Creating Mutations: Thirty Ways To Develop Narrative Starting Points

by David Pascal

Let's say that you want to write a piece of fiction and you have no starting point whatsoever. No sense of time. place, location. No characters. No idea of the problem or challenge that they're facing, no notion of the beginning, the development, the outcome. A total blank.

What do you do?

You create mutations. You take pre-existing material -- your own pre-existing material, if you like -- and vary and change and snip and juxtapose and recombine and, basically, play with texts.

You can play in an entirely free-form fashion, and that can work just fine. Or you can use specific techniques to vary material in orderly ways.

Below are a few of my favorites.

• COLLAGE
• MORPHOLOGICAL FORCED CONNECTIONS
• SUBTRACTION
• SHEETWORK
• JAZZ
• CUT-UPS
• ACTING / DIRECTING
• AUTHOR YOGA
• PUSH TO EXTREMES
• PERSPECTIVE OR ROLE SWITCHING
• ROMAN À CLEF / FACTION
• ROMAN À THESE
• FATTENING AND THINNING
• FORMAL TRANSPOSITION
• REVERSE / INVERT
• FALSIFYING ASSUMPTIONS
• PARALLELS
• FIELDWORK AND CASEWORK
• REWRITING OTHERS
• CRISSCROSS BRIDGEWORK
• CONNECTING AND DISCONNECTING
• TELLING IT OVER AGAIN
• CASTING / REPERTOIRE
• DESTABILIZATION
• FIND THE CATAPHOR
• EXPERIMENTAL SELVES
• BEHAVIORAL OUTLET
• EMERGENT HOLD
• THE BON-BON METHOD
• BUDDY WORK

COLLAGE

Collage is as simple to apply in a narrative sense as it is in the visual sense. You simply take an item from two or more narrative sources and stick them together. Then you see what the result looks like, and -- maybe -- make some shifts and changes in the items so that fit together better, or go on further from there.

An example of 'loose' collage might be to stick together more general narrative elements like character and setting. An example of hard collage would be taking scenes or passages directly from texts and juxtaposing them.

To illustrate the first:

Take the general outline of a detective novel and its main roles. Take actors, and use them to flesh out the characters.

Thus, Max Von Sydow from the Exorcist is the villain. B. F. Skinner can be the detective (with a degree in behavioral science as well as criminology). Danny Di Vito of Taxi is his sidekick. Estella Havisham of Great Expectations is the love interest, and Miss Havisham, her guardian, one of the victims. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (the Stoppard version) are a team of two policeman in the local force. The setting? Make it Iceland . The time? Height of the cold war.

This is 'loose collage' -- loose in that narrative elements from external sources have been brought together, but the exact combination allows room for a great deal of variation. Is Sydow as the villain possessed by literal demons? Or is he a madman who only thinks he's possessed? (Or is he a disillusioned apostate who, in Dostoyevskian fashion, is committing crimes purely to make the philosophical point that good and evil have no reality in the context of a godless universe?)

You can take your pick -- or come up with another version of your own.

I myself would give detective B. F. Skinner – or Skk?nner -- a degree in behavioral science as well as criminology, and let him hunt down the villain by means of behavior-analytic insights. But then I like radical behaviorism. Another writer might just use Skinner's personal characteristics only, such as his looks, or his love of Wagner.

In Great Expectations the jilted Miss Havisham uses Estella to avenge herself on suitors in general. Is that the reason that she becomes a victim here?

Does the pain Estella causes others leads her own victims to strike back, making them suitable red herrings for Inpector Skk?nner to investigate?

Maybe. The loose combination makes it easy to play with. Why not make Estella the Inspector's partner, and have Rosencrantz and Guldenstern played by Danny Di Vito as twins? With loose combinations you can go in any number of different directions.

Hard collage takes stuff directly.

Example:

To enter the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris, you first cross an eighteenth-century courtyard and step into an old abbey church, now part of a later complex, but originally part of a priory.

On the floor stretches a line of vehicles: bicycles, horseless carriages, automobiles; from the ceiling hang planes. Some of the objects are intact, though peeling and corroded by time, and in the ambiguous mix of natural and electric light they seem covered by a patina, an old violin's varnish. Others are only skeletons or chassis, rods and cranks that threaten indescribable tortures.

Beyond this sequence of antique machines -- once mobile, now immobile, their souls rusted, mere specimens of the technological pride that is so keen to display them to the reverence of visitors-stands the choir, guarded on the left by a scale model of the Statue of Liberty Bartholdi designed for another world, and on the right by a statue of Pascal.

"I was going to ring you in a couple of minutes," she said. "If you'd waited, you'd have been able to admire me in my new negligée."

"What a pity," Hirsch said grimly, closing the door behind him.

I had not expected Cath to come to my ordination. Indeed I had grown resigned to her disappearing from our lives.

There was a breathless silence in the room.

She turned to one of the computer screens, studying the mass of crawling green letters. The spell between them was broken again.

"Another Baader-Meinhof member was shot and killed in Munich."

"There's so much, Martin. So much more. And we've only begun to scratch the surface. We don't aim to pass judgment on the scum who infiltrate government and corrupt and prostitute themselves in a never-ending thrist for greed and power. They're only the symptoms of the real disease -- IAGO."

Beautifully flowing espionage scene, don't you think? Alas, the first three paragraphs are taken directly from Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, page 4, the next two from Hans Hellmut Kirst's Brothers In Arms, page 126. The sixth comes from Andrew Greeley's Virgin and Martyr, page 351. The seventh, eighth and ninth from James Patterson, Black Market, page 150, and the tenth from Gloria Vitanza Basile's The Manipulators, page 98.

These passages have been put together without any change whatever. They've been assembled in the exact way that a visual collage is put together. Existing material selected without alteration and juxtaposed.

Of course these passages are also unpublishable. Hard collage can stimulate law suits as well as ideas. Publish the above as it is, and one would be guilty of plagiarism. Other's people's words would be sold for profit directly without permission or credit being given.

And yet, the simple fact of taking disparate snatches of prose from divergent sources and putting them together has produced a basis for entirely new characters, plots, and situations.

A casual reading of the above suggests to me a scene that is depicted nowhere in the books from which the elements making up the scene are drawn.

Here it appears that in the nineteen-seventies or nineteen-eighties at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris, on the eve of a priest's ordination, a woman named Catherine whom the priest has known much of his life, and a person called Martin Hirsch, are meeting to discuss the relation of a German terrorist's death in Munich to something called IAGO -- a secret society? The code name for a secret CIA or Soviet operation?

It is a good starting point and and interesting opening scene for a thriller -- in fact, a completely original scene. Only the elements that suggested it were taken from other books.

And a good literary workman could rework that scene to the point where accusations of plagiarism no longer applied. The Conservatoire could be replaced with the Smithsonian, Catherine with Britt, Martin Hirsch with Anton Benjamin, the priest could become a Zen priest, IAGO could be re-christened DESDEMONA. And the plot could evolve from there.

Hard collage is somewhat dangerous. The danger is that the writer will be lazy, take other people's material, and neglect to transform it sufficiently. To do so is not only to court accusations of theft but, worse, to merit them. The writer's job is creativity, and while re-creation is itself a form of creation, not to re-create is to cheat both the audience and the source of one's material.

That all material has some pre-existing source is a given, but writers who simply take things without bothering to use it to spur their own imaginations and make the result their own are not playing the game like artists. Or gentlemen.

But, hard or loose, collage clearly is one of the most effective techniques around for creating new combinations of plot, character, situation, genre, and even sentences. It is well worth using -- as a starting point alone.

 

MORPHOLOGICAL FORCED CONNECTIONS

That mouthful is the term given to the very useful brainstorming and creativity technique developed by a Bulgarian-born Swiss astronomer named Fritz Zwicki.

It normally used a column or box model, and is very well described in a book called The Universal Traveler by Koberg and Bagnall which lists many such idea-generating techniques.

Essentially, what MFC does is list the attributes of any given object or subject and then list as many possible alternative attributes as possible. Then it connects them up criss-cross fashion. (Examples to follow.)

Koberg and Bagnall give the following rules for their "foolproof attribute listing invention-finding scheme":

1. List the attributes of the situation.

2. Below each attribute, place as many alternates as you can think of.

3. When completed, make many random runs -- generally tough not necessarily in order -- through the alternative attributes, picking up a different one from each column, and assembling the combinations into entirely new forms of your original subject.

To my knowledge, no one has ever applied this to fiction or fictional characters. So let us celebrate this as a Pascal first and try it!

 

Our first morphological subject -- Sherlock Holmes. What are his characteristics?

The first row lists four standard characteristics of Sherlock Holmes.

The columns below list alternatives or synonyms of those characteristics.

After generating them, we simply select one from each column, and re-combine them into entirely new configurations.

Holmes #1 is our Holmes, the rationalistic British private detective who is accompanied by a doctor, Watson.

Holmes #2 is a psychic consultant to the Toronto police. He channels perhaps the victims, perhaps great earlier detectives, and has a hyper-rationalistic journalist daughter who, like Sancho Panza, is critical but accompanies him on his cases.

Holmes #3 might be a Mexican writer of True Crime nonfiction who is deeply empathic and follows his lines of investigation through his feel for the individuals involved, rather than logic, and whose Watson is an aspiring writer whom he's taken under his wing.

Holmes #4 is a Polish police officer of the Soviet era who brutalizes individuals to get the truth, and whose Watson is the real or hallucinated ghost of an innocent victim that he murdered.

And so on and so on. The possible variations are limited only by the number of attributes that you can think of, and the number of alternatives to those attributes that you (or a book of synonyms) can come up with.

Does this sound overly mechanical? On the contrary. Morphological Forced Connections are an easy and useful way to make your work more individually expressive as well.

Consider. Go through the list of alternatives above. You may find that you really respond to the idea of a detective who is Mexican, but are indifferent to the notion of one who is Swedish. A consulting psychologist to the police may strike you as a fascinating, whereas a consulting psychic may strike you as ludicrous.

By selecting those alternatives to which you most strongly respond, you guarantee yourself a character that both more strongly reflects your interests and preferences and is more likely to move you.

And, of course, you can morph more than just characters. Settings, plots, genres themselves can all be morphed -- anything with describable attributes can be.

Example:

Most crime fiction has the general outline of involving a crime that is then investigated. The perpetrators are captured and then punished.

But what if you morph these elements? Then you get, not something that violates the law exactly, but that violates social norms that are sometimes embodied in laws -- say, the use of a new drug that is not yet been made illegal, and becomes part of a newly emerging religious or political movement.

Instead of being investigated (only) by the police, they become the objects of study by television people, who want to make a program about them.

Instead of being captured and sequestered, they may be only shunned, or attacked by the public in a spontaneous riot, or joined in ever-increasing numbers, or form a commune.

Instead of facing punishment, they may become media stars, sign lucrative contracts, or be deprogrammed, or find that their activities may be redirected to more socially acceptable avenues -- the new drug users could take part in legitimate medical studies of the drug.

This way, instead of having a standard crime plot that goes through the same old routine for the ten thousandth time, you may have an entire new sort of story that no one has ever seen before.

Will the public like it? That depends on what it's about and how well you write it.

But you have definitely created a new story line. And what led you there was Morphological Forced Connections.

 

SUBTRACTION

Subtraction is what it sounds like. Instead of taking some pre-existing material and adding something, or modifying some particular aspect of it, you take something away.

Subtract x and what's left? That's the game here.

Examples are almost too numerous to mention. Take Sherlock Holmes. Take away Watson. Take away London. Take away his eyesight? What's left.

Possibly a short story very close to the Conan Doyle canon where Holmes takes a solo journey to the United States and is temporarily blinded but must foil Moriarty nonetheless.

Possibly a very long novel in which a brilliant Japanes police detective who has consciously modeled himself on Holmes loses his eyesight and his wife in a terrorist attack. How does he cope? What does he do?

The answers build the novel, but the novel begins in taking the classic image of Holmes and subtracting things from him.

Take Germany in the Thirties. Subtract Hitler. What would have happened? A Nazism led by Joseph Goebbels? A Soviet-inspired Communist government evolving into a tyranny along the lines of the Russian Revolution?

Take Nazism itself and remove all traces of anti-semitism. Would a pro-Semitic Hitler have founded the creation of a Teutonic Israel?

Take America and remove Lincoln. Would the Civil War have been lost? Or settled much later, or much earlier? Would it have begun thirty years later? Or might it never have taken place at all?

The 'what if' of subtraction can touch almost anything, including a number of poignant and moving very close to the writer. What if your parents had died a week after you were born. What if you had not married your wife, or had your children, or taken up your profession. What if you had never been born at all? That's the basis for one of the most sccessful films of all time -- Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life.

It's not only a wonderful life -- it's a wonderful method, that gives you entirely new scenes, new situations, and new character activity, and all of it without having to create anything new at all. Creativity? You don't have to come up with anthing to use this method. All you have to do is take something away.

 

SHEETWORK

One of the most effective methods of story generation is what I call the Q & A Method. It's simple: you just keep asking questions about your story and don't stop? Who is the lead? Where does he work? Is he married? How old is he? What does he want to achieve, if anything? Where does he live? In what period of time?

The Q & A Method most effective if the writer is willing to follow out his or her questions and answers out as far as they seem to naturally want to go. Answers seem to suggest further questions all by themselves, and one can find oneself branching out into areas so strikingly different from the point one started that it can be quite a surprise . Is merely answering questions 'creativity'? The results are certainly creative.

But not every writer likes that degree of open-endedness. And some may prefer to go about their questioning with a bit more structure.

I think of this as sheetwork, which is what I call reaching into my desk to get out a sheet of paper with questions already on it about who my characters are, what the setting looks like, what everyone in it is individually seeking, and so on.

Sample sheets can be individually composed or sometimes found in various books on writing. Writers given to sheetwork should remember that they can modify what they see there. Developing your own sheet of questions is always a good idea.

Do you really want a meticulously minute physical description of you protagonist, right down to the make of cufflink and the mole under the left elbow? Some writers do. Meticulous physical characterization helps that sort of writer get a fix on his or her character.

Other writers are comparatively indifferent to physical characterization. For them, getting the setting down is what brings the entire book to life. If that's you, then write down questions that help you establish a solid grip on your setting.

This technique is especially useful if you're aware of habitual weaknesses in your writing or story approach that you want to correct.

Suppose your own observation or feedback from readers or editors indicates that you're neglecting physical characterization, or descriptions of setting. Write your draft without worrying about it. Then when you go over it have a worksheet ready and build that area up.

 

JAZZ

Jazz may seem more an attitude of mind than a fixed technique. But in fact it is a technique and one that has a solid history in prose.

Jack Kerouac, one of its first practitioners, called it 'spontaneous bop prosody' and what he did with words as a 'verbal jazz musician' in many ways paralleled closely what jazz musicians do with melodies when they spontaneously play standard melodies in non-standard idiosyncratic ways -- and what 'free jazz' players do when they don't begin with a set melody at all but simply play what comes to mind, which is what Kerouac sometimes did, setting an apparently free-flowing stream of consciousness onto paper.

I cannot wholeheartedly recommend Kerouac's specific method. Kerouac, said his friend John Tytell, wrote on "sixteen-foot rolls of thin Japanese drawing paper that he found in the loft, taping them together to form one huge roll."

Tytell observed that the "marathon linguistic flow" became a river of a single 250-foot paragraph with no punctuation, "as it unreeled from his memory of the various versions he had attempted during the past two years, but writing now with more natural freedom, somehow organically responding to the Zen notion of 'artless art.'"

Needless to say, this is not how it finally hit the market. After searching six years for a publisher, Malcolm Cowley, Kerouac's editor at Viking Press, edited, punctuated, and paginated the book before finally allowing it to see print.

Studies of Kerouac's language show that On the Road's prose was so consciously shaped by the jazz metaphor that it featured rhythms and cadences in a deliberate imitation of free-form instrumental playing.

That's the far side of the jazz metaphor, and I don't know how many writers want to take it that far. But it's there to be taken. A 'Jazz application' might be reading a story, shutting the book, starting a tape recorder, and re-telling it. Possibly even re-telling it the way you think Louis Armstrong might have told it.

You won't get the words right. But they'll be original words.

 

CUT-UPS

The cut-up method was developed by the American novelist William S. Burroughs in 1959 in Paris, in collaboration with his friend, painter Bryon Gysin. Burroughs gave Gysin the major credit for discovering the technique, though similar experiments with the same general approach had been done by Tristan Tzara, Eliot, and Dos Passos.

The cut-up is a technique of physical juxtaposition in which passages of prose are quite literally cut up with scissors and then pasted together at random. It is, in many respects, the most extreme version of what I earlier termed collage, except that in the earlier usage, collage was intended as a less direct and more casual sort of combination and juxtaposition.

Burroughs' cut-ups are not a matter of taking one coherent item such as a paragraph and putting it next to another coherent paragraph that has a similarity of topic or style. He would take a page of prose, cut it in half length-wise, and place that half over another half a page of prose and then read across, producing entirely new sentences on entirely new pages. Of course the majority of those sentences would be incoherent. But several might exhibit striking and unexpected word combinations, and suggest entirely unexpected new sentences and ideas.

Burroughs regarded his technique as not so much aesthetic as therapeutic: he applied his technique in terms of his somewhat idiosyncratic theory of mind control and how to escape it.

Standard words and phrases, he argued, are part of a system of "word and image locks" deliberately put in place to control the mind and lock it into conventional patterns of perceiving and thinking and behaving.

We react to words automatically and thoughtlessly because we have been conditioned to habitually react to them automatically and thoughtlessly. When exposed to them in garbled or broken-up form, the automaticity of the reaction -- and the control they exert -- is thus broken.

Whatever the value of this theory psychologically -- and I've seen no studies that support or refute Burroughs' claims for it -- as a technique for developing new word combinations and suggestions, it has real power. Burroughs himself incorporated cutups from literary authors including Eliot, Kafka, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Coleridge and Shakespeare into his famous Naked Lunch trilogy, juxtaposing them with popular culture items like a verbal equivalent of Pop Art, and adding the notes and fragments he produced going in and out of drug deliriums.

And the result has long been hailed by many as as a solid addition to literature itself.

Burroughs described the technique on several occasions:

"The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . . Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different -- cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise -- in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like.

"Here is a Rimbaud poem cut up.

"Visit of memories. Only your dance and your voice house. On the suburban air improbable desertions . . . all harmonic pine for strife.

"The great skies are open. Candor of vapor and tent spitting blood laugh and drunken penance.

"Promenade of wine perfume opens slow bottle.

"The great skies are open. Supreme bugle burning flesh children to mist."

"Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut-ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here write now."

Elsewhere Burroughs wrote, "Pages of text are cut and rearranged to form new combinations of word and image -- In writing my last two novels, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded, I have used an extension of the cut up method I call "the fold in method" -- A page of text -- my own or some one else's -- is folded down the middle and placed on another page -- The composite text is then read across half one text and half the other -- "

Burroughs was by no means an advocate of simply taking the result as is and making it public. He called for extensive editing, a sensitivity to potentially useful material slumbering in the assemblage, and frequent revision.

"All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation."

The method itself was subject to extension and variation. The fold-in method was one such. "In using the fold-in method I edit delete and rearrange as in any other method of composition - I have frequently had the experience of writing some pages of straight narrative text which were then folded in with other pages and found that the fold-ins were clearer and more comprehensible than the original texts -- Perfectly clear narrative prose can be produced using the fold-in method -- Best results are usually obtained by placing pages dealing with similar subjects in juxtaposition."

Burroughs was aware that cut-up method was by no means restricted to prose. Tapes could be cut up and re-spliced. Montage, the juxtaposition of film and television images, was the basis of how those arts functioned. His comments in many ways heralded the new helter-skelter media environment of music remixes, web surfing, and discontinuous channel switching that we all experience.

Except that Burroughs sought to use the experience consciously to develop both an awareness of its functioning and of our own functioning in relation to it; as well as an to use it as a new and seemingly endless resource of new images, ideas, and phrases.

Is this technique as useful in practice as it sounds in theory? For poets, it can be quite useful.  Startling and unexpected new word combinations become almost commonplace.  For writers of fiction, on the other hand, working on material farther removed from the pure surface of language andstyle, the cut-up can devolve all too easily into incoherence. It may suggest good fiction; it rarely makes a direct leap into being good fiction.  

Burroughs himself went from producing very jerky-sounding discontinuous prose in his early novels to almost quite conventional-sounding narrative in his late work, and I think that stemmed from a natural sense of the limitations of the cut-up method.

An unexpected narrative development is more likely to come by juxtaposing ideas rather than language itself.

Tear off half a page of Carrie, The Brothers Karamazov, and 1984, and you may well come up with some interesting garbled sentence fragments and swatches of dialogue. And those fragments and swatches may well suggest a story idea or element.

But they will not suggest an story in which a girl with telekinetic powers, living in a dystopian near-future dictatorship with three other sisters and a religious madwoman for a mother, comes under suspicion after the mother is murdered. That plot results from a combination of the general plot thrusts of the respective narratives, and general plot thrusts are not always mentioned explicitly on individual pages taken from the book.

This doesn't mean the cut-up method doesn't have its uses, not least of which is a heightening of the language and diction used in particular genres. There's nothing like cutting up a few science fiction pages and a few pages from a western to see how different the actual language is -- the wealth of technological neologisms of sci-fi as opposed to the homey landscape terminology permeating westerns. Cut sentences up enough, and as meaning drops away, grammatical and linguistic characteristics become paradoxically but impressively plain.

But again, the benefit of that lies largely in language awareness and, occasionally, the discovery of new and useful phrases or notions. As a device for generating narrative as opposed to narrative language, the looser approach to collage suggested earlier may be easier for most writers.

 

ACTING / DIRECTING

Acting and Directing are ways to approach your narrative material from entirely different perspectives.

Take the second first: if the current way you're approaching your material as a writer doesn't work, then don't approach it as a writer. Try approaching it as something else. Imagine, for instance, that you are a film director instead, or a theatrical director. How does that change your perspective on what's going on in the story and how to present it?

This technique is deceptively powerful. A writer may be blocked because he wants to 'get into' his character, to feel him or her from the inside, and yet not be able to make that connection. A director couldn't care less. He's taking a picture from the outside. What is going on visually that communicates what he wants to communicate to the audience? Adopting a cinematic perspective on one's story can easily strip away a tendency to over-ripe prose passages or plotless psychological meandering. A character in a novel may well worry about some personal problem and brood over it internally for entire chapters. But film is a moving picture, and moving pictures have to show something happening.

Adopting the stance of a theatre director has the same benefit. You can't have an actor do stream-of-consciousness internal dialogue on stage. Nothing happens. He has to speak, and he has to encounter and interact with others on a real-time visual basis. Looking at your story from this angle automatically propels you to give dialogue and character conflict greater attention.

Taking the inner position of directing a story rather than recounting it can be taken to a higher level too. Unlike film or theatre directors, the writer can take on borderline divine abilities and think himself directly into real-life scenes of his imagining and order and arrange things from within. The difference isn't a small one.

Many writers have characteristic ways of approaching material, and very few of them have actively tried to find out what those ways are. You may, for instance, assume that writing fiction means describing people and their stories from a distance, the way you might tell a friend a story about your family. That isn't necessarily a bad way to do it, but that sense of distance may well flavor your story, or give it the feel of a recounting of things in the past, or unconsciously restrict certain topics or subjects.

If, on the other hand, you take the perspective of a Star Trek officer entering the Holodeck, if you approach the story as an example of virtual reality that is totally plastic and capable of turning into absolutely anything you want at any moment, the possibilities become different.

Taking on an actor's perspective, imagining yourself into the character in thick of events, can be as useful as taking a new position outside of it. Describing from outside is one thing, describing from within another. This technique has obvious benefits from the angle of characterization. Your villain may have a cardboard quality, but imagine yourself sitting down and writing a first-person chapter from the inner perspective of the villain.

Does the terrorist see himself as butcher, or a self-sacrificing patriot? Does the fearsome mystery see himself in real life a poverty-stricken loser who endures constant contempt and abuse, and does the murderer or traitor gloat over his deed, or is he appalled and ashamed? Might he hide his crime not out of cowardice, but so as not to abandon and hurt his children and spouse and parents?

The one-dimensional person can become three-dimensional, if you yourself step in their place. And the things you hear themselves say to themselves, the plans they make in response to the developing events of story, can give you not only insight but actual prose to insert into the appropriate place in the text.

Become Ashley Wilkes, Scarlet O'Hara, Rhett Butler. You will observe things, experience feelings, have goals and plans and opinions, that will not be obvious from an outside perspective. And that will not only deepen your grasp of that character but suggest story paths and character actions you might not have seen otherwise. You will see not only old stories from new angles but new stories entirely.

One particularly interesting kind of acting and directing was practiced by the late best-selling author Trevanian. His approach to writing is not to create any of the characters at first, but instead to create the character of the author. To produce a Western, he first imagined and then played the role of a Western author. To write a spy novel, he first imagined a supercilious espionage writer much akin to the book's hero. To write a mystery about a police inspector in Montreal, he assumed a Simenon-like persona before picking up the pen. For Trevanian, creating the author preceded creating the author's characters.

 

AUTHOR YOGA

This is an exercise I've given people, with surprisingly positive results. I have them close their eyes and imagine themselves to be their favorite author. They imagine what it is like to literally physically be T. S. Eliot or Stephen King or Danielle Steele, sitting down to their writing desk, falling into the writer's trance, working out the story or passage at hand.

This particular exercise I developed after reading about experiments in hypnosis done in 1966 in the former Soviet Union by Dr. Vladimir Raikov.

Raikov took a female physics student, with no especial interest in art and no particular evidence of special artistic skills or abilities, and hypnotized her into becoming Raphael. The hypnotic subject would then walk around taking on the posture, the glance, the comments of a great Renaissance artist, and in due course settle down to draw.

Raikov called this technique ‘reincarnation’ and he went on to ‘reincarnate’ the subject as other great artists of history, such as the Russian painter Repin.

According to reports, the subject's drawing skills markedly improved as a result of the hypnosis. But the interesting thing is that after ten sessions or so, the student began drawing on her own, taking a sketch pad around with her and drawing with genuine skill and absorption on her own time.

After three months and twenty-five sessions, the student's artistic abilities had progressed to the point where she drew neither like Raphael nor Repin but "as well as a competent magazine illustrator." At the experiment's close she was considering leaving physics for art as a career.

I later learned that Tibetan Buddhists have a similar technique which they call 'Deity Yoga'. They enter a meditative state, visualize a deity, and then visualize themselves as the deity and merge their identity with it entirely.

Whether one become a God by imagining oneself so is not the issue. The issue is, does imagining oneself as an incarnation of wisdom and compassion make one wiser and more compassionate? It seems to do so. The Dalai Lama, who practices Deity Yoga, is certainly farther along the path than most political leaders, who do not.

This technique is a kind of Author Yoga. Really try to see the world -- and the process of writing -- as your favorite author might see it. Play that author, as an actor would. Play him or her internally. See if your understanding deepens and your work improves. Evidence suggests it will.

Do you really need to go into a trance or be hypnotized into thinking you are Shakespeare in order to write a play? No. Marlowe didn't, nor did Shaw.

But playing the part, taking on that perspective as an experiment, seeing the work from the point of view of a master craftsman, approaching it with a sense of experience and emotional confidence, can be a transforming experience. A way of acting that can lead to a manner of being.

 

PUSH TO EXTREMES

The technique of pushing elements to an extreme has a long and noble history, both in terms of form and content.

Simenon once said that his method of writing fiction was simple: he took a character and asked himself, what would push this person to the breaking point and beyond? Then he wrote a novel about exactly those circumstances coming about and the character's reaction. The character might be someone he knew, or a character that had come to inhabit his head. Either way the method was the same, and it was powerful enough to provide the motor for some of the most powerful confrontations in French literature.

The technique can work for you too. Pick someone you know -- your spouse, your best friend, your co-worker. What would push them beyond the edge? What would drive them to murder, to theft, to abandon everything? What would make their entire life collapse?

To someone deeply religious, it might be loss of faith. To a politician or egotist, it might be the public revelation of some disgrace. To a business person it might be a devastating financial threat, to an academician some professional disgrace.

Find the absolutely intolerable thing that cannot be allowed to happen, and make it happen. Drama follows inevitably.

Pushing to extremes is not restricted only to Simenonesque formulae or crime. You can have characters actively pushing to extremes, striving to realize themselves. Reichmarshall Heinrich Himmler is a character pushed to an extreme. The beginning is a shy, bespectacled schoolboy who is unsuccessful with girls. The end is one of the most fearsome architects of genocide in history. The story of the passage from one extreme to the other is a story, and not an insignificant or uninteresting story.

Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader is arguably an analogous journey. Buddha is a counter-example -- from isolated prince to ragged seeker to enlightened being. Ludwig Wittgenstein might be an analogy here -- the upper-class child of wealthy Viennese simply giving his money away so as to be able to concentrate on philosophy without being distracted by it.

Instead of pushing a person to face the extreme of something intolerably negative, one can take a person to the extreme of fulfillment. What would bring any given character to perfect realization? That is another kind of extreme, and a gripping one.

The narrative principle of pushing to extremes can be applied to families and to groups. What takes a political group to the point of terrorism? What pushes the Russian proletariat to revolution? What makes the Kennedy family or the Jacksons into what they are? Telling that story tells a story. The principle can be applied to externals as well as psychology. Consider settings. What is life be like for a characters in exteme environments, on the moon, on Mars, or in the Ice Age?

You can push the very form of fiction to extremes.

George Perec's famous 300-page novel La Disparation, from which he excluded all use of the letter 'e,' is one example.

Chris Marker's La Jetty is a moving picture which doesn't move: it's made entirely of black and white stills.

The French novelist Gyp wrote an entire string of novels entirely in dialogue.

There are stretches of Finnegan's Wake where the English-like language consists of no actual English words at all.

Robbe-Grillet wrote fiction consisting entirely of minute objective descriptions of surfaces. One infamous 'short fiction' of is was a description of three imaginary objects. It was short, it was fiction, and it was a mode of writing pushed to an extreme.

Taking things to an extreme can lead to high drama, to striking formal experimentation, and (in some cases) to going over the edge and producing things that are unbelievable or unreadable. Extremity and taste, like extremity and substance, don't always go hand in hand.

But going to extremes doesn't necessarily mean going beyond them. And merely approaching them can produce interest, narrative tension, and stylistic originality.

 

PERSPECTIVE OR ROLE SWITCHING

Switching roles or perspectives in a story is a way to improve characterization, suggest new perceptions and scenes, and possibly to change the entire existing structure of your story.

Take Hamlet as our example. When we think about Hamlet we think about it from the perspective of a theatre-goer viewing it on the stage. We also see it from a third-person perspective: the spectator, looking at things from the outside.

Let's change that perspective. Instead of a spectator in the audience, let's imagine ourselves as a novelist writing the story of Hamlet. Instead of viewing a character such as Ophelia from the outside, we can now describe Ophelia's feelings, physical sensations, fragmentary internal dialogue.

Stage-set limitations vanish -- we can insert long evocative description of the frozen Danish landscape, we can present Laertes' troops in battle or see leaves drift along the moving river where Ophelia eventually drowns. A film director, or a children's story teller, would arrive at entirely new methods of presentation.

But imagine that we stay with our novelist role. Let's take the third-person position we now have and go to first-person. What would the story of Hamlet be viewed and told from the perspective of Claudius, of Ophelia, of Gertrude?

Gertrude's story might well be a Scarlett O'Hara of Valley Of The Dolls tale of a woman of ambition and determination coldly sleeping her way to the top.

Claudius' narrative could be that of a political murderer striving for political power, or the Shavian tale of a self-appointed Brutus electing realistically to free a nation from an incompetent predecessor, or a Faulknerian love story of passions involving family and incest.

Ophelia's tale could be a Sylvia Plath tale of a sensitive woman painfully in love with an indifferent man of verbal genius, and slipping gradually into suicide.

Each of these, as they are, could be powerful novels, given proper treatment by a sufficiently gifted writer. Each could also be the starting points for entirely new novels -- an Ophelia figure falling for a young Kennedy figure, a conflicted heir to a political tradition marred by assassination. She could be a English Lit student at Harvard; he could be torn over conflicts relating to homosexuality rather than Courtly conspiracy. And so on.

The point of switching roles is that it gives you a host of material to begin from -- in this case the characters, setting, and plot of Hamlet -- and yet by viewing it from an different perspective you can alter how the entire story is presented and completely change the emphases and to some extent the contents of the whole.

A re-telling from Ophelia's perspective would show nothing of the ghost of Hamlet's father or the suspicion that Claudius was his murderer. On the other hand the death of Ophelia's father Polonius, almost a scene in passing to the indifferent Hamlet, would be a devastating development to the story from Ophelia's angle.

Ophelia's view of Gertrude's marriage might well be positive -- Gertrude would now be dealing with Claudius and thus leave Hamlet alone for Ophelia. A wealth of new angles on existing materials emerges, and new angles can lead to entirely new and fruitful directions.

 

ROMAN á CLEF / FACTION

The roman á clef, or 'novel with a key,' is a novel in which real events are given a fictional mask. It might be safely considered to be a historical novel, except that the historical actors are close enough in time period to the author to be able to sue him for libel.

Thus The King is the sordid tale of a Frank-Sinatra-like figure and Valley Of The Dolls is the sordid tale of Judy-Garland-like figure, and the play MacBird is the sordid tale of someone amazingly like Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36^th President of the United States , arranging the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35^th President of the United States .

The roman á clef, as these examples show, tends to be marked by a very close resemblance to actual individuals prominent in the public mind, and very often posits a hidden and seamy streaks of vile deeds or self-indulgences. Rare is the roman á clef whose major figures are decent or even average. Wanton carnality, criminal acts and connections, secrets covered up and revealed are at the core of this genre.

Is it for that reason worthless? Not necessarily. In some ways the roman á clef is a descendant of the muckraking novels of the Thirties, and often there is a lot of muck to rake. Joe Klein's novel Primary Colors was a brutal representation of Bill Clinton's private and public misdeeds, and that sort of revelation can be salutary and lead to things being cleaned up.

The spy fiction of Frederick Forsyth gave birth to the term 'faction' for this very reason. There are things you can't say about contemporary people and events because you can't prove that they're true. They may well be true and they may well be mentioning and speculation in a fictional context can be a public service. CIA, Homeland Security, MI5 and Mossad operations have taken place and continue to take place in the dark, and if only novelists are able to bring some elements of them into the light, that is nonetheless be a good thing.

The roman á clef can reach higher levels as well -- I'm thinking particularly of Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, a portrait of Parisian intellectual society after the end of World War II. Under their fictional masks Sartre, Camus, Koestler, and Simone de Beauvoir herself chat, reminisce, seethe, brood over the fate of France and the West, and collectively produce one of the most interesting and thoughtful novels and pictures of an era written in that century.

As with most portraiture, the person being portrayed is key, and de Beauvoir's technique of portraying philosophers as opposed to pop stars and mafiosi has much to recommend it. Thomas Bernhard's novel Correction, about a philosopher much reminiscent of Wittgenstein, takes the approach into the genuine realm of high art.

 

ROMAN á THESE

The roman á these, or didactic novel, is not much held in high regard anymore, perhaps unjustly. Such novels are written with a goal, the goal being to convert the reader to the author's viewpoint. It is fictional propaganda, in short, and while nowadays one tends to dismiss such stuff, one would do well to remember that fictional propaganda has had profound impact.

Lincoln, on being introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, said, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!" That might be giving Ms. Stowe a bit too much credit, but the undeniable fact that her book shook, changed, and inflamed many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of readers undoubtedly contributed to a major historical conflict.

Didactic fiction can lead to the high art -- Milton's Paradise Lost was written explicitly to 'justifie the wayes of God to men,' not to be the greatest individual poem in the English language. But that is what it has been frequently called, just as The Pilgrim's Progress was called by Shaw the best book. Triumph Of The Will may be appalling but it remains classic.

Didactic works need not be flat exposition of canned cliches either. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged or the Don Juan books of Carlos Castaneda, whatever one thinks of them as art, certainly show considerable intellectual originality.

The didactic approach can even cover entire spectrums and eras, as with the Great Wall of socialist realism. Communist literature vetted by the State was panned from the start, but is it really so easy to discard The Master And Margarita, And Quiet Flows The Don, Solaris, The Bedbug, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovitch?

Can the roman á these approach help you write? Maybe. It depends on whether you have strong views and have the skill and desire to use fiction to get support for them.

George Bernard Shaw claimed that he never wrote for the pleasure of it, that all his work was composed purely and solely to get people to share his point of view. That he nonetheless produced a body of work second only to Shakespeare's in terms of British drama is generally conceded.

Robert Ludlum thought government secrecy was getting out of hand, and Upton Sinclair felt that businesses were cutting corners and harming both their employees and the public.

They dramatized their views in books. They changed some minds. It made a difference.

If you need the spur of a good cause to get you writing, adopting the roman á these approach can give it to you. The result need not be inartistic, nor does it have to be indifferent to popular success -- indeed, getting the ear of the public is very nearly a prerequisite.

Working in this vein can produce fiction with a scope and importance quite outside criteria of artistic or monetary success. But that doesn't make its importance any less genuine. Or its power to spur new narrative any less real.

 

FATTENING AND THINNING

Fattening and thinning are simple.

To fatten a text, take an existing piece of prose and add a new sentence of your own after each sentence that you read.

Example:

Call me Ishmael. You may call me Frederick or Arthur or even Heinrich if you wish, but that would not be my name. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. Do you find the world particularly interesting? -- I do, I find it quite fascinating, and that is why I chose travel as an occupation. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. For certainly a continual exposure to new and strange environments keeps one alert. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. For there is something about stability and conformity, that wheel of repetition that most men have the misfortune to regard as life, that is death to the soul. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. Rather than dying myself, I prefer to let the world around me die, and to find newer and newer replacements.

The original lines are of course Melville's, from Moby Dick. The interspersed lines are my own, to fatten it up.

The amusing thing about Fattening is that you can go back and do some Thinning. To Thin, you take out the original text. To wit::

You may call me Frederick or Arthur or even Heinrich if you wish, but that would not be my name. Do you find the world particularly interesting? -- I do, I find it quite fascinating, and that is why I chose travel as an occupation. For certainly a continual exposure to new and strange environments keeps one alert. For there is something about stability and confomity, that wheel of repetition that most men have the misfortune to regard as life, that is death to the soul. Rather than dying myself, I prefer to let the world around me die and to find a newer and newer replacements.

Good opening paragraph? There are certainly worse.

You can expand this technique -- fatten each paragraph with an additional paragraph, each page with an extra page, each chapter with a new chapter -- and you can shrink it, adding a new word after every existing word or set of words.

Either way you start with something old -- but end up with something new.

 

TRANSPOSITION

Transposition is simple too. Nearly every extended work of fiction has different standard ways of presenting its material. Some is done first person, some third person, some sections are presented as dialogue, some are summarized by the narrator.

Transpose them. Turn the dialogue section into a summary section, description to implication, first person to third person. Example:

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.:

Transposition:

"So how did it all start then?"

"In the beginning? Well, there was this big Word hangin' there, you see..."

"What, a big Word?"

"That's right."

"Just hanging there up in space? No clothes hanger holding It up or anything?"

"Hanging there all by Itself, yes."

"Well that is just extraordinary. Just utterly bloody extraordinary."

"Isn't it? And It was with God too."

"What, you mean this big Word and God were sitting there in space on some bloody divan, having a cappuccinno, like at Starbucks?"

"No no no. The Word was with Him because It was Him. He's a big Word, don't you see?"

"What? You mean the Allmighty is a sentence fragment? The Creator started out as nothing but a gigantic participle. You're joking!"

"I think it would be more accurate to think of Him as an Exclamation Point."

Poor theology. But decent enough start for a Monty Python skit.

Transpositions can be ones of content as well as form. The Big Sleep is one kind of story if you set it in California in the Thirties. It's a very different kind of story if you set in in postwar Japan in 1946 and if you transpose the investigator from a white male private detective with an elegant prose style to a black female investigating on behalf of the military police.

Change one element and you change several. Change several and you may the clue to an entirely new creation.

 

REVERSE / INVERT

Reversal and inversion speak for themselves. Simply take a given plot line or situation and turn it inside out.

A robot comes from the future to hunt and destroy a young woman, as in Terminator? Why not write a story in which a young woman goes into the future to hunt and destroy a robot?

Is Fyodor Karamazov killed by one of his sons? Why not have Fyodor Karamazov kill one of the sons?

Scarlett O'Hara is torn between Ashley Wilkes and Rhett Butler? Why not instead a civil war love story where a Clark Gable figure is torn between Southern belle Vivien Leigh and Northern belle Carole Lombard?

Is police lieutenant Columbo stalking killer Anthony Hopkins? Suppose you write it as killer police lieutenant Columbo stalking an innocent Anthony Hopkins?

The beauty of reversals is not only that by making one simple adjustment, an entirely new story can be produced, but that by reversing a situation, a writer can sometimes open up an entirely new range of social possibilities. A reversal of the traditional roles of White Knight and Damsel is arguably a core part of building new feminist perspectives. Stepin Fechit was a fixture in the earlier imagination of racist Americans, and that the reversal of that image into the image of Sidney Poitier or James Earl Jones was no small harbinger of a new social attitudes about racial discrimination.

Reversals can not only create, and not only surprise, but sometimes point the way to unrecognized truths.

 

FALSIFYING ASSUMPTIONS

You can arrive at an entirely new plot by falsifying the assumptions of an existing one.

We assume that Watson is Holmes' trustworthy sidekick. What happens to the story if we make Watson a conscious duplicitious agent of Moriarty instead?

We assume Oedipus is the son of Laius and Jocasta. What if the son of Laius and Jocasta died and a slave boy unrelated to either was put in his place?

A small nest of terrorists is plotting to bomb the Israeli embassy. What if every member of that terrorist nest were themselves agents from different branches of American and Israeli intelligence?

If we assume that Gone With The Wind took place during the Civil War in the 1860's, a certain kind of novel follows. If we assume that it takes place on a starship during the 2160's, an entirely different sort of novel follows.

(Gone With The Wind might be a virtual reality environment produced as a vacation space, or possibly as a mode of therapy. However, something's gone wrong, the ship's computer is now operating things independently, and the humans are stuck in the program. Some have even forgotten it is a program. Instead of surviving the way, how do protagonists Rhett and Scarlett escape The Matrix?)

Every work of fiction rests on certain assumptions to which the reader tacitly agrees. If you pull the rug out from under the reader's feet at some point, the experience can be delightful or disorienting, depending on your skill and how well you've set it up.

The easiest way to set it up is to take an existing work of fiction, or news story, or personal real-life situation, and ask yourself what seems to be going on. What does everyone casually looking at this situation assume to be true? Then falsify it.

If a novel opens with a self-proclaimed detective talking to a client while a swing band plays a forties tune, the reader assumes the detective is a detective, and the time period is the forties. In most cases the reader will be right, and in this particular case let us assume that he is.

But if you falsify those assumptions, and imagine a situation where the detective is not a detective, but only someone posing as a detective, and the swing band is not a forties band but a contemporary swing revival group, then you have created an entirely new opening situation that can go in directions totally different from the one you began with. Perhaps they're actors. Perhaps they're holograms. Perhaps they're people or societies that favor Retro with a vengeance.

You can start your own story from that point, or keep the reader's casual assumption going -- till you decide to spring the surprise and dazzle them with your capacity for creating unexpected plot twists.

The formula for creating the amazing unexpected plot twist? Simple: arrange things so that what the reader thinks is not the case at all. Then spring the surprise at whatever moment you think is most dramatic.

The formula for finding a finding a plot to twist? Look around you, look inside you, look at books and magazines and shows, and ask yourself what you assume is true in what you see, and then ask what would happen if something that appears to be the case in any one of those situations were different. Radically different.

Make a list. It will give you a rich collection of new story angles and reader surprises.

 

PARALLELS

Parallel plotting is a technique for bulking up stories, and is often used when developing sub-plots. Let's say your genre is the romance novel and your story is a romantic triangle. Girl A is torn between Boy A and Boy B. The story is clear in your mind and develops well, but it isn't especially full. You need to fill out a hundred and fifty pages and the story as it is now can only be drawn out to cover ninety pages or so. What do you do?

One answer is to create a second plot that parallels the first. Your heroine is torn between two men. Why not give her a girlfriend or sister that is also torn between two very different men, or a brother that is torn between two women although married to one?

Recounting the development of the parallel plot fills up the needed space and adds new characters, incidents, and fullness to the overall story.

The parallel story line can do more than just duplicate the first. The effect of the main story line is enhanced by the contrast of the secondary story. It can considerably deepen or highlight the main story, as well as affect it in direct and powerful ways. 

Let us say that in the first story, the heroine agonizes deeply over her two suitors because she genuinely cares about both and wants to avoid hurting either. The subsidiary parallel story can be about her sister, who is currently having an affair with two men, causing them both considerable upset, and doesn't care a thing about it -- in fact relishes it.

Properly done, this can make the main heroine seem noble and compassionate by contrast, or repressed and lifeless by contrast, and needing to assert her own needs more.

The second line can open new plot possibilities as well. The compassionate heroine may find herself more attracted to one of her sister's suffering victims than to her current choices, and complicate the main story line even further. The rapacious sister may decide to solve her sibling's impasse by stealing away one of her choices.

Even more parallel lines can be generated -- the sisters' father may be torn between a high-paying corporate post he loathes and an academic position that pays nothing but that he's always wanted. And again, the parallel lines can connect up. One of the main sister's romantic interests is a professor at the university whom she met through her father. The other may be the son of her father's main business competitor.

Paralleling plots can operate whole or in part or even involve story elements that don't involve story at all. The above examples are really three parallel sets of relationship -- Person A must choose between Choice A and Choice B.

But you can have three parallel sets of activities -- Person A seeks out a missing parent (main line), so add the parallel of Person B trying to reconcile with an estranged daughter (parallel line) and Person C trying to find the exact person for a dramatic role.

Similar types of activity parallel one another. Person A may be a trial lawyer, Person B a journalist, Person C a psychoanalyst -- all professions deal with people, often very troubled people.

To parallel a plot doesn't require even that much level of variation -- start with one lawyer working on a case, and create a second lawyer working of the same case, and you have enough right there to produce conflict and interaction.

But you can just as easily create a totally reversed parallel. If your main line is a lawyer defending a client, the parallel line can be a hit man operating entirely outside the law aiming to kill the client.

You can also play jazz musician and spin the parallel line farther and farther out with ever wilder variations -- the hit man is a Jamaican who wants the victim's liver because a spirit in a Voodoo trance convinced him that waving the liver around his head three times would enable him to win at Lotto.

Ridiculous? Not as ridiculous as real life. But that's not the point. The point is that you can parallel full and entire story lines, or fragments or aspects of story lines, or vary and twist those variations into pretzels. And you can come up with as many such whole, partial, or twisted additions as you like.

Every such addition adds bulk to your story, and gives you more to connect, more to use, more to play with, and more to write about.

 

FIELDWORK AND CASEWORK

Fieldwork is a worthy term used by anthropologists. It refers to the collection of raw data in the social science and natural science fields such as anthropology, social psychology, and sociology.

Field work is conducted in the field, as contrasted with laboratory research which is conducted in controlled environments, and what it often amounts to is simply going to the place that interests you, sitting there, observing everything you can, and taking notes.

There are few techniques as useful as fieldwork for generating story ideas, characters, lines for dialogue, whatever. Just go to a setting you expect to use, sit down, and take notes.

Want to write about contemporary American characters? Go to the food court at a shopping mall, get out your note pad, and write down how people dress, how they look, what they talk about, the language and the phrases that they use.

Are you writing a court scene? Go to court. Look around. Take notes.

In the age of Google and the Wikipedia, research has a tendency to arrive second-hand. That doesn't mean it isn't useful, but there are few ways of getting strong real detail into your writing, not to mention ideas for characters and events, by actually going to the place where your characters are likely to go and the events are likely to take place, seeing what's right there, and recording it.

And remember to maintain the attitude of the novelist, of the sociologist. Fieldwork is usually restricted to sub-cultures or other cultures. It doesn't have to be. Trying to see your own world from alien eyes can show you as many new and unexpected things as observing new spots entirely.

Casework is a term used by social workers and occasionally psychologists, and has overlapping and competing definitions. The way I use it here is to contrast it with fieldwork, and the major difference is that fieldwork deals with everything in the social environment, whereas casework deals with the characteristics and story of one single individual or family.

Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections might be viewed as an example of casework: the novel traces the decline (and decline and decline) of the Lambert family.

The head of the family, Alfred, slides into dementia, as his wife, Enid, denies that it's happening. Their son Chip has lost a college post by seducing a student, and embarked on a new career as a screenwriter. His sister Denise is a chef wallowing in sordid workplace affairs. Banker brother Gary loathes his marriage. The novel is in many ways an attempt to fulfill the promise of a novel title by Anthony Trollope: The Way We Live Now.

It may be a sad image of the way we live now, but it is a good example of fictional casework. Franzen is tracing the experiences of a small representative social group in the context of a closely observed modern social setting. It is a novel, but also in some respects a report. A sort of report that anyone can try to make.

At the other fictional extreme we have the casework of Sigmund Freud. Researchers have demonstrated rather conclusively that many of Freud's reports on his client cases were falsified. Patient's histories were edited or misrepresented in ways that would support Freud's now-discredited theories, and reported 'cures' have been shown to be totally fallacious.

And yet -- what writing! Not for nothing did Freud win the Goethe Prize for literature. His reports of client cases brim with brilliant remarks, searing drama, mystery, tension, surprise. Freud often presents himself as a sort of Sherlock Holmes of the psyche, unearthing hint after indication after clue till coming upon the startling truth that illuminates the entire case.

The truth, regrettably, has turned out to be bogus, since the revelation has nothing in objective reality to confirm or disconfirm it. The victim either accepts Freud's explication and is thus deemed by Freud to be cured, or doesn't, in which case 'neurotic inner resistances' block the patient from grasping the truth of Freud's uncomfirmed and unconfirmable insights.

As science, it's nonsense. But as art, it's magnificent. Freud's casework will live as literature long after it's forgotten as psychology, and precisely for that reason writers should study his work. His reports of his most famous cases are superb examples of psychological as opposed to sociological casework as a fictional technique -- the close-focus examination of a single-individual and the story of that individual as they try to come to grips with interior mysteries and demons.

And fine novels, from Keith Oatley's The Case of Emily V. to D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel, have been built on following those structures almost exactly.

 

REWRITING OTHERS

This is a technique that I have never used. And yet it's so attractive that I find myself hoping that some reader of this book will try it and let me know how it works.

The basic idea is simple, and stems from the experience that all of us have had at some time or other of reading a piece of fiction that is not only Godawful, but Godawful in a way that you can clearly see could be fixed.

Why not fix it? In fact, why not totally revise the entire thing, top to bottom, every sentence?

The problem with getting to the stage of revision is that you have to begin with a first draft. And the problem with that is that, as Hemingway said, the first draft of anything is shit. It's very tedious to produce several hundred pages of shit. Why not save time and find several hundred pages elsewhere and use them instead? Why not use an existing work of fiction as your first draft?

Of course, if you allow so much as one recognizable untransformed sentence of the original to reach the final draft stage, then you are a plagiarist, and may God help you, because the plaintiff's attorney certainly won't.

But if your final draft reaches the point where it's initial beginning is no longer recognizable, then you have created, or at least re-created, something all your own.

In practice I would imagine this to be a rather hard technique to execute. In part because if the book you start from has good passages and aspects, the need to discard them in the course of transforming them goes against a good writer's grain, and hurts the book too.

Whereas if it has no attractive elements and needs total revision, the book is so appalling that you don't even want to approach it, much less spend several months patching it up.

A more generalized version of this approach may work. The great French novelist, Raymond Radiguet, more than once expressed the neoclassical theory that all great fiction was the restatement of some earlier paradigm. To produce a great novel, he wrote, one had to find a great novel, put it before one, then set up one's easel and recreate it anew.

And so Radiguet set The Princess Of Cleves in front of his easel and produced the new French classic, Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel. Jean Cocteau, his sometimes disciple, applied the same technique to produce another classic, Thomas L'imposter.

But in both cases, I have the impression that these writers set their canvases at more than a little distance from the original, and didn't hesitate to stray from their models when so inclined. To actually take an existing work and change it line by line is quite another undertaking, and frankly one that is too tedious for me.

But as a pure exercise in revision, if nothing else, it may well be worth doing. And for a writer who absolutely cannot seem to get through a first draft, grabbing any available text and starting from there may be a radical solution, but it's a simple one.

Remember, however: transformation is creativity. Direct, unthinking appropriation is not.

What you do not make your own is not yours.

 

CRISSCROSS BRIDGEWORK

The technique of Crisscross Bridgework is simple. Find a book. Read the first chapter. Then write the next chapter. Then read the chapter after that. Then write the next chapter after that, and so on and so on, till the book is done.

Very few writers have managed to stay the entire course doing an exercise like that. After all, a book of 100,000 words would entail a person's writing 50,000 alternative ones, no small enterprise.

But smaller versions of this exercise may prove fruitful.

For one thing, simply reading a book up to a certain point, stopping, and writing just the next chapter alone, gives the writer a springboard to creating something, which alone is good for someone momentarily blocked or stuck.

Also, the subsequent comparison of what the student writer wrote to what the actual writer wrote can be eye-opening. Does the student write in long block paragraphs, and indulge in a lot of italicized interior dialogue, while the actual writer produces taut paragraphs and italicizes nothing? Which works better? What did the professional writer do that the student writer did not?

The almost competitive comparison of rival versions can illuminate writing differences and practices in a way that abstract discussion doesn't.

Nor does this have to occur at the level of whole chapters. Tear one page out of a chapter and write a bridge page from the end of the preceding page to the start of the next.

That exercise is short. But what it can show you about how your model writer writes and builds a scene or story, as opposed to how you write and build one, can have a long-lasting effect on your understanding of craft.

You can also copy a few pages, take a black ink marker, and strike out every other sentence or paragraph on your copy. Then fill them in, and compare your insertions against the originals. Where are you different? Where is it weaker? Stronger? Why?

This crisscross pattern of bridging from one self-made gap to another doesn't need to involve crisscrossing at all. And that's where it becomes valuable for producing stories of your own.

Read the first five chapters of a novel, and then sit down and write the next five chapters.

It may be that comparing the two will show you that the original's writer has done a better and more powerful job, and you may learn how to do better yourself by noting and following the differences.

But it may also be that the five chapters you wrote take the character and stories into an entirely different, entirely valid, direction. Why not just keep going?

If the turn you give the story is different from the original author's, then it's your turn. Rather than discard it, why not build on it and take it further? If your characters are acting and interacting in ways that the original author's characters are not, why not simply recognize the fact that they're behaving like new characters and give them new names and see what these new characters do?

Crisscross bridgework is preeminently a tool for comparisons. It lets you see how you do as opposed to how a published author that you admire does. (Though you shouldn't take any wide differences to heart -- your version is first draft, whereas the author's may be the result of dozens of drafts, and professional editing as well.)

But some of the bridges that you build, if large enough, will suggest to you that they can stand alone, or support or span other structures. If that's the case, why not let them?

 

CONNECTING AND DISCONNECTING

Connecting and disconnecting are a good lazy person's way of building up stories. You don't have to come up with new story lines or characters. You simply jam one into the other, or snap an existing link, and ask yourself what happens as a result.

In Hamlet, for example, the paths of Ophelia and Gertrude never cross. Ophelia is linked to Polonius as his daughter, and Hamlet to Gertrude as her son.

But what if we snap these links and disconnect them?

What is Hamlet is not the son of Gertrude, and Ophelia not the daughter of Polonius. What if we go on to make new connections? What if Ophelia is the daughter of Gertrude, and Hamlet the son of Polonius?

Then the whole picture changes. Claudius and Hamlet could be competitors for Ophelia, not Gertrude. The pursuit of Ophelia could eventually lead to the throne; getting her to a nunnery would be in no one's interest. Hamlet's accidental killing of Polonius would be parricide.

Snapping a relationship is easy. 'Data and Whorf are no longer members of theEnterprise' -- snap. Where do they go, what do they do? Eventually they either connect with others. And how do the people left behind react?

Establishing new connections isn't always as easy as breaking them.

Creating narrative is a matter of finding material and then of transforming or developing that material. The material is not solely a question of one individual trying to achieve a goal. Each individual is a member of a network of individuals. Each individual has a family, or a group of friends, or associates with others in the context of a workplace, or a social club, or a school or particular location. These contexts and relationships are areas to which he or she is connected.

Sometimes these contexts and relationships are separated even in the life of an individual. One's co-workers may never see one's family. One's fellow sports fans may never run across one's old college buddies. But they may. Potential connections to others are always there to be made, and each of the people, places, and groups to which one is connected connect to other people who can connect back.

Imagine an individual as being in the center of a spoke. From that center we draw as many lines as we need to the people and organizations and groups and places that person is connected. Then draw another spoke for another character, and another. At some point the connections and contacts overlap.

This, of course, is Stanley Milgram's well-known 'Six Degrees Of Separation' idea. He found (pre-internet) that there were generally no more than six persons between anyone on earth and any other person on earth.

How then do we connect our lead character to the terrorists, to the murderer, to the job offer, to the love of his life? Through the friend of a friend of a friend, or the acquaintance of an acquaintance.

Once we establish the relationship, we establish the possibility that the relationship can develop dramatically.

 

TELLING IT OVER AGAIN

One very good technique for building up a story is re-telling it. This (like a great many things in writing) would seem to be a paradox -- how can you tell the story if you don't know it yet?

the answer is that, although the full and complete story will not be full and complete until it is written down, elements and fragments of the story must always precede it.

Tolstoy didn't know the full story of War And Peace till it was over, but he knew the story of Napolean's invasion of Russia, and he knew many stories of noble Russian families and dissolute Moscow life. No doubt the histories of the war, his own experiences as a soldier, his memories, all contributed to the early sketches for characters and incidents of War And Peace.

How did they progress from vague sketches and ideas to the concrete tale?one technique may simply have been Tolstoy re-telling the story again and again -- to himself, to correspondents, to fellow writers or visitors to his estates.

A very good way to make a story grow is to re-tell it. Even if it isn't finished, even if half the characters aren't there, even if the setting remains up in the air and you haven't established the point of view -- just sit down and tell someone the story and new elements of it will pop into mind.

Describing it in conversation is particularly effective. There's something about the give and take of chat, about the questions the person you speak to asks, that sparks the imagination.

But simply writing the story down on paper can have the same effect. Write it, then re-write it, then re-write it again, trying to add an extra paragraph of description each time. There is always some element that can suggest some small but new feature.

Re-telling the story by outlining it, or by laying the events out on a timeline, are other ways to do it. These have the advantage of making gaps in the story line evident. And (as with crossword puzzles) where there's a gap, the mind wants to come up with a way to close it.

And one effective way to retell your tale is to review it. Imagine yourself as the New York Times literary reviewer receiving your book a year or so hence, producing a glowing review for the Literary Supplement. What do you the reviewer have to say about the book? What are the criticisms, to what sort of reader do you recommend it? How do you summarize the story?

It's a paradox, but reviewing the book before it's written can clarify the entire process of writing it in the first place. Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science-fiction writer, ended up writing reviews of his books rather than the books themselves. People read reviews, he said, but no one reads fiction. Why not cut out the middleman?

 

CASTING / REPERTOIRE

Casting is a technique especially well suited to bestseller writers and writers inclined toward the screenplay and teleplay.

The way to do it is to not to start with plot or characters at all, but to select the actors you want to play the characters, and structure a suitable narrative around them.

John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Jack Palance, Woody Strode -- the inevitable classic Western plot unreels like a carpet. Sean Connery, Alec Guinness, Glenda Jackson -- an easy spy thriller, although an Elizabethan historical story is not outside the bounds of possibility either. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Shirley MacLaine? An obvious caper flick. Stanley Donen directing.

Heavily typecast characters can result in heavily typecast plots. But not inevitably. Donald Pleasance, Nicol Williamson, Jeanne Moreau? That could be anything from an Ingmar Bergman or Woody Allen film to an East German spy tale to Beckett at his most uncompromising.And either gives a writer a starting point of remarkable power and promise.

Vivid and powerful characters capable of great dramatic interaction abound, on screen, in life, and throughout history. If the corona of previous plots hovering around them seems to suggest certain threads and directions, why not draw a few of them out?

Picture Work is a much simpler version of casting, but for that reason, perhaps a more open and evocative version.

Some writers, I've noticed, don't seem to be able to get a real grasp on a character without a visual image, without seeing their face. When they have the face, they have the personality.

Yet coming up with an entirely imaginary mental image of someone is not something every writer can easily do. Not all of us are strong visualizers. A prompt may be needed.

The technique of Picture Work came about in the course of looking for just such prmpts. As an exercise in characterization, I would sometimes tear pictures at random out of a newspaper or magazine. Not famous people, just individuals in ads or local people in the news. Who is the person behind this face, I would say? Tell me about them. I sometimes found that writers could draw entirely histories out of the one single image they saw.

One good way of collecting a group of characters for a book is to clip and collect pictures of any face or person that evokes an interest in you. They can be major movie stars. They can be bit players. They can people you've never met before and will never meet.

So long as they have a picture of a face that suggests a story to you, or that suggests that they could play a part in a story you're doing, keep the picture and put it in a file, perhaps with a few notes attached.

When you need a character, go through the files. You'll be surprised how often one of them will leap out at you.

You may also find it useful to begin assembling a 'repertoire company.' Film directors do it quite commonly.

The Hitchcock Players would often consist of Cary Grant juxtaposed with the Cold Blond, Eva Marie Saint or Grace Kelly or Tippi Hedren. The Woody Allen Players tended to include Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, Tony Roberts. The Bergman Ensemble would be unthinkable without Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullman. The John Ford Troupe would trot out Chill Wills, John Carradine, Ward Bond and John Wayne regularly as clockwork.

Novelists too have certain characters that tend to repeat -- the saintly prostitute, tormented intellectual, and fool-in-Christ were staples of Dosyoyevschina, and the sexy dame was as much a feature of Mickey Spillane as the sexist prig was an adornment of Jane Austen.

By recognizing that certain sorts of characters or actors have a particular attraction for you, or would be particularly good for playing characters that you've done, you begin to develop a sense of the characteristic individuals and interactions that appeal to you or that you find represent your world view well.

Finding such personae can be a turning point in understanding where your individual characteristics as a writer lie, and in presenting those characters who embody them efficiently and effectively.

 

DESTABILIZATION

Destabilization can be regarded as a mild form of Pushing To Extremes. The latter technique pushes a person or situation to the point where it blows up. And that can be dramatic, but it isn't always advisable or even necessary.

Drama isn't restricted to things going boom. If a protagonist is betrayed by a spouse, or loses a child, or wins the lottery, what happens? How do they deal with it? What effects will these things have on them? The questions are ones that can be answered in terms of drama, and gripping drama.

The writer's task is only secondarily to answer those questions, however. His first job is to pose them, to create dramatic situations, and one of the simplest ways to create a dramatic situation is to destabilize a less than dramatic one.

Is the situation you have in mind routine, placid, serene? Destabilize it, and you will create drama.

Wealth is destabilized by poverty and poverty is destabilized by wealth. War destabilizes peace and peace destabilizes war. Changes in location and in jobs or health or social status can destabilize both relationships and placid and unmoving story lines, and turn them into vivid and exciting ones, as the people involved try to adjust to the new situation, or flounder in them, or try to revive the previous state of affairs.

Simply take any situation and ask, "How can I destabilize this? What needs to happen so that this situation can't go on the way it has any longer?" Answer that, and drama follows.

 

FIND THE CATAPHOR

A cataphor is anything significant that threatens to occur without necessarily occuring.

It can be an immediate violent threat, like an onrushing car; or an incident waiting to occur, like the eve of war; or a developing crisis between two characters, like one spouse increasingly being tempted to leave another.

But the beauty of the cataphor is that it doesn't have to occur at all. Cars can miss, peace talks can succeed, and couples can reconcile. A threatened occurrence, a potential development, need not ever occur. And nonetheless, it can provide compelling gripping tension that rivets the reader to your pages.

A suspense-filled story is not one that's filled with incident. A suspense-filled story is one that is continually filled with the threat or promise of incident, of something interesting or significant that may happen. And that thing doesn't necessarily have to happen at all. It only needs to be referred to or mentioned.

One of the most effective ways of getting a good story is not necessarily to discover and arrange incidents at all, but instead to ask oneself what sort of event or development could possibly occur that would deeply affect the lives of your characters.

Find the ticking bomb -- or the unnoticed winning lottery ticket, or the deadly bacillus, or the impending court order, or the approaching cop, or the vampire's undisturbed coffin -- and just put it there right next to your protagonist. Once you've put it there, the tension will be in place until you decide to trip the wire, even if you never trip the wire at all.

When a tiger walks into a room, drama is born. The tiger doesn't have to attack. He just needs to lick his teeth now and then.

 

EXPERIMENTAL SELVES

The technique I call 'experimental selves' I owe to the late (superb) Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima.

At one point in his career and life, Mishima was apparently experiencing a crisis as to the direction in which he wanted to go. And so he wrote the novel 'Kyoko's House'.

The interesting thing about the novel was that it featured four protagonists, each of which could easily be seen as aspects of extensions of Mishima himself.

Mishima handled the business aspects of his career with unusual attention and competence; he had started on an obsessive fascination with body-building; he was a celebrated artist who had written about Buddhist mysticism; and he was becoming more seriously involved with violence, nihilism, and right wing politics.

And his novel featured a character who was purely a businessman (and a nihilist); a boxer whose life revolved completely around the physical and who turned to extreme right-wing politics; an artist who has a mystical experience.

It could (and has been) argued that in Kyoko's House, Mishima was giving free rein to various aspects of himself. He was allowing various possibilities that he might follow, 'sub-selves,' as it were, to come out.

Exteriorizing them allowed him to play 'make-believe,' but on a far more complex and serious level than any child. (And indeed, Mishima did follow the roads laid out by certain of his characters, going far deeper into right wing politics, for instance.)

His book was not only an interesting book. It was an interesting technique, and a useful one. Every human being has various aspects, inclinations. Every one of us might have lived different lives had events in our past been different. Every one of us might go in different directions in the future, depending on what we do know.

Instead of wondering about or regretting the road not taken, or anticipating what we may end up doing in the future, why not create a character who does do it, and a plot line that follows that possibility? Why not create a character whom you may probably never become, but whom a part of you is in profound sympathy with? Indeed, why not become -- yourself?

People play with ideas of this sort all the time. "I wonder what I might have been if I had been in revolutionary France , or the Holocaust, or became an actor, like I always wanted to be."

Stop wondering in your head, and start wondering on paper. Put yourself as you are into that situation and see what happens.

Experimental Selves is interesting in that I've seen it help certain writers get over a certain inability to empathize with their characters, or see them from the inside. Your character stops being wooden when he starts being you.

It's also one of the more therapeutic sorts of writing, and one that can be helpful in making decisions. If you're not sure whether you should leave your spouse for another person, write a novel about someone much like you leaving a person much like your spouse for a person much like the third party. What happens? How does it feel? Does it work?

If it works beautifully, or if it fails utterly, you may well have learned something important about yourself. (Not to mention writing a novel that absorbs you totally.)

If you’re at a crossroads or on the point of making some major choice in your life, you can even have characters make both choices, and once they’ve lived it, have them meet and talk about it.

The simplest way to prepare for this technique is to write down a few lists. Write a list of prominent characteristics you possess, things that you feel describe you or define you. Are you a liberal, a Catholic, an aspiring writer, an amateur guitarist?

Go deeper till you can imagine a character whose entire life revolves around liberal activism, imagine yourself having made the decision to be a priest or a nun, play the role of a successful and famous novelist, imagine what the life and thoughts of a rock star or classical guitarist might be.

Write down the roads in life you never took but that still haunt you -- the person you might have married but didn't, the career you might have studied for didn't, the near-tragedy that was averted but that would have completely changed your life if it had occurred.

What would have happened then? Write about it.

An interesting twist to this technique is creating an anti-self. Are you liberal, Catholic? Then create a character that is your polar opposite, that is hyper-conservative, that is violently atheist.

At worst you may create a character with whom you disagree so violently that it gives you an emotionally vivid villain.

But at best you may find parts of yourself that you never suspected struggling for expression.

The psychologist Carl Jung one said that every human psyche contained an element that he called 'The Shadow' -- everything inside a person that that person has ignored or repressed or avoided.

Fiction, and particularly the creation of what I call 'anti-selves,' is perhaps a good way to give that Shadow self voice. Which may well be beneficial.

The Gospel of Thomas has Jesus say, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not have what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

There are few better, safer, or more thoughtful ways of bringing it forth, than fiction.

 

BEHAVIORAL OUTLET

The notion of fiction as a behavioral outlet stems from a remark once made by B. F. Skinner. Many people, he observed, are impelled toward certain behaviors that they really can't allow themselves to perform. The angry employee who would like to punch the boss, but can't; the man who is resists adultery but is attracted to another man's wife; the social climber who is overshadowed by another and wants to revenge himself, but refuses to acknowledge it.

These desired behaviors hover inside us unsatisfied, said Skinner -- but the symbolic satisfactions of art can give them a certain release.

We ourselves may not be able to run amuck or wallow in wealth or indulge our senses to madness and beyond -- but fictional characters can, and by following their experiences we can in a way relieve the behaviors pressing for expression within us.

I suspect that this technique may be all the more powerful the less explicit it is. Not everyone wants to consciously indulge himself in the donning the persona of a rapist of terrorist.

At the same time, the ability to use fiction to do things one is barred from doing in real life can be a genuine method for generating material.

If you could toss morality and realism entirely to one side and do anything, go anywhere, where would you like to go and what would you like to do? The answers could be surprising.

Nor would they necessarily be immoral. Writers bound to wheelchairs could write about, and to that extent live, the experiences of Olympic athletes. Reactionaries can return to their perfect worlds of the past, and revolutionaries can describe their Utopias. Failed novelists can write of successful ones, and successful hacks of pure-at-heart romantic authors starving in garrets.

Fiction as a behavioral outlet lets you do the things you want to do, and have the experiences you want to have.

This can be a difficult technique to use consciously. One can argue that it is used unconsciously all the time -- that Moriarty lived out Conan Doyle's unspoken inclinations to lawless and untrammeled intellect, and that Watson lived out Conan Doyle's unspoken inclination to have a superior friend who was always right and always good.

Did Conad Doyle create his characters with those ends explicitly in mind? Probably not. It might well have been tougher to do it explicitly than to just do it.

The fact remains, we can do it explicitly. Fiction gives us a mask through which we can allow aspects of ourselves to speak, and give expression to thoughts and feelings we would otherwise expose.

B. F. Skinner was himself a case in point. In the course of writing the best-selling classic Walden Two, Skinner created a character called Frazier who espoused extreme pro-behaviorist views that Skinner himself did not yet endorse.

But once Frazier explicitly stated the views that Skinner could not get himself to state, Skinner became a committed Frazierite -- which is to say, he became B. F. Skinner, by letting a character express thoughts that he himself could not.

Jung's notion of the Shadow, of those parts of ourselves that we have cast out, and that we have to face if we are ever to achieve psychic wholeness, have a curious way of taking on faces in fiction. It may well be that we can encourage the creation of the anti-selves that we ourselves are by allowing some of the more guarded elements of ourselves to have some play in this manner.

At worst this can lead to the dead ends of porn or unbridled violence. But at best it can lead to genuine insight and personal evolution -- as it did in the case of Skinner.

 

EMERGENT HOLD

This technique is rather a strange one, but I recommend it because I've practiced it and seen it bear good fruit in others. It is a rather strange way of generating story ideas, but every writer should know it.

The way to practice this is to put the story you are writing at whatever stage you feel is appropriate on what I call 'emergent hold'. That is to say, do nothing. Let the story elements lie there and do not attempt to build or grow or connect or do anything at all with them. Try not to think of how the story is likely to develop or emerge. Just sit there and contemplate them. And if you're starting from zero? Then contemplate zero.

This technique, of course, has roots in reverse psychology.

If you try forcing yourself to come up with an idea, you produce tension and nervousness and self-doubt and freeze.

The converse of that powers this technique: if you try with all your might not to think of how any given story might develop, keeping possible developments out of your mind will be very nearly impossible. Something will percolate up.

But the value of the Emergent Hold technique is subtler than that.

It is possible to force the creation of a story line, and many techniques above do just that. One can grab elements at random, fuse them together, and have an instant starting point -- hero: Hamlet, heroine: Garbo, setting: the Klingon Homeworld, cataphor: impending war with the Romulans; start writing!

But is this collision of elements pulled out of the air at random really what you want to write?

In many respects the starting point of a story is the least important element, since it is in the evolution and development of it that the writer's individuality emerges. A finished work is the end result of hundreds of thousands of word choices and image selections and reconsiderations and revisions.

At the same time, sensitivity to the most promising initial elements and early combinations is good to have too.

That is what Emergent Hold provides. Instead of ramming things together and trying to grow plot and story rapidly and immediately, the Emergent Hold approach counsels you to simply let the elements float and simmer without pushing them in any way and, as it were, allow them to suggest how they want to develop and where they want to go.

It may be useful to think of this as a sort of focused meditation. Instead of contemplating emptiness, contemplate your novel. Without force, without judgement. Simply observe what there is of it.

Stories do not dictate themselves, of course, and I am not suggesting a Ouiji Board method of story development here -- though Philip K. Dick did write The Man In The High Castle by consulting the I Ching.

It nonetheless remains a fact that sometimes, if you will take however few bare elements of a story you may have, and simply allow them to be there present in your consciousness, without any explicit conscious attempt whatsoever to manipulate them, after a while story developments will seem to grow and flower almost by themselves. The less you try to encourage or shape them, the easier and more naturally they'll arise.

Of course, if nothing arises, and deadlines beckon, and your growing impatience makes waiting intolerable, then try any of the other, more forceful, methods. They certainly work.

The curious thing is that this quiet, almost Buddhist non-method will sometimes work quite well too. In fact sometimes it will produce material that is astounding in its certainty and power.

To my mind, this is one of the most profound and valuable methods there is. I strongly recommend it to everyone. But it is appallingly counterintuitive, and if it doesn't work for everyone.

If it doesn't work for you, don't linger. Try something else. Forcing yourself not to force yourself will only tie you up in knots. But if you're lucky enough to have the knack for using it, consider yourself blessed.

 

THE BON-BON METHOD

I've saved the Bon-Bon Method for next to last because it is one of my favorites. I don't know that it will lead to the ideal novel, but it will certainly lead to a writing experience you will enjoy.

Here's how to used the Bon-Bon Method. Get a sheet of paper and write down everything you absolutely love, adore, can't get enough of, or are totally fascinated by. Everything that you ecstatically obsess about, passionately, wildly, senselessly. And when you write it down -- make your story out of it.

The Bon-Bon Method came to me after seeing one writer after another who seemed determined to write books that they did not like. Sometimes they would try to write best sellers, which they despised, for the money. Sometimes they would try to write depressing angst-ridden free verse about social oppression, which they did not suffer or even know about in any detail, so as to be thought deep and serious.

They were all trying to write things they thought they ought to write, rather than writing about things they naturally thought about and cared about. And none of them wrote a word about anything that they personally enjoyed. Their writing made them wretched, because they didn't like what they were writing about. And the writing itself was sporadic and irregular, because wretchedness is not something one wants to experience on a regular basis.

The solution? Pick stuff you really like, and write about that. Make those the building blocks of your fiction.

Do Pound and Eliot and Solzhenitsyn bore you to tears? The hell with them! Do you instead really like bicycles, Switzerland , lesbians, nature photography, surrealist painting, Zen archery, and Godiva chocolates? Then write a story about a nature photographer living in Switzerland who comes across a two lesbian bicyclists impaled by a single arrow from a Zen bow, and who is suspected of their murder by his or her romantic interest, a police officer who does surrealist paintings off the clock and who shares the photographer's addiction to Godiva chocolates.

Idiot plot? Change it, develop it, create another one. But stay with the elements that you love and enjoy. Those are building blocks can be put together in dozens of ways. Because if you happen to be a person who finds thinking about those building blocks absolutely delightful, then the process of writing about them will take on some of that delight.

We return to the things that we like to return to, and if we build our book out of those things, we'll return to the book regularly. That's a habit that will radically advance the odds that the book will get done.

And if you make the process itself a joy? Then it's worth doing whether it's ever done or not.

 

BUDDY WORK

If, when you try to come up with material to write about, you find you have absolutely exhausted every personal resource you have, even then there's hope. Because there's no reason for you to be restricted to yourself as a person. There are others persons out there and they can help.

One of the surest way to keep a book growing and moving forward is to involve someone else in the project. This is a subject we're going to deal with more in a later chapter, but it's also a resource you should be aware of right now. A collaborator can suggest ideas, provide or critique scenes, help in revision, and (in short) supply whatever deficits you may feel you have as a writer.

There are any number of ways in which other people can be active and positive aids and resources for you as a writer, whether as agents or editors or fans. One simple useful way is to sit down with you and encourage you to keep at it. A more involved way is to suggest ideas or actually rewrite and contribute whole sections of the work in question.

But regardless of the level of commitment, be aware that there are a wealth of fellow-writers out there, and they are a resource you can and should use.

You can reach fellow writers at schools or through writers groups or via the internet or even by suggesting to a friend that's never written before that perhaps they might like to take a crack at it. The two of you, or a group of you, can work together on projects or can help keep each other focused on each of your separate projects.

Either way, help from another person can keep you moving forward in situations where you might toss in the towel alone.

If flying solo isn't working out for you, find a writer in a similar situation and arrange a joint trip. You may both get there faster.