Also Known As

Here's a short experiment, no eye protection or heat-resistant gloves needed. Some of you may have seen this one before, but please bear with me anyway.

Take a sheet of paper (or a Post-it or an index card, or whatever). Write your name on the paper. Turn the paper over and, on the other side, write an alias for yourself. It has to be a brand-new pseudonym, not a childhood nickname or anything anyone else has ever called you. Take as long as you need; I'll wait right here for you to finish. But try to do it in less than a minute, just because I know that you haven't got all day. And, you know, this assignment isn't part of your grade.

Done? I chose "Asimov Eric Crane." I have no idea why, and that's not the point.

Do you remember the moment when you turned over the paper and stared off into space and there was nothing but a blank gray wall before your mind's eye and you didn't know the answer to the question yet? You were sitting in a sort of undefined space where there was only one wrong answer, and it was written on the down-facing side of your paper. That moment was a real, palpable moment of creativity and, more importantly, an example of writing what you don't know.

When I did this exercise, I felt--though just for a few seconds--disoriented and off-balance and, honestly, a bit afraid and verging on nausea. Call me a wimp; I've been called worse, trust me. One thing that was going on in my mind during that moment of off-balance creativity was a battle between conflicting forces: You are this alias. No, you are this one instead. No, over here is your real alias. There were several directions I could've gone, and in that brief moment I was aware of, if not every possibile outcome to my creative problem, at least many of them. The more complex the creative problem and the more time we allow ourselves to think about the solutions, the more possibilities we'll see. Most of those possibilities will conflict with each other, and we will attempt to choose one of them and let the others go.

Some of the most interesting and useful things we can discover about our story elements (characters, scenes, plots, themes) are the conflicting versions of them that are possible. One of the things I've tried to do in my own fiction is to present many of the conflicting versions of story elements in the same story. It has only been recently that I realized I was doing this, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that it's only been recently that I started trying to give a name to what I've been doing in stories. But as I say, if there is more than one way to think about some story element, I am pretty strongly inclined to include more than one of those ways in my stories. I'll give an easy example, using something I did in a chapter of my WIP "Cocke & Bull."

Suppose you have a group of characters who've all traveled to a city together. Suppose there is some kind of emotional turmoil or conflict within the group. Suppose you want to have your characters walk through the city from one setting to another, and you want to point out locations in the city. Suppose you also want to show the emotional turmoil, but you don't just want them to argue their way across town.

What I did was split the group in two, and the first group walks through the city and I give their impressions of the various locations within it, and I show certain interactions they have with the city's inhabitants. I use a certain type of images and descriptive language, to paint things as colorful and fun and light-hearted. Then I have the second group walk through the city, following the same path as the first group, and I show their interactions with the city's inhabitants. I use a different set of images and type of descriptive language for this trip, painting the city as dark, shabby, dangerous. It is the same city, but viewed from a different emotional angle, as it were.

This is one of my current favorite tricks, and in "Cocke & Bull" and my last book, I've played scenes twice in a row and shown how the scene can have radically different meanings depending on how you interpret the actions within the scene.

A sort of inverse to this is to figure out what the your characters' best and worst traits are, and to dramatize them behaving at their best and their worst in scenes that are as similar as you can make them. Show us your hero, and then show us his alias, as it were. Think, for example, of the protagonist's thoughtless insult during the garden party in Jane Austen's Emma. Shocking, embarrassing, and totally believable. Let the reader enter that moment of off-balance creativity you had, and let the reader be caught up in the battle between conflicting forces inside the story and the characters. You can ask youself "What are the possibilities here?" and you can use more than one answer. You can stay in that off-balance moment of creativity and write down as many aliases as you like and call them all the right answers.

My point, if I have one and possibly I really don't, is that rather than choose The One True Way for your characters and stories, you can create a multiplicity of meanings for events and people and places that are all true and all overlap and all conflict with one another and the story will be, in my opinion, much deeper and richer and satisfying. You can show, with certainty, that the world is uncertain. You can define how things are not definite. You can give your characters and your story not one alias, but many.

Make your other brain do the work

On Monday's post comments here, there was a consensus that characters--and in many cases authors--needed to show some sort of change from where they are in the beginning of a story to where they are at the end. (Or, as is the exception, no change, when the point is that no change was made.)

In thinking about a character's journey, we can all come up with "standard" types of change. Our protagonist can face her fear and hopefully conquer it. Or, someone can complete the journey he has needed to complete. But, often, the change within a real person is far more complex. Sometimes, in our own experiences, we can't even fully express why something was meaningful to us, we just know that it was.

That's where our other brain comes along. While I was taking my memoir writing class this weekend, the teacher, Samantha Dunn, claimed that the most powerful literary writing occurs when our subconscious is doing all of the work. Our conscious thoughts are often clear, simple. We understand them. But, our subconscious is the reservoir for all of our contradictions, those messy ideas we have that don't really make any sense. She had us complete this sentence about ourselves:

I'm the kind of person who (fill in the blank) , but (fill in the blank).

One of mine, for example, was "I'm the kind of person who makes an absolute mess in my home, but I project myself so well to others that they never suspect it." It says a lot about me, huh?

Making your subconscious do the writing increases that messiness factor in our characters' journey, the components that often make a reader much more interested in a person. It allows us, as readers, to become a voyeur.

So, how do we get our other brain to do the work? Michelle has a post on Daydreaming that is the important first step in accessing our subconscious for our writing. We have to allow ourselves to get lost in thought.

After that, the main tool we have is freewriting. Usually this involves a time limit. Tell yourself that for 20 minutes, your pen will not stop moving or your fingers will not stop tapping on the keyboard. Even when you can't think of anything, continue to write words down. Start it with a topic: a memory or a prompt.

Then, just go.

What you'll find is that when your conscious brain runs out of ideas, your body is still able to proceed with the exercise. And, in those times, you'll start writing some pretty strange things. Take a look at those things. Find the elements in what you wrote that spark some interest in you or elements that you feel guilty or embarrassed about writing. Those are the messages that have come from your subconscious. If you do this sort of exercise with a particular character in mind, you may find that you can tap into his or her subconscious, allowing you to depict a much more interesting evolution than you could have come up with before. You can also do this with an idea, coupled to what Scott wrote about yesterday, to find out if your planned story has enough interesting material for you to discuss for a couple hundred pages.

Where You're a Genius

You want to quiet the noise in your head to solidify that fragile germ of an idea ~ Dr. Jung-Beeman

Have you ever wondered where your Aha! moments come from? That's brilliant! you say. That's pure genius! This is going to be the best book ever written because I'm so darned clever! Yeah, I've been there, too.

A recent study in an article titled, A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight, shows that our Aha! moments are more method than we think. And they come from the strangest of places - daydreaming. The truth is, most of these thoughts are genius. They're the thoughts that come about from our brain working harder than it normally does - even harder than when we're concentrating on a problem.

"People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty," says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. . . As measured by brain activity, however, "mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem."

She suspects that the flypaper of an unfocused mind may trap new ideas and unexpected associations more effectively than methodical reasoning. That may create the mental framework for new ideas. "You can see regions of these networks becoming active just prior to people arriving at an insight," she says.

Talk about a relief! Because I don't know about you, but I daydream all the time. Especially about my writing and my characters and story.

One of the most important points of this article, however, was that insight comes best when the mind is positive. How you are thinking and feeling when you delve into daydreaming and those "mindless useless thoughts" has a direct correlation on how effective that daydreaming will be. And it can be effective! Think of Descartes, Newton, Archimedes.

I've noticed a lot of negativity around the blogosphere these past few weeks. I'd like to shout out that we need to STOP! It's a vicious cycle. If we're negative, our work will suffer. We will suffer. And it spreads like a disease. It obviously affects us more than we think it does.

Now put a smile on your face, gather your confidence, and head out to a field or a quiet corner today. Let your mind daydream. Get that Aha! moment you've been waiting for.


~MDA (aka Glam)