Awooga! Awooga! Stepping into the Landmine of Fan Fiction

Way back before the last ice age, when Cranky Rah's husband, the Poet-Accountant, was still an accountant, he got to audit a nuclear power plant to make sure they had all the uranium they thought they had. (If you're a nuclear power plant and you don't have all the uranium you think you have, that is Bad.)

As you can imagine, there's a lot of security and pretty intense safety procedures at a nuclear facility. The Poet-Accountant didn't have to wear one of those radiation suits, but he did have a special badge that tracked the amount of radiation he was exposed to. Still, I thought the best piece of advice he got was this:

When you hear the awooga! awooga! alarm, drop everything you're doing and run. Upwind. Fast.

This next topic makes me want to do that a little, but I'm going to brave it anyway.

Over the summer, I had a great back and forth with one of The Three. S was struggling with developing one of her characters, and we talked about how she should think about her main character's background and experiences and the character's relationship with other characters and even other characters' relationships with each other and how that might reflect on the main character.

Then one day, I ran into S (okay, actually, I was trying to chase her down at the rock climbing gym but totally failed because I was anchored to another climber), and she announced that she hated her story. That's okay, I told her. When you're stuck, it's all right to set it aside for a little while; you can always go back to it later. "No," she said, "I just hate it."

Yikes. Of course there are times when there's just nothing to write about. Maybe you're really busy or your creativity is totally drained. Maybe you're just not feeling it. Maybe you're thinking it would be better to start an origami boat business with all that paper you bought for writing on. A lot of people who talk about writing will tell you that you have to suck it up and keep writing anyway. Whatever. Unless you're trying to make a living off writing, I honestly don't see the point in forcing it. (Landmine #1!) My advice: Take a break. Chill out. Life's too short to write something you're not passionate about.

Luckily, that wasn't what was going on with S. She wanted to write; she just couldn't. She was having the Dread Writer's Block and didn't know what to do about it.

Here's my controversial advice to S: Trying writing some fan fiction. (Landmine #2!)

Before you freak out and start throwing paper airlines full of rude messages into my cave, hear me out.

A lot of authors complain about fan fiction—and I get it. I don't want people writing about my characters and then posting it all over the Internet, either. (So don't do that.)  

But you're juggling a lot when you write stories: plot, setting, character development (and characters that can't just be interesting but have to change, too), tension, narrative voice, dialogue. It's a lot to bite off, especially for young writers. Borrowing an idea (don't say stealing; we're just absconding with it temporarily) can be a fun and easy way to break through that Wall.

Just find a character or a world you like, one you feel like you already know. Pick a book or story or song you love. Does one of the characters do something you wish they hadn't—or don't do something you wish they had? Did the plot go in a direction you didn't want it to? Use that as a jumping off point and rewrite. Change it. Add new scenes. Introduce new characters.

There's a bad 80s movie (and I mean bad) called Solarbabies. (I told you it was bad.) It was a bad movie (did I mention that?), but I thought some aspects of the premise were kind of interesting. So I played around with rewriting the story. I kept some of the characters and changed others. Some of those others became characters with their own stories. Eventually, an idea for a desert dystopia of my own came out of it. (And perhaps eventually it will make its way out of my brain and into an origami boat.)

Even if nothing ever comes of it, I was writing and practicing and having fun, and that's really the point, especially when you're learning to write.

Here are a few other ideas for destroying the Block:

• Go to a random name generator, and generate until you find a name that makes you go Hmmmm... I also love the site Serendipity, which will generate random descriptions of cities, strongholds and interesting sites, as well as names.
• Do the old Flip the Fairy Tale trick. Think about your favorite fairy tale or nursery rhyme and find a way to rewrite it fresh, a la Cinder. Or write from a secondary character's point of view, a la Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
• Play around with Google Images. Search until you find a person, a locale, an object that fascinates you, then go write about it. 
• Go to the bookstore (or to Amazon.com) and browse book titles. Find one you dig, and write your own story for it.
• Listen to music. The Three love to write from music.
• Take a page from Ray Bradbury. That man loved lists, and he used them to brainstorm. Here's a list he made, starting with the word lake and letting his brain take him wherever it would:

The lake. The night. The crickets. The ravine. The attic. The basement. The trapdoor. The baby. The crowd. The night train. The fog horn. The scythe. The carnival. The carousel. The dwarf. The mirror maze. The skeleton.

Or just wait for it. Ray Bradbury said, "If you have writer's block, you can cure it right now by stopping what you're writing and doing something else."