Group Hug: Writing From the End

The Three and I had our last writing group of the school year last week, so it seemed appropriate to talk about The End and specifically getting past whatever blocks you have to get to the end of a story you're writing. And since we were talking about writing to the end, I thought it'd be fun to write from the end in our writing exercise.

First we warmed up by writing from the beginning. I offered The Three a set of opening dialogue options (from the random dialogue generator of my favorite random writing stuff generator):

• "You don't think that was just lemonade in your glass, do you?"
• "H-how long have you been standing there?"
• "She's old, and it's about time she died."
• "If you leave now, you lose everything."
• "I knew you wouldn't be able to see it through."
• "He was unconscious when I found him."

Be safe: Squeeze your own lemons.

The Three chose "You don't think that was just lemonade in your glass, do you?" and (after a lively discussion about the grammatical issues in that sentence—I totally la-la these girls) we spent 10 minutes writing the story that starts with that line. Amazing, there was not a death in every story written. Of course, some of the stories had more than one death, so it all averaged out in the end.

After we talked about Getting to the End of a story as a writer, it was time to write again. This time, The Three chose to write from "She's old, and it's about time she died." What I didn't tell them until after they had chosen it was that we weren't going to write from the beginning; we were going to write from the end. They had to write to the piece of dialogue instead of from it.

More death ensued. Of course.

Villains, Redux

Last July, The Three and I talked villains. The Further Four and I just got around to this topic today, mainly because they didn't exist at the time. (Well, the girls existed, individually, just not as a writing group.)

Freewriting villains is fun, so we started out by using Rah's favorite random stuff generator to generate some negative character traits. The three traits the girls liked were rude, secretive and violent. The instructions were simple: Spend five to seven minutes writing a brief bio about a bad guy or girl with those three traits. Make her nasty. Tell me what kinds of horrible things she does.

Yummmmm.

As usual, we got some crazy diversity out of this group of girls who are all about the same age and come from pretty similar backgrounds: adult villains and teen villains and villains of indiscriminate age. Villains who like order and hate long hair; villains who eat bunnies for breakfast; villains who get grounded; and one evocatively named villain called Gobstopper Grasshopper.

After we had our villains firmly in hand, we chatted villainy. This was pretty high level and basic: We talked about how the villain's job is to oppose the main character and cause conflict. We talked about how villains aren't always evil. Sometimes, they're antagonists, like your mom when she destroys your hopes and dreams by not letting you go hang out with your friends because your room still isn't clean.

Most importantly, though, the villain is the hero of her own story. To write a great villain, you need to understand her as well as you understand your main character. You need to answer those three questions: What does my villain want? What's in her way? Does she get it?

To get inside the head of our crazy villains we wrote again, this time from the point of view of the villain. Two rules for this go-round: Write in first person. Don't make your character not evil all of a sudden.

I didn't want these villains to suddenly stop eating bunnies for breakfast; I wanted to know what made that bunny-eater eat bunnies? What had the world done to make him that way? How did he feel about the world being arrayed against him?

Cranky Rah knows how she feels when the world is arrayed against her: Irritable. Vengeful. And in sudden, desperate need of a clean house.

Here's Cranky Rah, her friend Quaker Ann and other
like-minded cleaniacs, power-washing the world.

Group Hug: Playing with Setting

In Rah's world, the word "tomorrow" doesn't always mean "tomorrow." Sometimes it means "I know I said on Thursday I'd post the next day about writing about setting with The Three, but on Friday I was too busy rock climbing and eating tacos (not at the same time), and on Saturday I was too busy rock climbing and eating a Proper Pie (ditto on not at the same time)." I think we can all agree that these are awesome reasons to not get around to posting.

Anyway, The Three and I did write about setting on Thursday. Since so many good things come in threes, our writing exercise about setting had three steps.

Step One: Get a Character

Start by choosing a character name from a random name generator. Spend five minutes writing a brief bio of the character. You can write anything you want about the character, but he or she must be contemporary. The character name we picked was Jude. The Three love an androgynous name.

After we wrote about Jude, we spent a few minutes talking about what The Three know about setting, which was pretty much what I talked about with The Further Four back in January.

Step Two: Get a Setting

Now, spend five to seven minutes writing about the carousel in the picture, in list or paragraph form, whatever rocks your world. Be sure to include as many of the five senses as you can, and don’t forget to include the carousel's surroundings (meaning if you're riding the carousel, you can see outside of it to what's going on around it).

I loved how a couple of The Three ended up giving the carousel a personality: ominous or lonely. Because that's where we were going next, with the discussion of setting having a personality.

Once we'd had that discussion, it was time to try out writing about setting as a character.

Step Three: Give the Setting Some Anima

(Not anime. Anima. Important distinction.)

Now we want to look at how setting can play a role in how your character behaves. We’re going to place him or her in the setting we wrote about earlier, but we want to give this setting a personality. When you write, you can add in as many other characters as you want—or none at all—but you must assume that there are a bunch of people in this setting, just like in the picture. Write for 10 minutes. Share.

This can be a little tricksy, so you can always assign a personality for the setting: You want the setting to annoy your character or confuse your character or protect your character. In fact, try it all three ways and see how each affects your character and the plot, because the harmony of the world digs things in threes. Like three tacos or three rock climbing partners or three really fabulous teen writers who let me experiment on them every month with writing prompts.

The Further Four: What Happens Next?

One of the things that seems to make writers weep is the question What Happens Next? I've seen this bring moderately well-adjusted adult writers to their knees. (Okay, okay, the phrase moderately well-adjusted contradicts the word writer; I know. Just go with me.) It's also one of the things I hear from both my writing groups. So when I got together yesterday with The Further Four to talk about plot (the What in our Five Ws of stories), I wanted to give them something concrete to work with in terms of What Happens Next?

We warmed up by randomly generating a character, using the incredibly cool but incredibly boringly named Writing Exercises website. (I used the Story Plot generator in the children's section.)

A lonely girl or mysterious boy?
You decide.

Our generated Character 1 was a lonely girl. We spent about five minutes each writing a very brief bio of our lonely girl, focusing on character only. We didn't want to start telling a story about her, not yet.

Once we had our lonely girl bioed out, we generated Character 2, a mysterious boy, and spent another five minutes each writing a bio for him.

We talked for a few minutes then about plot, about how what a story is is a bunch of things getting in the way of our character getting what she wants. But what are those things that get in the way?

It all depends on the story, of course. You generally won't have a unicorn show up and start miraculously healing people unless you're writing a story that involves unicorns.What happens in a story happens because your characters are certain people who live in a certain world and do certain things. Which is uncomfortably vague, I know.

Unfortunately, no one can tell you what happens next. Your characters and plot have to lead you there. But we can list a few of the types of things that can happen in a plot. Like this:

• Character is introduced or leaves/dies
• Character learns a skill
• Character gets hurt or sick
• Character faces her greatest fear
• Character's weakness gets in her way
• One character betrays another
• Something unexpected happens
• Character finds something hidden or learns something secret
• Character learns about her past
• Bad guy has a triumph
• Bad guy has a loss
• Good guy has a triumph
• Good guy has a loss
• A chase
• A race
• A fight
• A capture
• An escape
• A rescue
• A change
• Something funny happens
• A natural disaster
• Something important breaks

A little eye candy for my DM bud.

(A special shout out to the Dungeon Master for helping me populate this list.)

As we write, we want all these things we're throwing in our character's way to keep getting bigger, harder and more dangerous until she faces her biggest, hardest, most dangerous challenge. At that point, we find out whether she's up to the task, whether she finds what she's looking for and whether we have a happy or sad ending.

After talking through this list of plot point types, we generated a Place—in an aeroplane (it's a British website)—and an opening event—someone is wearing a disguise. So that's where we started our story: Our lonely girl and mysterious boy are in an aeroplane, and someone is wearing a disguise.

I asked the girls to keep the start of their story short, to just write enough that we get a sense of where we are. And once we had established that, the girls decided on what type of a plot point would come next. (I made these cards to spread out on the table.) They chose something important breaks, and we wrote. Then character finds something hidden or learns something secret, and we wrote. Then character is introduced or leaves/dies, and we wrote. (You get the picture, yeah?) Finally, before they picked the fourth plot point, I told them that we were going to wrap up with this one and that they should finish their story if they could. The final plot point? Something unexpected happens.

I didn't see that coming.
Do you think she checked her bags?

What was awesome is that every single one of them wrapped it up. It was a thing of beauty. We had orphans finding a home, mysterious boys finding someone to share their passion for anime with, a long-lost father being tossed out of an aeroplane (don't worry, he survived), and a very unexpected unicorn emerging from the cabin galley to heal a dead guy.

Cranky Rah is more than a wee bit embarrassed to admit the unicorn was hers. Talk about some deus ex machina. And we will, at some point. Oh, we will.

Group Hug: Playing with Point of View

The Three and I played around with point of view for a couple of hours the other day. We wrote a huge amount—more I think than we ever have during group before—and we didn't get done with everything I had planned. It was a good thing (for us, at least) that the moms all got caught in traffic.

The Warm Up

Start by choosing a character name from a random name generator. (This took us a while. The random name generator kept generating dumb names. Finally, L suggested Maple, and we went with it.) Spend five minutes writing a brief bio of the character. You can write anything you want about the character, but the character must be contemporary (living in the here and now), and you must include what kind of music the person likes. 

These are not the yummy cookies
M made. We ate all those.

No sharing yet! When the five minutes is up, choose a second randomly generated name. Spend five minutes writing a brief bio of that character, with the same restrictions as before. 

Once both characters are done, share. (This is also when we ate cookies and drank cocoa or tea and chatted for a while about point of view, which I covered in the last post.)

Third Person Limited

Once you have your two characters, it's time to put them together. Here’s the scenario: Your characters are in a car together, driving down the road. They’re arguing about what kind of music to listen to. Who wins and gets to listen to the kind of music he or she likes?

He like jazz; she likes Nine Inch Nails.
But they're going to be even more
incompatible when he wrecks the car.

Write the scene in third person limited. That means pick one character and write from his or her perspective using the pronoun he or she. Remember that limited means you only know what that character knows, but you have some flexibility in terms of what you can describe in the world. (You can write about what that character looks like, for instance, without having her look at herself in a mirror.)

Spend 10 minutes writing. Don't share yet!

First Person

Now, go back and write the scene again—the same scene, part of the scene or a continuation of the scene—but this time from the first person perspective of the other character. Remember that you can get closer in this time: How does she feel about what’s happening? What does she think about the music? What is she going to do once she gets out of the car—and how does all this affect her relationship with the other character?

You have 10 minutes. Don't share yet!

Third Person Omniscient

Okay, I'll admit it: We shared after writing in first person. We had totally run out of time. If you're doing this on your own, though, or you have more time than we did, you'll write one more time.

He can't believe the woman inside the
car just said that about the guy's
taste in music. 

This time, write the scene from the perspective of someone outside the action, either as a god-like narrator or as someone who hasn't been seen or mentioned before and who the other two characters don’t know. Keep the focus on the two characters in the front seat, not the emotions of this uninvolved observer. Ten minutes.

Love is Like a Cliche

S recently shared a piece she had written called The Meaning of Love. It was about (oddly enough) love, and it came with this note: This is the terribleness that happens when I try to force myself to write.

When I asked her why she thought it was terrible, she responded: I think it's terrible because it's full of sappy love, which I hate with the soul that I don't have.

Love is like a book of matches.

Was she being harsh, both about her writing and her soul? Probably. But it's a real concern, right? How do you write about something writers have been writing about since there were words? How do you find something new or fresh to say about love (or hate or truth or beauty)?

I suggested to S that she start by making a list of what she wanted to say about love, without any flowery language. It might look like this:

Love is painful.
Love is amazing.
Love is something you regret.
Love is vulnerable.
Love is irresistible.

This is a lot to cover, and as you delve deeper, you may discover that it's more effective to focus on just part of this list.

Once you have your list, what do you do with it?

Go with a cliché, but turn it on its head. 

Instead of comparing love to a rose with thorns, how is love like a Venus flytrap? Instead of love being innocent like a child, how is love like a temperamental two year old?

One of my favorite poems is T.R. Hummer's Where You Go When She Sleeps, in which Hummer takes the cliché image of being filled with love and drowning in love and turns it on its head by comparing love to drowning in a silo full of grain.

Pull those clichés apart and find new ways to express what is true about them. 

Love is like Big Brother.

We like the image of love being like a rose because it's both beautiful and painful. What else is contradictory like that? How about love being like a bulldozer? It plows down anything in its way and denudes the land—but it also can clear away the dead and useless, creating a place where new things can grow. 

How about love being like a spy who lies her sultry way into your life, intending to betray you, only to betray herself and her country by turning double agent.

Focus on what love isn't or how it isn't like those clichés.

A famous example of this is Shakespeare's sonnet Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Shakes spends his 14 lines explaining how his love ain't nothing like a summer's day.

Pay attention to how other writers do it.

Somehow, singers, poets and other writers continue to find ways to talk about love (and hate and truth and beauty). They do it over and over again, and while they aren't all geniuses about it, there are plenty of great examples of someone finding that fresh approach, those new lines that resonate with us.

Take Sting, for example. The guy's been writing about love since, like, the last Ice Age (or at least since before he lived in a castle), and he keeps bringing it home. Give a listen to these four songs, all different takes on the same topic:

• Every Breath You Take. From the Police years, this song is played at a lot of weddings, but Sting meant it to be about obsession. It takes something that seems so sweet at first ("He loves me so much he pays attention to my every breath!") and turns it pretty creepy.
• Fortress Around Your Heart. Sting takes this fairly common metaphor of someone walling themselves off after being hurt by love but uses concrete details to turn the metaphor into a story.
• Fill Her Up. This song is about what love can make you do and how maybe you should think twice before you do it.
• Love is Strong Than Justice. This song is also about what love can make you do, but it's unapologetic in the end.

Love is like concrete. Or a meltdown.

One thing you'll see about all these poems and songs is that they focus on one extended metaphor instead of a series of similes or metaphors. Pick one idea, and build it through your entire piece. (And don't be afraid to use humor, even on a serious topic.) Keep in mind that even though you started with a list of abstracts (Love is painful), you don't want it to stay abstract. You want specific details to make the abstract concept concrete and real for your reader; something they can see in their heads and hearts.

So What is Love Like?

Love is like a TARDIS. Tell me how.

Welcome, The Further Four

Dude, Buzz Aldrin is so cool.

Cranky Rah and the Poet-Accountant la-la the Space Race. We love the autobiographies of Jim Lovell (he of Apollo 13 and "Houston, we have a problem."), Scott Carpenter (For Spacious Skies) and Gene Cernan (The Last Man on the Moon). We think Chris Hadfield's book An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth is the bomb (and, yes, we do talk like that). We've even read Flight Director Gene Kranz's Failure is Not an Option (the Apollo 13 disaster may not have landed men on the moon, but it gave us some great quotes).

(Full Disclosure: Cranky Rah had to skim more of Gene Kranz's book than she would like to admit. He speaks engineering like poets speak love.)

We watch the movie Apollo 13 (again) (and again), and every time we watch it, we think, "Hey, maybe we should watch From the Earth to the Moon again, too." Cuz, hey, it's easy to fit 12 hours of an HBO miniseries into our crazy lives. Like, who needs sleep when you can watch a docudrama about astronauts? Not we.

This is why, when my daughter (hereafter known as R) protested at her new writing group being called The Wees (okay, it does sound a little like what you do when you drink a lot of tea), I turned to NASA nomenclature to help me come up with a new name. First, there was the Mercury Seven (John Glenn and company, the first Americans into space). Then the New Nine (or Next Nine or Nifty Nine—one name wasn't enough for those men who were going to walk on the moon). So welcome to The Further Four.

The Mercury 7 (not the Cranky
Rah 7), compliments of NASA

The Further Four (put their initials together, and you get something that sounds like a medical scan: ECRG) are 12-ish and, like The Three, they love to write. Unlike The Three, they're really at the very beginning of their writing journey, so when we got together for the first time on Monday, I wanted to start out simple.

Maybe you know about the Five Ws from journalism or school writing: Who, What, Where, When and Why. (There are those who throw in How, too. Which starts with an H, not a W. And which is kind of covered in the actual Ws, so I left it out.) Anyway, the Five Ws aren't just for steely-eyed, ambulance-chasing journalists. Every good story—fiction or non—should answer the Five Ws.

Who?

Who are the people your story is about? These are your characters.

What?

What happens to your characters? This is your plot.

Where?

Where do your characters live? Where do the Whats happen to your characters?

When?

When do the Whats happen to your characters? This isn't just the year or era your story takes place; it includes the time of year, time of day and the age of your characters. It covers the timeline of your story, too: Does it happen over one hour, one month or many years?

Why?

Why do the Whats happen? What leads from one What to another? And why do your characters behave the way they do? This is also called motive.

The Five Ws of Anger

Look at Ben. See? He hates
losing an hour, too.

Any good meeting of writers at Cranky Rah's cave must include playing around with whatever we're talking about. So to explore the Five Ws, The Further Four and I each created a character to write about, using the same Apples to Apples approach The Three and I used last week. (Cranky Rah might not like Ben Franklin when he steals an hour from her every spring, but she's a firm believer in "waste not, want not.") 

E got the adjective crunchy, which was awesome. It was a great chance to talk about how crunchy could be a physical trait or a character trait.

After we had each created and shared our character, we all wrote again, this time putting the character in a scene that answered the other four Ws. My one requirement was that the character had to be angry in the scene. 

We ended up with characters with crunchy hair who had had a very bad day, a nasty, thumb-sucking girl, and an angry pink shark who kind of regretted losing his temper and eating all his dolphin friends. So all in all, a productive writing day.

Group Hug: Building Characters From Apples

It was a long, dark summer without The Three (mainly because Cranky Rah's life kept getting in the way of us meeting up), but we had a lovely afternoon together yesterday. I bang my head on the floor in delight over L's pie cookies. Pie. Cookies. Two great things that go great together. And they were lemony, just like Cranky Rah.

We played with dialogue yesterday, which was great good fun. Before you play with dialogue, you need some characters. Otherwise, it's just you and the voices in your head—and while they might have some interesting things to say, it's probably best that you get away from them every once in a while.

So, first you need some characters. It's easiest to do this exercise (adapted from a newsletter on writing tips by Brave Writer) if you have the game Apples to Apples, but if you don't, you can just make a stack of cards with one adjective written on each.

Here's how it works: Each person takes three of the green Apples to Apples cards and uses the adjectives on them to write a brief character sketch of a person with all three traits. (You can up the crazy factor by drawing five cards instead of three.) 

We did this twice—and I did not, by the way, tell The Three what we were going to do with these characters when they were creating them. We did this first half of the exercise at the beginning of our afternoon, as a warm-up, and it wasn't until we were reading our character sketches to each other that I mentioned, oh-so innocently, that their characters would later be talking to each other.

Poor Matilda. It wasn't her fault.
Sometimes genetics are just
against a girl.

A note on this in practice: After I drew the adjectives long, furry and unhappy for my first character, I went through and took out all the adjectives that could only be used for physical traits so that when we drew a second set of adjectives, they would all be personality traits. But I'll be honest, at the end of the day, the fact that my first character, Matilda, was furry had a huge impact on her relationship with the difficult Francesca, so maybe it was a mistake to take out the physical traits. If Matilda hadn't been furry, she wouldn't have been carrying that duct tape around with her (for emergency hair removal, you know), and the vengeance she wreaked on Francesca would have taken a different path, perhaps one that left Francesca's perfect eyebrows intact.

So after we warmed up by creating characters, we talked a while about dialogue (more about dialogue in then next post). And then we went back to our characters, to have them talk to each other. There were three rules:

1. Each character's dialogue must reflect his or her personality.
2. You can use said or asked but no other dialogue tags. You have to express each character's attitude through the words they speak.
3. You can use some action narrative to keep things going, but limit it. The focus here is on dialogue.

The conversation between the two characters could be about anything, but the dominant emotion in the scene had to be anger. (This is technically not a fourth rule; it's really just the set-up. If we had had more time, we would've done different versions of this, wherein the dominant emotion was confusion, joy, etc.).

As you might expect, hilarity ensued. 

Seriously. Anyone else want to know
what these three are talking about?

Once you've built your characters, there are a lot of other dialogue exercises you can put them through. One idea I really liked (but that we also didn't get to; in 90 minutes there are, well, only 90 minutes) was to have those two characters talk to each other about one of them being really late for an appointment. The first time, the characters are dating each other (this would've been a problem with M's characters, one of whom was six). The second time, they're meeting for the first time, and one of them is more powerful than the other. 

All these exercises are about playing around with how a character's personality is reflected in how he or she speaks and how the way characters speak to each other shows their relationship, two of the most important roles of dialogue in a story.

What else does dialogue rock out? Find out in my next post. Right now, I have to go crawl around the couch and see if anyone dropped any pie cookie crumbs.

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."

Group Hug: Pick a Name, Any Name

Generally Cranky Rah likes to write alone in her cave, but when The Three come for a visit, we all hang and do freewrites and writing exercises together. Let's call this one Pick a Name, Any Name.

1. Find a random name generator online (there are a bunch of them out there), and generate a name—or five or six. When we did this, we kept going until we found one we all liked (relatively speaking). If I remember correctly (and, honestly, the likelihood of that is pretty slim), we wrote from the name Paxton.

2. Spend about 10 minutes with everyone writing on her own, spinning a character based on the name. Everyone writes from the same name.

3. Squabble over who gets to read first, then share.

All of the characters we created were vastly different from each other. We were split 50-50 on gender, and we even each ended up with multiple spellings of the name: Paxton, Packston and Joe. (That would be L with the eclectic spelling.)

This is a fun exercise anytime, really, but it's also good for when you're in the doldrums of writer's block or if a character's not really working for you anymore. Not sure who someone in your story is or where he's going? Maybe he's not a Butch, he's a Kristof. Or maybe he's not a Kristof, he's just plain Chris. Even within one name, you often have a lot of options. Christopher, Kristof, Chrissy and Topher are all very different characters.

In fact, you could have fun doing a freewrite in which all of the characters' names are just variations of the same name. Hey, that sounds good. Take 10 minutes. Ready? Go.