NaNoWriMo Dynamic Beginnings

I've blogged many times about the importance of a good opening hook. You can see my post about strong beginnings in First Impression and Lasting Impact. So how did I begin my NaNoWriMo novel today?

With two characters discussing the weather. Yep. This went on for about three pages. It was utter rubbish.

But...

It doesn't matter. There's a good argument for writing weak beginnings and material to just be scrapped later; it's a first draft. I had a rough idea of my plot planned out, but I wasn't prepared to spend time working out exactly where the story should start. I got about six pages done today and I think my story will actually begin about page three (which was Chekov's exact prediction - write your story, then throw out the first three pages). Plus, I was sticking to my theory, if you can't think of anything to write... write anyway (I include this as a tip on writing when you're stuck in Thinking About Writing)

After a long bout of weather-chatting, today my protagonist was merrily digging away and discovered a... severed hand! Yuck enough for most, but for her, even more so. When she touches dead things, she gets a flash of how they died. Turns out the hand was not an accidental death by misadventure caught up in the land explosives clearing dirt. She was murdered.

Anywhoos, I was happy with my word count, I hit 2,634 and will probably get a few words down tonight before bed.  Did you start your novel today (I know we're all on different time zones)? How'd you go? Love it or Hate it?

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NaNoWriMo Ready

The clock is ticking, NaNoWriMo begins... tomorrow morning!


Come join the madness, and friend me at NaNoWriMo here.

Last year I worked out my plot by starting with a brainstorming (also known as Clustering) session. This year I had my story prompt from a character exercise I did at the recent CYA Writer's Conference (you can see my post about it at Character to Plot Workshop).

Our family workshop (because, yes I make my whole family join in) was to write down our story premise (one sentence that sums up what your story is about), mine was: Psychic paleontologist tries to solve a murder after receiving a vision of the victim's death.

Then we wrote down, as a dot point, just ONE thing that could happen in our story, mine was:

• Dusty finds a body.

Then we passed our notebook around the table and, based on our premise and dot point, each person would add their own dot point of a plot idea that could happen in the story. This would work well with a critique group because you'd get lots of ideas. These are the ones I found in my notebook:

• A dig explosion goes off early, burying a volunteer - was it an accident or something more sinister?
• When Dusty accidentally touches the body she sees the killer has a cute little teddy bear.
• Dusty love jello.

Once we received our books back we went on to write as many plot ideas for our own story as we could. You just write ANYTHING that could happen in the story, small or significant. You do not have to use the suggestions given to you, but you're not allowed to cross them out either. All ideas are there to inspire.

The great thing about this approach is if you get 40 ideas and write out each one as a scene or chapter, you could easily reach your 50,000 words.

In last year's NaNoWriMo our family all included an evil Pomeranian puppy within our story, I look forward to seeing what quirky element or character we can share this year.

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Forgetting Dreams

Image from http://www.kylemstone.com/paintings34.html

I've had a bit of a fascination about dreams lately and how they can be used for inspiration for plot ideas.

In 7 Tips for Keeping a Writer's Dream Diary, we talked about writing down your dreams because they're so hard to remember. I was curious. Why are they hard to remember? So... I did some research.

Do we all dream?

Seems to be a difference of opinion here. The Naked Scientist says we probably have more than four dreams each night. The one we remember is more likely the one we have as we come out of deep sleep towards waking.

But, Dreamsearch believes some people dream very little or maybe not at all. Although this site also says we are not sure if animals dream, and if you've ever owned a dog and seen them running, growling and wagging their tail in their sleep, you'll know better.

Why do we forget dreams?

The Naked Scientist tells us that dreams create short-term memories, and because we often don't consciously move those images to our long-term memory, we quickly forget them. This is why you are more likely to remember a dream if you are awakened during it.

Other theories included Freud's idea that dreams are our secret wishes and desires, so we decide to suppress them. That doesn't really work for me because there are plenty of dreams I wish I could have suppressed, but didn't.

And that because we move in our dreams through our imagination we are tying our memory to that kinetic memory, but when we wake we move our body physically (stretch, sit up or reach for the alarm) and this breaks the link between our dream state and physical state. This theory suggests lying very still upon waking, with your eyes still closed to recall your dream before moving your body.

I wonder if my pets remember their dreams?

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Turning Dreams into Stories

 

I love this image I found at: www.josephinewall.co.uk/stairway.html 

In my last post, 7 Tips for Keeping a Writer's Dream Diary, I talked about ways to provoke, inspire and remember your dreams. But what if you have a big list of bizarre images, how does that help you create a story or add to your WIP?

Don't worry if you think your dreams don't make sense, mine hardly ever do. To show you how I turn a dream sequence into a plot idea, I'll give you an example of a dream I had just a couple of nights ago. This is how I recorded the dream:

Black Tweety-bird, human size. Lives in it's own house.

For some reason it's essential to modern society, it performs some necessary function for our lifestyle and it's a machine.

It's lonely.

The people try to find it a match, they send them in boxes with barcodes.

The robot (it's changed now) scans the barcodes to get a probability percentage of happiness with the match.

Finds a reasonably high percent and chooses that box.

It's changed again and is a woman. The match is a man with his two kids, they move in.

The kids are thrilled but the man is not.

What the...?

After brainstorming the idea with my daughter, we came up with this story plot:

Woman with OCD, decides to find herself a partner because she's lonely. She can't stand the idea of taking her chances with strangers, so she joins a dating service. She's sold by the idea they will give her a percentage rating of compatibility with each match. She's a numbers girl (really, she sometimes has to recite increments of seven or count the number of parked cars she passes on a walk).

Let's call her Nancy. Nancy agrees to a date with a man she's never met or seen, because the lady who runs the agency (let's call her Jill) told her the compatibility was 98%. That's good odds.

But...

Jill has a loser brother called Chris, he gambles, drinks and picks up cheap women. Party-boy Chris thinks it will be easy to pray on desperate woman looking for dates through the agency. No way is Jill going to let him join. So... Chris steals the identity of one James Brown, accountant and prepares to turn up to meet his blind date - Nancy.

This couple has nothing in common. Chris is wild and unpredictable and Nancy is straight-laced and needs routine. She is not impressed by Chris, but believes in the numbers so much that she overlooks all his obvious faults.

Chris has never had to work so hard to win over a date, but he can not accept failure - womanising is the only thing he's been proud off. He has to pretend to be a bit more like she'd want, less drinking, less flirting. He even turns up for the job interview she helps arrange for him, and to his disappointment, he gets it. He finds Nancy's ways rubbing off a bit, he's started washing his hands three times before and after meals and has caught himself counting parked cars.

Nancy slowly starts to unwind. She's still OCD, but learns to have fun in spontaneous moments as well.

Finally it looks like Chris will get his night of passion with Nancy, but...

Jill finds out what her brother has done and rings Nancy to warn, just as Nancy was heading to the bedroom! Nancy storms out.

Chris is miserable. He can't even be bothered getting back into the drink and gambling.

Nancy dates the real James Brown, accountant. She discovers he would have indeed been perfect for her, but... that was before she met Chris, before she started to change.

Jill realises she's interrupted true love when she allows her brother to join the agency and runs his statistics to find his perfect match is Nancy. She arranges a secret blind date for them so the lovers will be  reunited. They find compatibility is not about being the same, but about creating a balance with differences.

I'm sure your dreams won't be any worse than a lonely giant-Tweety-bird, so see what plot ideas you can get from your dream notes.

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7 Tips for Keeping a Writer's Dream Diary

As part of our NaNoWriMo preparations, we (the family writing group) are keeping diaries of our dreams. You have to be quick writing them down because dreams disappear quickly upon waking. Hmm, I wonder why that is - do you know? I'm sure there will be a fascinating scientific reason we don't keep those memories handy.

 

The idea is we can take the abstract dream ideas and brainstorm story plots. Do you record dreams? Here's some tips:

1. Make sure your paper and pen are right by your bedside, chances are you won't bother getting up in the night to find them.
2. If you can't see well enough to write immediately (my eyes are blurry for about an hour after waking), you can say the dream out loud to help solidify the memory.
3. Think about your WIP as you drift off to sleep. Talk to your characters, this might help you dream about them.
4. Don't try to write a sensible narrative of your dream, just scrible images and interactions as you remember them. They don't have to make sense, you can use them as writing prompts later.
5. Meditate before sleep to promote vivid dreams. I've posted about hypnosis for writing before in Stories from the Subconscious I use a hypnosis recording on my iPhone. You can also learn self-hypnosis. Try iTunes for plenty of free hypnosis podcasts.
6. Fall asleep listening to an audio book. I do this accidently sometimes and it always prompts weird dreams.
7. Reading fiction right before bed can get your brain in an imaginative mood.

Here's some recordings that I use:

Do you have any tips on encouraging vivid dreams?

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8 Secrets to Success for Writers

I love Ted Talks, there are some brilliant minds sharing innovations, motivation and inspiration. I recently came across a fantastic 3 minute talk by Richard St. John, sharing the 8 secrets to success. These elements rang true to me for writers, so I wanted to share.

What Leads to Success:

1. Passion - I've blogged about this before in Z is for Zen, If you don't love what you do, find something else you do love doing. You should write to fill yourself with joy and satisfaction. Write because you must.
2. Work - All things of value in life come with great effort. Be prepared to put in the hours and send out the queries and rewrite your novel for the hundredth time. Don't whip up a first draft and assume other people will edit it for you.
3. Good - Skill is a basic ingredient to success. How do you get good at writing? Learn from the experienced, read to expose yourself to good writing and... practice, practice, practice. 
4. Focus - Tune your energy and attention to the task at hand. Sometimes this may require switching off the internet and other distractions. You're here to write, so write.
5. Push - Keep going, despite every hurdle. The only way to guarantee you won't make it, is to stop now. Push yourself physically and mentally. Met your word quota for the day? Double it!
6. Serve - To become successful at anything you can not be only meeting your own needs. Serve others, in writing this means write for your reader, not for yourself. You think that scene is just perfect, but your beta readers all tell you it's just backstory and confuses the flow of the narrative? You know what you have to do.
7. Ideas - Keep your imagination active. Always have your notebook (or your notes app on your iPhone) and record interesting dialogue, story plots that come to mind and anything that inspires. Journal and record your dreams.
8. Persist - When you hit that first rejection this will be the hardest element to hold onto. If you are truly passionate about writing you won't give up. Keep trying, keep sending stories out there. Keep getting better.

Click below to see this motivational talk by Richard St Johns:

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Formula for Creativity

A little bit rude, but...

Still think there's no set formula for creativity? See how these boys have figured out the secret to writing hit songs. BE WARNED - Aussie boys using course language, not suitable for children at all! (but very entertaining and clever):

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