1. How do I come up with ideas for a story?
2. How do I come up with a plot?
3. How do I make a backstory for this character?
4. How do I think of characters?
5. How should I write a female character?
6. How should I write a male character?
7. How should I start a story?
8. How should I end my story?
9. Should Character A fall in love with Character B or
Character C?
10. Am I doing this wrong?
The second worst answer you can give to any of these
questions is that you need to sit around and wait for inspiration to
happen. That simply does not work,
any professional writer will tell you that. This is why I like the way John Cleese said creativity is a
way of ‘operating.’ It implies something that is actively done.
Now, the absolute worst answer you can give to these
questions is an actual answer.
Example: Female characters are supposed to exhibit these traits; males
are supposed to exhibit these other traits; you should start your story in this
manner; you should end your story by doing this….etc…etc…
The problem with these questions is that they suggest the
one asking them is under the impression that there is one right way of doing
something and they can learn how to do things that way. The problem with giving these questions
a hard answer is that it reinforces that way of thinking. Creativity is being able find and
implement several solutions to a problem.
If you know someone who is particularly creative, you’ve
probably also noticed that they are not particularly concerned with
wrongness. That is, when they see
a problem with a standard solution, they aren’t concerned that other solutions
will be viewed as ‘wrong.’ When Copernicus pieced together the heliocentric model, he wasn’t concerned about
being wrong even though the accepted theory of the time was the geocentric
one. Likewise, Nabokov wasn’t
concerned about being wrong when writing a character who was attracted to young
girls. Zusak wasn’t concerned
about being wrong when writing a book set in Nazi Germany that was narrated by
Death. Meyer wasn’t concerned
about being wrong when she created vampires that sparkled in the sunlight.
Creativity is
when you stop thinking along the lines of ‘Should I…’ and ‘How do I…’ and start
thinking in terms of ‘What if…’
You take all of your knowledge, all of experiences, all of your
resources, and you piece them together to make stuff. You dig deeper into the things that interest you. You look at things with more than one
perspective. “Follow your most
intense obsessions mercilessly” (Franz Kafka). You take something interesting and you just play with
it. You add more to it; you twist
it around; you break it into little pieces and rearrange them; you try to
disguise it as something else entirely.
That’s how writers make plots and characters and do all these things you
wonder how writers do. They take
something that interests them and start asking themselves ‘what if…’ and any
other question that might pop into their heads and then they create answers for
them.
What if… an American
girl moved to England? What problems would she face?
What if… this girl
didn’t actually move to England, but was kidnapped? How does this change
things?
What if… her
kidnapper wasn’t human? What was he?
What if… I made the
kidnapper be the protagonist? Is he still evil? Can I make people pity him? Can I make people love him? Does he still lose in the end?
What if… the girl was
a child when this happened? How
does this affect her?
They keep asking themselves different questions and they
keep creating different solutions and then question their solutions and
eventually all of these pieces are turned into a story. It is this way of thinking that is
creativity, and I think the biggest challenge to being creative is that we are
taught not to think that way.
Think about the way things are in schools. Information is often presented in a straightforward kind of
way. Students are ‘punished’
(usually by lowering grades) for giving wrong answers to questions. Asking ‘why’ and ‘what if’ are usually
seen as derailing the topic. We
are taught that 2+2 = 4 so when we are asked: What two numbers add up to
four? we usually don’t even realize that
there are literally (in this example) an infinite number of answers.
So people, especially (in my experience) teenagers, who want
to be writers often think in terms of ‘what should I…’ and ‘how should I…’
expecting to be given a series of steps or a set of rules they follow to
produce whatever they are trying write.
Their stories are likely to become formulaic. They see that this author wrote a story in this way and
these other authors did much the
same thing so that must be the way it’s done. But the important thing to realize is, when it comes to
writing, there isn’t a right way to arrange your ideas. And that’s what works of fiction are
essentially, an arrangement of ideas presented in a way that tells a
story. There isn’t a particular
way you can acquire these ideas either.
You certainly can’t sit around and wait for them to come to you. You have to create them yourself, and
that’s probably one of the most difficult parts about writing for some
people—adjusting to this way of thinking.
It’s not that you always have to think this way, it’s that you have to
be able to. You have to let go of
the notion that your ideas are somehow wrong or bad. You have that willingness to break ‘rules.’ You can’t look to other people to tell
you how to write your story. And I
mean your story; I don’t mean the
technical side of writing.
Everyone needs help with that part, but that’s what editors are
for.
Anyway, to those who have asked these sorts of questions,
I’m going to tell you this: There
isn’t a right answer for any of these.
These are questions you have to answer yourselves with a lot of thought,
a lot of patience, and a lot of time.
Think about what you know and what resources you have and apply them in
ways you haven’t before. Reframe
the questions. Look at things from
a different angle. Invent your own
rules.
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