggin' sucked for me because I wrote a bunch of stories with no particular theme in mind.  I'd just wake up too early in the morning, "puke" a story into existence, and then work on it until it was worthy. 

I had a sizable herd of stories and spent a lot of time going from theme to theme.  I think I had gone through four or five of them before "Unheroic" came up.  The theme I chose was simple: a collection of short stories about characters saving the day who have NO business calling themselves heroic.  Imagine a story where a demon from Hell saves the day?  Or the damsel in distress?  It's a quick, easy-to-explain theme which piqued a lot of people's curiosity and ended up helping my initial sales.

So, when compiling your collection, think of a theme.  Make it ungeneric.  Don't let it be bland.  It's gotta be something you can explain quick and easy-like.  And tuck in enough stories to give the reader a reasonably-sized book of tales to read.  I put 36 into mine, for a little over 200 paperback pages.  If you're writing your theme-based stories from scratch, I'm impressed.  I'd rather write over 100 stories, size them up, and then work out a theme later.  There's more flexibility that way . . . and more room for mistakes (God knows I made a few).