The World of Inspiration Generation

What if you could go to a place where everything and everyone around you had the potential to inspire your writing? What if we told you that you’re already there? This week, we’re headed to Ideation Land – a writer’s Candyland! 

This week’s episode challenges the idea that inspiration strikes like lightning. We say, get out there and make your own lightning. And have fun while you’re at it!

With the right mindset and lens, the things in your everyday life become the raw materials necessary for writing. We invite you to bring freedom and play back into the picture to transform what’s around you into fiction. 

For all the lessons + tips from this episode in one spot, check out and download this PDF  (https://drive.google.com/file/d/14vwifoddMbq0jj_F5r_TVPg78fFVFeuA/view?usp=sharing). No subscription or signup is necessary. 

Do you need support with your writing? Check out our coaching and editing services at https://veronicajorden.com/ and https://annaschechter.org/. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Veronica, a Gen Xer. And I'm Anna, a Gen Zer. And this is X Wright Z, a podcast fueled by our love of books and the craft of writing.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

We are writers and editors who read across the genre spectrum. And you know how in Sci-Fi characters are on an intergalactic mission to do whatever they need to do? Well, we're on an intergenerational mission to help writers write better stories.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

And as part of our mission, every episode comes with a handout chock full of key takeaways and tips that you can use for your own writing. A simple Google Doc with no signups or subscriptions necessary. If we can spark your creativity and help support your writing habit, we'll consider this a job well done. Now let's dig into this week's discussion.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

There are a lot of things that keep us from writing or progressing in our writing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Most of them it's ourselves. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Yes. I was going to say it's not our schedules always. It's not the other stuff we gotta do. It's what we say to ourselves or what we think we do or don't have going for us. Right. So Veronica and I come across these things all the time in our own writing and when we're working with and talking to other writers. Veronica, what are some of the sort of things that come up in people's minds or in their worries about writing or really not writing?

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Yeah, I mean, I think most of us have have hit kind of what we call writer's block at some point, right? Whether it comes from we've got these huge expectations, right? Because we've had one big idea and now we feel like everything else compared to that, like just doesn't fit the bill, or no one will like it. Or I mean, I've even talked to writers that are like, I want to write, but I have no idea what to write about. Nothing inspires me. Nothing, nothing is getting my creative juices going. And I just sit and stare at a blank page. I mean, then that's really horrible. That puts a lot of pressure. And I find that anytime you're feeling pressured to produce, when you get into that, we've talked about it on a previous episode. When you get into that space of like, I have to come up with a a great idea, that's exactly when you're not going to get the idea, right? It has to feel like I get to, I get to sit here and come up with fun ideas. Um, you know, and if you think about it, like when we're kids, we don't have this problem, right? You could watch kids play all day and they never have a problem coming up with a story ever. That's true. That's true.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

And I've heard writers say, you know, they they do talk back to, I loved writing stories when I was a kid. I loved like acting out little stories when I was a kid. And I used to be so creative. I used to have so many ideas, but now I don't.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Um, so today we're going to dive into some ways, some techniques. And in some ways, we want to invite you to go back to childhood and play.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Yeah. Turn off that inner critic. Like little kids, when they are exploring, you know, I want to be a superhero or an astronaut or I can fly or I have magic, like they don't have that voice in their head saying, oh, that's stupid, or that's not a good idea, or no one will like that. They don't care. They're just having fun. And that's the space that if you get stuck, if you can just let go of that inner critic for even just a short period of time. Like I know a lot of people have a hard time letting that go. Set a timer if you have to. It's what I do. Um, set a timer, but let that inner critic like take a coffee break and just let your mind play. Let it play. Have fun. There is, you know, I remember um, I don't know if you had this in school, but like I used to, this is a, I think a um a marker of like the Gen X generation. We used to have like gifted and talented classes. Oh, we had that. Oh, did you? Okay. So did you ever hear one of those teachers say there's no bad idea? You ever heard that added? Yes. Yeah. Totally. So there's no bad idea. There might not, the idea might not be great for a book, but you know, if you just let your brain go and go down the rabbit holes periodically, do it. What's the harm in in a few minutes of kind of daydreaming and ideation? You'd be amazed at what you come up with. And so even though, like, I wish that I could just like wave a magic wand and everybody could just like close their eyes and come up with 10, you know, fantastic ideas. I get that sometimes battling that inner critic and getting past that block is tough.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

So yeah, and it rarely works, like, yeah, like you get the lightning bolt, it hits you sometimes of an idea. Right. A lot of it is willing the ideas to come.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

Yeah. You've got to create a space where those ideas can come in. And so I mean, I think we just get into it. We've got four different kinds of ways that you can um begin to find ideas in the world around you. Um, and just for note, this is part of a much longer course that Anna and I are working on called Inspiration Generation, which is going to give you all kinds of different techniques and ways that you can find ideas so that you never run out of story ideas to tell. And these are kind of the first four.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

This is something that Veronica brought to me probably a year ago. And we've been sitting on it for a long time. And it's always a thing you can come back to, and it's something we're excited to start sharing with you. So yeah. Okay. Okay. So in in preparation for this episode, we put our money where our mouth is and did some of the observing that goes into what we're about to get into. So let's start with that. Let's start with the ideas themselves.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

The first technique or the first kind of reminder that we want to share is that ideas are everywhere in the world at all times. Yep. You just need to have your writer's cap on.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

Yeah. You just need to be looking for it. You just need to be aware and look around you and see, right? Turn off that inner critic, find a piece of paper, use your phone to type it out, use voice notes, whatever. This first idea is ideas are everywhere. All you got to do is look for them. If you're looking for them, you'll find them, right? So we actually did this exercise. And I challenged ourselves this week to at some point during the week to jot down the exercise itself. I would challenge you if you're listening, five five random observations in a day. Do it in one day, maybe when you go to work, maybe when you go outside drinking your coffee in the morning, wherever you are, just make a quick observation. Don't filter it, don't judge it. Just write it down or capture it in some way, and then come back to it in a couple of days and see what ideas come from it. Sometimes when we remove the pressure of like in this moment, I have to hurry, I have to figure out how I can make a story out of what I'm seeing right now. No, you just have to observe it and let it percolate for a little while, right? Okay, I'm I'm can you just know I love I love this.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

I love this too. And my my first ever writing professor made each of us get a notebook, and every single day she expected us to write down five things we saw, five things we heard, five things we felt, and do a little sketch. And she checked through our notebooks periodically. And that is what this is. This is stick your ideas down there. They don't have to be beautifully written, they don't have to have a flourish to them. We're gonna start doing that with our other techniques. This is get your raw materials.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

Yes. I like that. It's like, yes, it's gathering raw materials. So you want to share one or two of your observations, Anna? Sure.

SPEAKER_01 8:39

So I wrote down a bunch, and my observations range from people to animals to little things I saw like out in the world, like springtime, things are growing. Okay. Anyway, uh, let's see. I attended two graduations, and I saw graduates posing for pictures with their umbrellas up because it was pouring down rain. Yeah. I also saw my cat watching a squirrel through the window, and the squirrel was very close to the window, almost teasing my cat.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

It's like felt intention right there. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

All right, so those are just two of mine. I've got plenty more, but Veronica, do you want to share a few of yours?

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Yeah, I mean, so I the first one I wrote is that my middle child could sleep through anything, as evidenced by the fact that he's been sleeping through two alarms that have been going off for 10 minutes. That's awesome. And then I did others, but let's see. The this one, actually, you can tell how bad the storm was by the number of garbage cans conferencing in the cul-de-sac, because in my neighborhood, when it rains and I'm yeah, when I'm in um central Texas and we've been having tons of rain and thunderstorms. And yeah, down in our cul-de-sac, the rain always carries garbage cans down to the end. So you can always tell how much rain we had by how many garbage cans have collected in the cul-de-sac at the end of the street. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

I love it. Yeah, what do you call a collection of garbage cans?

SPEAKER_00 10:18

I don't oh, we'll put that out there. If you've got a creative name for a collection of garbage cans, you should um let us know. Yeah, so I mean, see, and now what could we do? I mean, I'm I'm wondering, like, we've given you four observations right there. Did it spark any ideas? Did you get a clear picture in your head of any of these things and what happened? Did your creative mind start asking questions? Um, did it laugh? Did it think about how maybe you've seen something similar? That's all of those creative juices starting to fire. That's your brain. It's already starting. Yeah. Taking that observation and creating story around it, whether it's a personal story or whether it's something you've made up, that's that's the space that we want to find.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

Nice. Okay, so now we're gonna start actually really playing with these observations. We might bring in some other ones from our list. We might also come back to these ones. Yeah. The next technique or the next step in this is to now tap further into the world around you. Think about the sensory components of your raw materials and get good at or practice doing some people watching and some, I like to say like ethical eavesdropping that writers need to do.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

Yes, that's true. Like, don't, don't, don't purposely insert yourself into somebody's drama. Like, be respectful out there. At the same time, if they're sitting in the middle of the coffee shop blaring their their personal laundry, you can't help but overhear it. It's okay.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

Yeah, tap into the world around you because this takes the stance that there are stories everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

If you're willing to notice them and go forth with them.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Right. So the trick to this technique is to think about it. One, yes, it's a people-watching component, but it's also trying to tap into sensory things. So things that you see, smell, hear, whether there's texture, um, is there a sense of something kind of anticipatory? Is there something like unknown that's happening where you get like the hairs on the back of your neck stand up? It's really tapping into the sensory layer of these observations, be it people or things. Okay. So do you so the the the prompt here if you're trying these exercises out for yourself, is to uh write a quick character sketch or um go deeper into one of those daily observations and really tap into the sensoriness of it. Um, three to five sentences, like nothing big, right? It's not it's like a pair of not a plot, not a story. Right. Just focus on one person or one thing and write a really good description that tells us about them or it. Nice. Yeah. So do you have one, Anna?

SPEAKER_01 13:21

Yes. So I mean, my mind's going in a bunch of different directions, which is good. Um with the graduates all standing out in the rain. I'm coming back to now the feeling of being in your gown, your cap, hair and makeup done, but it's all being weighed down by rain. You're holding up your umbrella, it's awkward, it's maybe uncomfortable, but you've done this amazing thing. Finishing a degree, you're posing with your friends, it's emotional. Maybe there's tears and rain water. Um, so I'm getting kind of all of those kind of sensory things. Uh-huh. And I also want to share another one off of my list. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go for it. So I was at Lowe's, which if you're in the US, you probably know what it is. If you're not, it's kind of like a home improvement big store like that. And I was in the Lowe's garden center looking at all of the herbs. And this woman frantically runs up and she's searching for dill, and she can't find it. And then she thinks, oh, I found it, but it was spearmint. And she was kind of narrating this to us as we were looking for our own little plants to buy. Yes. And I've jotted that down in my notebook. And like the next thing I would want to add to that is the smell of the fresh herbs and the soil. And it was quite hot that day. So the sun beating down, it's like one of the first days that felt really hot. You know, we're getting ready to plant some stuff, which means the season's changing. So I'm getting kind of all of the sensory feelings of the sun, the smell of the herbs and yeah, that's kind of where I'm going.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

Yeah. I mean, I see green, and I definitely know that kind of loamy organic smell that you're talking about. Um, no, that's a really good sensory thing. See, and it was just something that you were doing in your in your day, and you even got an interesting person, this frantic woman looking for dill. I wonder why it was so important for her to find dill. I will say this, I she probably did not find it because dill is it's a little difficult to, I think you, as somebody who's planted, I don't know that I've ever bought it pre-grown. I've only ever grown it from seed. It's a little, I wish I did that, I would have told her. I don't know if not.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

I don't think that's no. Uh-uh. We tried to help her. There was no dill to be found. And I was thinking to myself, this is kind of your basils and your parsleys. I don't know if we're gonna get that. Yeah, I don't know if we're gonna get the dill plant.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

Dill is great. But I don't know how we're not a gardening show, but I didn't know. What have you got in terms of sensory and I um this week I've been home busy. I haven't gone out much, so I've had to really rely on what I can see in my kind of limited purview. But what I have had is some deliveries. And so this is um, I wrote a little character sketch. Oh, no. The um the delivery driver was all business. Clipboard stayed off my grass, needed a signature. But as soon as I closed the garage door, I heard Dancing Queen blaring from the truck cab. And, you know, I thought maybe this guy isn't quite as uptight as I thought. Yes. It's interesting. It was very contrary to what I would have expected from this man who was just he had to have signature and he was just very serious. Um, his truck and dancing queen is blurry.

SPEAKER_01 17:00

I just thought it was really funny. Anyway, I love that. I I I like that a lot. You've got a lot that you can play with in terms of the sound of the truck rumbling up, yeah, the knock or the ring on the doorbell, the scratch of the pen signing. Yes. And then you've got the unclean.

SPEAKER_00 17:18

You know, I was like, I don't know, like he kind of left me. I was feeling a little self-conscious, like I wasn't as put together as this delivery driver. But when I heard when I heard a little disco on the way out, it made me smile.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

So I love that. That's a really sweet. Possibly you can play up some like humor with the expectations twisting around.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

Um I mean, what is that? I mean, just our two observations. You've got a woman who's frantic for dill at Lowe's, which is really kind of funny to me. And I've got my very buttoned-up tight delivery driver who's jamming to ABBA on the on the way out.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

See, honestly, good for him. And I hope that woman found her dill.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Yeah, I hope she did too. I hope she found well, I hope somebody finally told her that she's not gonna fight, she's gonna have to grow it herself. But anyhow, maybe, maybe they're meant to be together. Oh, see. Oh, hello, romance, dill woman, and uh dancing queen. I love it. Yes, beautiful. So you so see what I mean? Like you can look anywhere and just observe people. People are interesting. Um, yeah. People are interesting, especially if they're just going about their day. And imagine, you know, I mean it makes me actually now that we talk about it, it makes me a little more self-conscious to be thinking about what am I doing? What am I saying? But I am one of those people I probably would have been frantically looking for something too and narrating my day. Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:47

No, and that's such a human thing. We've either done that before or we've heard someone else do that before because people are in their own little zone doing their thing. All of what they're doing, yeah, can be material.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

It could be a story, it could be a spark that starts something, you know. Like, I'm gonna be thinking about that when we get off the call today. I'm like, what was that woman possibly so frantic about dill? I don't know. Maybe like what story could we create around it? I mean, it's what if, like, I don't know, her son's favorite food is pickles. And so, like, she's like now determined to make pickles herself, and she, of course, needs to grow dill, and she thought, oh, I'll go to Lowe's and get my own dill, and then I can make it all summer long. And she gets there and can't find the dill. I don't know. It might not be.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Well, what if, what if, now this is funny, what if she's been lying to people about this amazing herb garden that she's cultivated and it does not exist? Yeah, she bragged about the dill maybe for homemade pickles that weren't homemade, you know. Um, and now she's like, oh, people are coming over. We gotta get this garden uh manufactured somewhere. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

All right. You know what? I'm gonna put this out there. If you're listening to this and and and our frantic woman looking for dill or my dancing queen uh delivery driver has inspired a little story, I want to hear about it. Please send it to us because again, or post your own like really interesting um human observation, someone you see on the way to work, somebody who's in the cafeteria, somebody you pass in the mall at the grocery store. People are everywhere. Take, you know, 30 seconds and just watch them discreetly and politely remind you and see what you can come up with. People are interesting. All right. We can sit here and do this all day. All right. So technique number three um is if you've got kids or you've been around kids, you may have played something like this before. But we call it what if an opposite day. And this is really starting to ask questions, right? What if something happened? What if I could do a certain thing? What if a param, you know, something about the world drastically changed tomorrow? Or it could be something really small. We'll get into some examples here in a minute.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

Yeah. We we naturally started to do this one when we were talking about the woman with the dill. What if she was making pickles for her son? What if she was trying to cover up a lie where she's this expert gardener? Right. So we we immediately started to do that. This is the next step. This is where you start to launch a little bit, right? Right.

SPEAKER_00 21:31

Yeah. So I mean, um, let's do some what-ups first, and then we'll talk about opposite day.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Okay, so following up from the visit to Lowe's, uh huh, we got a strawberry plant. I haven't tried to do strawberries before. Um and we immediately had a strawberry go from white green to bright red overnight. Wow. Um Oh, this is opposite day. Because I'm gonna say, what if it went from red and it unripened? Okay, let's come back to that one. My cat watching the squirrel.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

What if they were communicating with each other through the window? Maybe a little Tom and Jerry-esque thing, or maybe there was a deeper connection between these two species separated by a window. What if they were friends? What if they were friends? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

Cool. That sounds like a middle grade book waiting to happen.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

Yeah, it's not like super deep, but it could, it could go somewhere, right? Okay, what kind of what ifs do you have?

SPEAKER_00 22:37

So I wrote, um, because I was, again, because I was working from home this week and didn't get out very much. I wrote, what if getting to work outside of your home was a privilege? So like right now, I kind of feel like, well, see, the most opposite day because like now the opposite. These are these are related to each other. Yeah. All right. So how about this one? What if I woke up tomorrow and could make plants grow just by asking them to? That's like my that's like my favorite daydream. If I could make plants grow, I would love light. What if I could grow dill for this poor lady? You could grow dill for her. And then I wrote, um, what if a family recipe for cinnamon rolls could somehow prevent a war? What? I don't know how that would happen, but I was like, what if it could? What if it could? What if the cinnamon roll was so good that it that it created the desire for peace?

SPEAKER_01 23:40

It actually, wow. I was thinking, what if there's something written coded into like great-great grandma's handwritten recipe card? What if there's something coded in that could help solve some sort of international conflict? So, okay, I like it.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

See, there's hungry. There is no, I know, right? There is no rhyme or reason to this. This is what I'm saying. Let your mind play. Don't judge these things. Will it be perfect for every story? No. Am I gonna write a book about how cinnamon rolls save the world? Probably not. But you know what? You never know if that idea percolates. I may wake up tomorrow and decide, you know what? Instead of save the cheerleader, save the world, it's serve cinnamon rolls and save the world. It's you never know. It could happen. Okay. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

Well, also, no, it I mean, it opens up so many avenues from like, is there something very strategic about the cinnamon rolls? Is the cinnamon roll laced with something that takes out someone who's really gotta go, you know? Um, is the uh is it an olive branch? You know, I don't know. It is, it's it's the what-ifs.

SPEAKER_00 24:57

Yeah. I even, you know, and we talked about too, like um kind of the the addition to this is opposite day, right? We've already kind of sort of given you a couple of what ifs that turned into opposite day. But this is like kids are really good at this. Like, what if we or not what if, opposite day. What if every yes meant no? That would be that's the typical one that I hear kids, right? Like, mom, it's opposite day. Can I go to the park? No, that means yes, I'm going. Yeah, okay, great. Nice. Yeah, it's kind of up was down. Yeah, totally. You can also kind of play around with opposites as far as character motivation, as far as character norms. Do you have any like opposite character examples, Anna?

SPEAKER_01 25:45

Yeah. I'm trying to think what to what what I can do with my dill lady. Um, let's come back to her in a second. Like, this is this is one where you can introduce archetypes and then really twist them.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

So, you know, you've got the librarian and her cardigan with her glasses. What if she's secretly a getaway car driver? Like, what if she's secretly this like super badass, quick, kind of criminal, kind of underground operator? Yeah. Kind of a Clark Kent Superman situation.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

Very cool. Yeah, that's unexpected. That's an opposite. I wrote mine is mine, is a little bit, I don't know. I kind of feel like it was an opposite. And I guess I must have just had baking on the mind because I wrote, what if a really hard, like cutthroat bounty hunter secretly dreams about opening like a an action movie themed bakery? I even went and said he would call it Top Buns.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

Oh my gosh. Wait, Veronica thought of that first. No one else can use that.

SPEAKER_00 26:54

That is so good. Anyhow, I mean, so you really can take a character and what could you do that's so completely opposite to how they are presented, whether it's their job, whether it's a belief about themselves. I mean, honestly, if you think about most stories, at their heart, you've taken a character who is one way at the beginning, and then typically they have a dramatic change by the end of the book. So what this is designed to do is show you that you can make any character go anywhere. Um, it's just a matter of what you could figure out that is opposite to who they are now, who they could be by the end of the book. And again, there's a process, you know, figuring out how did they get there. But if you know who they are at the beginning and who they are at the end, you've done a lot of the big work, right? So come back to your delivery driver for a second. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

We, as part of observing the world, whether we're doing so as writers or just as people going about our lives, we make inferences based on the information that we have available.

unknown 28:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:06

And those inferences or observations or assumptions or guesses can be wrong. You know, Veronica, my my guess, my inference, is that you did not expect him to go listen to Dancing Queen. No. And so that's got a little bit of the what if? What if a hardworking and quite serious delivery driver absolutely loves disco and fills his drives every single day with tunes?

SPEAKER_00 28:38

Yeah, I mean, for all I know, he's a disco teacher at night. I don't know. Wouldn't that be interesting?

SPEAKER_01 28:45

Yes, and I okay, I've got a what if that's a little wacky. Good. But what if the dill is frantically trying to escape that woman?

SPEAKER_00 28:55

That's the reason she can't find it. It's running from her. It's it does, it, it, she is the dill murderer. Yes. She's on a she's on a secret mission to eradicate dill from the face of the earth. She hates Dill.

SPEAKER_01 29:12

Yes. Yes. She wasn't excited about using the dill, she was excited about eliminating it.

SPEAKER_00 29:18

And now you're an accomplice. You helped her search for it. The dill now hates you too. You will never be able to grow ill dill, Anna.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

No. Well, hopefully my strawberries will be okay. Anyway, wait, I like that. What? To come back to your idea of your wish. What if I could make anything I wanted grow? Yeah. What if plants could determine who was truly nurturing or not? And they grew at will for those sort of worthy.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

Yeah, you know what? And it makes me think of so many books I've seen that what's um uh is it called The Women? I think so, where you see that where a house, like the plants that grow outside of it, are very they help to demonstrate who lives inside, right? Like imagine if you drove through a neighborhood and you see like a green lawn that's perfectly cut. You would probably assume certain things about the people who live in that house, right? So you could either play with that and make who lives in the house somebody completely contrary to what that, you know, perfectly manicured lawn represents. Or what if you drove through that same neighborhood and another house had plants that were maybe overgrown and dark or tons of color and sparkly, what would they also tend to make you think about the person who lives inside the house? See, ideas, they're everywhere. They're everywhere. You just have to look and turn off that inner critic and see um, see what comes up. See what you can do with it. This is about being, yeah, and I know, like we're talking about ideas today that will probably not become best-selling books, right? These are not deep ideas, but it gets the juices flowing and it is very much like a muscle, right? If you can get into that space where you feel free to create, where you aren't censoring the ideas, you'd be amazed at what comes. But you have to give your yourself the freedom and the room to explore and come up with ridiculously fun ideas, even if you never use them.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

Yes. And just the time and space and permission that it doesn't have to be determined right now. Yeah. It can be that you are playing and hopefully bringing back a sense of fun. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:45

Yes, remember. Writing is something we get to do, not something we have to do, right? Um exactly. All right, we could sit here and do what if an opposite day all day. So the challenge with that is come up with three what-ifs and then take a character who maybe you already have written or one of the people that you observe from one of the previous um exercises, and how can you flip that character? How can you make them somebody who appears one way, but then secretly or maybe not so secretly, they are actually very different from what their outside appearance or their actions convey.

SPEAKER_01 32:25

Yeah. Think back to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from a few episodes ago. Yeah. And think about how appearances can be deceiving.

SPEAKER_00 32:35

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. All right. So the last technique that we're going to talk about is again, it's an extension of these things because maybe as we're talking about what-ups and opposite days and some of the things we've come up with start to, I know they're already reminding me of TV shows and movies and characters that I've seen out there. And so this last technique that we're going to share today, it's called borrow, twist, and remix, steal like a storyteller. So, you know, there is no sense in, you know, we don't all have to reinvent the wheel every time we sit down to write. We can find inspiration. And in fact, of course we do, find inspiration in movies, in music, in books, in myths, in art. Um, again, it's this idea that I ideas are all around us, but how can we take those things and use them in an ethical, um, creative way where we're not stealing somebody else's creative energy, but we're taking that and using it to inspire something that we're writing. Right.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

And actually, this is what every single story since the dawn of time has been doing. Pretty much. You know, I another thing that we could have mentioned at the top of this was people worry about my ideas aren't original enough. I haven't, you know, broken into this new world of ideas that have never been thought before. Within a finite number of sort of human stories that have been told and will be told, there are infinite possibilities to do with those kinds of things. Because I mean, we are all on this planet. Yeah. We are all alive. There are certain things that are universal, certain things that come back throughout time, throughout generations, experiences that are so common. We're human. That doesn't mean that the story is going to be a repeat. It's that we've actually got a whole wealth of stuff to draw from, compare our experiences against, and ask again, what if, what, what could we do? What can we do with this story? How can we twist it? Right. How can we build it?

SPEAKER_00 34:52

And look at like even right. And look at movies, look at music. Like, how many times like we have a new cover of the same song and suddenly it feels different or it speaks to a new generation, right? True. Or we we have remakes of movies. Um, and now certain themes become more prevalent because that's the world we live in.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

I have been a thief for a very long time because I did this in fifth grade. I actually we were assigned this as a writing task in school, and I'm so happy we were. We were supposed to take a classic children's story, fairy tale, you know, three little pigs, anything like that. We were supposed to take it and reimagine it. Okay. I had a really awesome teacher, so shout out to Miss Sawyer because she gave us this assignment of stealing like a storyteller. I wrote my own newly imagined version of Sleeping Beauty with the opposite dilemma that she could not sleep.

unknown 35:53

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 35:54

And so that's a little bit of opposite day, and that stealing like a storyteller. Um I borrowed from the Sleeping Beauty tale that I remembered. And I wrote a little short story called Insomniac Beauty, The Princess Who Could Not Sleep. And I don't remember how it ended, how she finally got to sleep. Um, if I'd written it as like a young adult, she would have had a melatonin and hoped for the best. But um, I'm sure it was true love's kiss in some way, finally allowed her to get to sleep.

SPEAKER_00 36:28

Yeah. I love that from a fifth grade perspective. Like she finally gets the kiss and says, All right, I'm I'm tired now. Thanks. Yeah, that's that's actually not what you want. That's not what you want to see when you kiss someone and they marry. So we could also take the same story, Sleeping Beauty, and put it like, what if instead of sh her father is a king, what if he is like um some kind of like arms dealer, right? So we can completely flip the paradigm. And now he's sent his daughter away to keep her safe, but instead of, you know, in the Disney movie, it's three fairies that take care of Aurora in the forest. But what if now she's been sent to like an underground bunker and has like some kind of, I don't know, like android that's that's a team of androids that's watching after her, right? So now we add a sci-fi bend to it. So you can really take any story again, they're don't steal, like, don't don't just change names and places and things like that, but you can find inspiration by twisting something. There's any number of ways that you can take stories that are out there, ask a question, ask the what-ifs, do opposite day, put an interesting character. What if the what if aliens landed at that low and the woman looking for Dill was the first person they had contact with? Or what if the woman looking for Dill was an alien?

SPEAKER_01 37:52

And maybe she like she had some sort of interaction where someone was talking about a deal. Like, if you make a deal with us, we will let you go back to your planet. And she heard Dill, and she's thinking, my only way to get off of this planet back to my home is if I secure the dill. You could go anywhere. I mean, and just to come back to your sleeping beauty revision, I can see Maleficent being the hero of this, being the one who's trying to stop. She tries to put everyone to sleep to stop this just illegal arms trade happening. You play with those archetypes, play with those tropes, play with what we know from the foundations of storytelling, fairy tales, myths, play with yeah. It's ah, it's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 38:46

See, ideas are everywhere, y'all. I promise. All you have to do is look around and just turn off that inner critic and see what comes. Play. Have fun. Be a child, if only for a short period of time. Um, I call it going to Ideation Land. It's like my favorite place ever. It's like Candyland, but for writers. Oh, oh, I like that. Go to Ideation Land and see what you can find. I promise you, the ideas are out there. And I feel like now everybody, the next time they go out and about, they're gonna be looking for this woman, looking for Dill. That's all I have to say. I know.

SPEAKER_01 39:20

Dill is the ingredient of the summer. You heard it here. And ABBA is a soundtrack for the summer. So get in. There it is. Perfect. I love it. All right. Happy writing, and actually, I guess happy idea idea idea. Veronica, is that a word? Hi, happy ideaing.

SPEAKER_00 39:44

Happy ideation. Playing. Yes. Yes, play, y'all, please. Remember, writing is something we get to do. It's not something we have to do. So have fun with it. Um, and if you come up with some really random or fun or funny or even serious, I like serious sometimes too. Um, ideas, you know, from this or because of this, we'd love to hear it. So drop us a comment or send us a note. Bye, y'all.