day 2.5: sample brainstorming session
Hi!
I decided to put together an example for you to show how I go about this idea-generating and decision-making process. It’s definitely not the only way, but in case you thought the process I outlined earlier sounded too tidy, don’t worry, it’s not <3. This is supposed to be fun, just throw things out there and see what turns up.
I set a timer for three minutes and wrote down every image that came to mind. Some of them are related to stories I’m currently working on, some came out of nowhere, others were inspired by the current weather; in short, they’re just a random collection of thoughts.
The magic of the brain, though, is how it can draw connections between seemingly unconnected ideas.
I looked at this mess for a while, not really thinking, just letting my brain draw connections between words and images. One story I’ve been thinking about for a while is the experience of being a queer person in a small town, without making it sound like a sad gay trope, so it’s no wonder it turned up on this list. Unsurprisingly, my brain started drawing connections between images related to this one:
Looking at the things I highlighted, I can already imagine the story premise:
Protagonist has just moved back to the small town where they grew up (perhaps a family member has died and willed them their house). Their house is full of boxes; they still don’t know if they’re going to stay, but they’re a struggling artist and they have nowhere else to live. They have to go to the local DMV to renew their license, and while there they run into their crush from high school.
Protagonist never confessed their feelings to Crush and left right after high school. Now, ten years later, they’re back, and staring at Crush, not even sure if this person remembers or recognizes them (wouldn’t be surprising, many people here don’t recognize Protagonist thanks to their transition), and wondering what happened to bring Crush back to this town.
As far as Protagonist knows, both of them had planned to stay away from this place forever.
What Protagonist doesn’t know is that this other person has also had a crush on them for more than ten years, but is convinced that our protagonist doesn’t like them and moved away without keeping in touch because one night near the end of high school the two of them kissed, and our protagonist never spoke about it and left soon after.
So: I have my main characters (Protagonist and Crush) opening scene (meeting at the DMV), and the turning point in their relationship (Protagonist learns Crush likes them back), and I can already imagine the overall shifts in the characters—from pining to being together, and from being single to being in a relationship. There’s also likely to be a shift in Protagonist from being poor and struggling to selling some of their work and having hope for the future.
(You’ll notice all my shifts are from negative to positive: that’s because I like happy endings. You can make your shifts from negative to worse, or positive to negative, or from positive to ambiguous, whatever works for your story! Just make sure there’s a clear change.)
There’s one more detail I forgot to mention: those cardboard boxes.
Protagonist hired a neighbor to help them move some of their boxes from the city, and the neighbor seems to have left a box that doesn’t belong to Protagonist. One day, shortly after meeting their crush, Protagonist is unpacking and opens this innocuous box they don’t remember packing, and there’s—nothing inside (the box is a portal).
Protagonist is drawn to the portal world (escape from reality), but soon they’re navigating unexpected dangers in that world while also trying to reconnect with their old friend/crush in their everyday world. Eventually both of them are pulled into a conflict in the portal world that neither of them is prepared to handle.
Okay, with all of these elements in place, is this enough of an idea to carry a story? Here’s some questions to help decide:
How many characters are there? The more characters, the longer it will take to wrap up all of their character journeys. In this story I have 1) Protagonist, 2) Love Interest, 3) a few townspeople, 4) two or three main characters in the portal world. So, at least six characters whose character journeys need to be made clear (now, for some of these characters it might only take a few sentences, but for Protagonist and Crush it will need to be much more detailed).
What are the key scenes? I don’t know all of them yet, but just because a story needs to have a setup, some sort of tension, and resolution I know there needs to be at least:
one scene where our two main characters meet,
one scene where Protagonist discovers the world on the other side of the portal,
one scene showing the reveal/turning point in the relationship,
one scene showing the turning point/climax of the conflict in the portal world,
one scene tying up the relationship journey,
one scene tying up the portal world journey(aka wrapping up the conflict and revealing how the box ended up with Protagonist).
That’s quite a few scenes already. And we haven’t even gotten to the scenes showing the journey from scenes 1 and 2 to scenes 3 and 4. If we wrote very sparingly we might be able to squeeze it into a short story. But this feels like something that could easily fill a book.
Okay, I’ll stop this now before I overstay my welcome. But my point is, by being uncritical and opening up to ideas, something pretty interesting came out at the end. I have no idea why cardboard boxes jumped to mind while brainstorming, but they ended up being the key image that tied everything together through their associations with moving, and also with portals/hidden objects.
Until tomorrow,
Beka
