BRAINSTORMING & PLOTTING

BRAINSTORMING AND PLOTTING

If stories come to you faster than you can write them down, brainstorming can still be useful tools at many stages of the novel. Start now wherever you are in the process.

But suppose you want to start a new book. One way to start a new book is to grab a random idea and see where it takes you. In my novel BILLBOARD COP, I was waiting in Aina Haina parking lot for my buddy. A shiny Mercedes entered the lot and parked. A handsome, well-dressed man (a 15 in a range of 1-10) got out of the car and walked over to a rusty dented Ford. He looked around, then wrote something on a card and placed it under the windshield wiper. When he returned to his car, he stood outside, looking indecisive, then finally climbed back into his car. Before he exited the lot, I was already dreaming up stories to explain what was going on and what he’d written on the card.

The nice car versus old car made me think of Cinderella. But no, that wasn’t where this story was headed. The whole story began to fold in my head. Yet, it had nothing to do with the card, the card had turned into a billboard. I was going to Boston that weekend and the idea churned in my mind. I knew the story would be a romantic intrigue, because that is what I write, and the setting would be Boston. I had experience with gas-leaking service stations, land acquisitions, and government. Hmm. The story would include those elements, I decided. Then I started the wild brainstorming, putting down ideas, good or bad, as fast as I could. That was while in flight. By the time I arrived in Boston, I had pages of brainstorming. Then, after week in a hotel room, BILLBOARD COP was born.



BRAINSTORMING TYPES
WILD BRAINSTORMING



Wild brainstorming works great in groups or alone. The idea of wild brainstorming is to dump ideas onto paper as fast as you can. We use this process to trigger ideas when we have nothing in mind. But I know most of us always have something churning in the brain cells. It is helpful to start with a stack of blank 3x5 cards. Take one card and write down any topic that comes to mind, love, hate, adoption from a foreign country, adoption of a handicapped child, divorce, loss of money, finding a suitcase full of money. Or go with animals, cats, dogs, wolves, horses. Or relatives, aunts, uncles, mother, step-mother, sisters brothers, cousins. Then, if the novel is an intrigue, someone has to die or someone has to murder them. Try a place, Russia, Hawaii, Utah, Las Vegas. I’ll bet each of you can grab any of those dumb ideas and weave them into a story. If not, start putting down more things, silver, gold, veils, kings, brides. Still no trigger?

Take your next card and write down as many conflicts as come into your mind, maybe use something from the first card.

Now on a third card, make two columns of unlikely characters. A nun and a convict, a lawyer and a murderer, a rancher and a Hollywood star, a baseball player and a woman who hates sports, or maybe she is the league owner, a detective who hates reporters and a reporter, or a ranch owner and a woman who likes town living, a preacher and a prostitute and so forth--you get the idea.





STRUCTURED BRAINSTORMING



This is the process used when you already have an idea, but are searching for new possibilities. I used structured brainstorming in my last job. In our inter-agency meetings, we knew what the outcome had to be, but we wanted input on how best to achieve it in the most inventive and less costly way. In seconds, we would catch fire with enthusiasm. You can do the same thing with a firm idea. You toss the idea out, say what you hope to accomplish and then sit back and let the group take the idea and build on it.

Structured brainstorming takes more thought, but the ideas still have to gush out fast. Say you want to write a woman’s fiction story to help others. Maybe you have gone through the ordeal yourself and have helpful things to say about the topic, but you want some ideas on how to present it. Should it be set in the ghetto, in a hospital, on a ranch? Should there be a love story along with it? What two unlikely characters would be guaranteed to butt heads?

Great characters are often a little wacky, colorful, theatrical, exaggerated, flamboyant, ditzy, dizzy and contrary. Look at the Wedding Singer. He flashed through extremes constantly. The creation of wacky characters can be fun. One way to exaggerate a trait is to make it way out there: a fanatical love of pickles with peanut butter or hatred of snakes, bugs, or sharks. Or an obsessive love of trains, or electronic eavesdropping, or a compulsive need to climb up on high places to think and a hero who is afraid of heights. Extremism in anything will serve. Maybe pit a character who believes in living life to the fullest, and damn the consequences with a character who is ultra cautious.

Wacky characters add spice to serious characters. They act as a foil. The use of foils is a literary device for enhancing the traits of one character by contrasting them with the opposite traits of another. Brainstorming can help with this.





PLOTTING YOUR STORY



This is where the “story arc” is developed to keep you on track. The conflict must be ever-present. Menacing your characters is the name of the game. What is the worst thing that can happen at this moment? Brainstorm this. How many characters do you need to tell the story and make the lead characters shine? What will be the reoccurring theme? What kind of setting do you need to show this story at its best advantage? What kind of weather? How can we gain sympathy, empathy for and identify with our characters? Virtually any predicament that brings physical, mental, or spiritual suffering to the character will earn the reader's sympathy: Loneliness, lovelessness, humiliation, deprivation, repression embarrassment, danger. As we plot, we need to keep all of this in mind. We thrust our characters into crisis, then light the fuse.

When we plot a story, we must have memorable characters and plot twists. Brainstorm plot twists, unique characters, and the desperation they need to fire them up and push them into action. Dynamic characters have conflicting emotions and destructive desires. Such emotions as: ambition, love, faith, lust or whatever inner emotional fires are raging are the forces that are pulling dynamic characters in more than one direction. Dynamic character resolve these inner conflicts by taking actions that will lead to more story conflict and more inner conflict.. Brainstorm inter-conflicts.

Brainstorming, character contrast and setting. Rube in city. City girl on farm. Poor girl in elite clique. To set your characters off and plunge them into immediate difficulties, put them somewhere where they don't belong, where the action forces them to deal with new and possibly frightening circumstances. Give your characters intriguing backgrounds, make them have unusual ideas and insights, let some of them be wacky, contrast them well with each other and their setting, maybe even give them a dual nature. It is great to brainstorm this and let the group take some risks and see what develops.

Brainstorm the ruling passion. A characters central motivating force is the sum total of all the forces and drives within him. The ruling passion might be to commit the perfect crime, or become a great preacher, or pickpocket or art forger. It might be something less specific, like to be a good husband, wife. The ruling passion determines what the character will do when faced with dilemmas he or she must overcome in the course of the story

Our character has a dormant and an active ruling passion. The dormant one still defines his character for the writer, but is not what motivates him. For instance, if he is suddenly accused of murder. At all times, the characters must drive themselves with at least one ruling passion. However, what motivates him in one scene may not be the original passion but he may return to it once the present crisis is past. Brainstorm the chain reaction where something happens to the character that sets off a series of events, leading to some kind of climax and resolution.

It is easy to see that brainstorming can helpful at many stages of the novel to spice it up and do the unexpected and give our readers the surprises they crave. Aloha, Lynde

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Post date and time 1-17-2010 3:36 P.M.