It's all in what you know.


Sometimes that's the problem.

You can learn just about anything on the internet. New medical procedures. World news and reviews about books or movies you may be interested in. You can also get bogged down in the research phase of any project you might be undertaking.

In order to write anything that anyone might like to read you have to be informed. To be in the know. You can find interesting news about anything you wish to learn about on the internet, and sometimes, thing that you don't.
For instance.

Did you know that the cure for hiccups is a finger up the butt?

No you didn't. Not before a few days ago anyway. And I don't want to hear, "I learnt that back in catholic middle school". Well, maybe you did. But you didn't learn it in any official sense.

The 16th event of the 1st Annual Ig Noble Awards, which was held at MIT. The discovery was made by an Israeli research group and was only one of the items keynoted. These awards are given annually in the area of "Improbable Research".

I do not know if Douglas Adams was ever a speaker at one of these but it is an area I am sure he would have been interested in.

Another of the items up for presentation was an analysis of the sound that fingernails make on a chalkboard. This research has become the basis for a new technology used for repelling teenagers. Absolutely peculiar and, some might go as far as to say "silly". What do these things have in common with all great discoveries.

Ideas.

The best place so far that I have found for new ideas is the daily news. There always seems to be something interesting, or at least mildly amusing, happening in the world. Somewhere in the back pages is where to look. That's where the magic happens and it is is where you find stories like the puppy that survived a five mile tornado ride, or the drunk rural double wide resident that was arrested for beating his wife with a "live alligator" in the solitude of the couple's trailer home; for the second time.
It's true.

Now I can't be sure, but I think you're mind is already working out how things like these could have actually happened. there has to be more to the story, you say. That thinking is the very process of which the creative side of writing is made. It is explaining to yourself the ins and outs (hiccup-pardon the pun) of a thing and making sense of it.

Like for example I'm still trying to piece together how the finger cure for hiccups came about. Was it an accidental discovery, like penicillin? When you look at a light bulb you sneeze. When you sneeze someone says bless you. What do you say when someone has the hiccups? The Ig Nobel Awards lareates are researchers who like to take the "Guess who has two thumbs and can solve your problem." approach to creativity, and we can learn something from them.

Maybe it can help with your writing (the approach, that is).

When you try to explain a situation to yourself, you usually have little to go on at the start; maybe only a blurb in the newspaper. This is where outlining helps me. I'm sure you are familiar with this process from English class, and you know that there are a thousand ways to do it. Just do what works for you. Be sure you don't get bogged down in the process though. I agree with Stephen King on this. In his semi-biography-writing instruction book, he says that plot is "blocky and uncertain, and best kept under house arrest."

What this means is that it is more important to keep your characters alive and vivid, than to focus mainly on the action or the battle with the big baddie antagonist, or force that is working against them in the plot.

You are going to be spending some time with these characters, so isn't it better to make them real and believable? Or at least to elicit some sort of emotion from them, rather than have them seem like cut-and-paste cardboard figures. Giving your characters impossible casts, or no human resemblance is equal to giving them name tags that read "good guy" or "bad guy"?

The same goes for the negative aspects of your fiction.

I don't know about you, but I always hated writing about the boring, explanatory parts of the story. Then one day I heard someone point out that if writing these parts is boring to you, then it will DEFINITELY be boring to the reader.

After hearing this I picked my jaw up off the floor. Then I filed that tidbit away for future use. Because it makes sense. No one wants to read the boring parts that you don't want to write. That makes the whole thing a lot easier. For you, and for the occasional chair, thrown out of frustration.

Your mother was wrong. Life does revolve around you.

Welcome to your freedom.

You can find enjoyment in all parts of your fiction if you make these explanatory parts ring with authenticity. Do this by showing why they are of interest to the story; you don't have to explain it like it was pre Renaissance banking practices. Although, even that can be interesting if you show someone being presented with a problem; getting their family business of, say, grain farming off the ground in Feudal France, or have someone get a hit put out on them by the pope for being too rich and not part of the Church.

OK, those suck. But you get the point. Keep this in mind and if you keep the work fresh and interesting to YOU, it won't seem as hard. I apologize if I've been acting above it all, and perhaps more that a little snide. You should look where you find inspiration to fill these gaps. Maybe its in your children.

My four-year old ran up to me one day, while I was writing; I think it was in late August. She came in with a serious, but not quite frenzied, look on her face and she told me the most horrifying thing that I could have heard from her at that particular moment.

"Dad!" she said, "Santa Clause, is Out...Side."

Oh my God. I thought. He's early.

If you want to experience imagination, there are far worse places that you could look for insight than your own children. Just allow yourself to remember. What my daughter had done was she helped me suspend my disbelief, ridiculously, and in fiction this is a necessity. Of course, in actuality my true fear was that it was a missionary, but the essence is the same.

It is also important to remember that the action of sitting down and writing everyday will make you accustomed to finding your way back into your work, and it will let the force of habit take some of the work load off of your Muse.

The last thing you want is a bitchy muse. Shouting at you from the kitchen, "You ain't got no bread man! Hows a fella supposed to make a peanut butter-nanner' sandwitch?"
How is he supposed to work under such conditions?

How are you for that matter?

Anyhow, a muse is like a Blog, you have to feed it. And it still won't do your work for you. Not even if you give it all the peanut butter and nanner' sandwiches in the world. And especially not if you don't sit down go to your task.

Write what you know? Absolutely. But no matter how factually accurate or extensively explained a scene is, no one will read it for long if it's boring. Just like the Mayo clinic's finger-McCracken maneuver for curing hiccups; just because something is scientifically proven, doesn't make it right.