On November 13, 2007 I ran out of plot for the NaNoWriMo novel I was writing. I had no idea what to write next. That’s not uncommon for NaNo novelists, but I hadda do something to jiggle myself loose. In NaNoWriMo, word count is everything, and I couldn’t afford to fall behind.

So I tried something I hadn’t tried before: I interviewed my characters.

Well, that turned out to be more interesting than I’d anticipated. And it boosted my word count to boot. And on top of that, it offered some plot ideas.

I didn’t use any pre-planned questionnaire. There are zillions of character questionnaires on the web, and none of them ever seemed to get at the heart of the character.

Instead, I did what I do in many real-life interviews: Follow the energy. The idea is to:

1. Ask a question that invites the character to tell me something new
2. Listen for emotional intensity in the answer. Sometimes the emotion is subtle, and other times it’s big and obvious.
3. Ask my next question based on that emotion.

Rather than describing this process in detail, I’ll let you read the interviews as I conducted them, unedited. I offer these interviews not necessarily as exemplary, but merely as examples. The thing to notice is how I followed the characters’ energy.

Some background: The novel involves a time loop. Every 29 hours, the characters (and everyone else in the story world) loop back in time. The story follows two main plots.

In the first plot, Dan Roberge murders his wife Faith and her lover Zorem. Then time loops and he murders them again. And again. Police detectives Ray Andollo and Patty Yonce investigate.

The interviews:

• Dan Roberge
• Faith Roberge
• Zorem Bigotte
• Detective Ray Andollo
• Detective Patty Yonce

In the second plot, Amy Anderson saves her son from drowning in a pond on the family farm. Then time loops and her son drowns. Then time loops again. After the first incident (before the first time loop), Amy’s husband Frank becomes engraged when he discovers that Amy had been drinking while their sons played at the pond.

The interviews:

• Amy Anderson. This was my favorite interview, because it so significantly affected my understanding of the character.
• Frank Anderson

I’ve created a mostly goofy software tool called Gibberizer.  You enter some text into Gibberizer, and it produces gibberish that is somewhat similar to your text.

Mostly the thing is just goofy fun. I’ve spent several hours gibberizing The Gettysburg Address into nearly-meaningful nonsense that sounds like Honest Abe on smack.  If that ain’t fun, I don’t know what is!

But there’s a potentially useful application for Gibberizer.  Fantasy and Science Fiction writers working in invented worlds and cultures can use it to invent names for people, places, and things.  Given a list of names from a culture, Gibberizer will invent other names that seem, more or less, to come from the same culture.

For example, I entered a list of 50 names from Lord of the Rings into Gibberizer, and it created these 25 “similar” names: Fimbreth Nimrodo Maggins Galad Peregolas Fladriel Nimroden Theodel Bregrin Elladriel Elladrif Fladan Elberegalad Pereth Halbaramir Boromiel Farad Beregalad Baggot Froden Beregrin Bregolas Bregond Brandalf Bereth.  Most of those names fit the Lord of the Rings culture.

I’m making Gibberizer available for free for any use whatsoever.

You can download Gibberizer at The Gibberizer Project Page.

System Requirements:  I’ve used Gibberizer only on my Windows computer.  As far as I know, this will also work on any Mac or Linux computer, as the computer has a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0 or later.  My understanding is that OS X comes with JRE 5.0 pre-installed.  If your computer doesn’t already have a JRE installed, you can get the latest JRE from Sun Microsystems.  If you try Gibberizer on Linux or a Mac, let me know how it goes.
To run Gibberizer, just download the file and double-click it.

The sketchy documentation includes:

• A sketchy Gibberizer User Guide.
• Some ways to play with Gibberizer.
• A Gibberizer Wiki with lots of half-written pages.

In early April eleven of my local writer friends and I held a weekend writer’s retreat at a dome house in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

One of my goals for the retreat was to practice developing ideas into story ideas, and then into stories.  And I had a technique in mind that I wanted to practice: clustering.

I’d learned about clustering years ago from a writing teacher in New Hampshire, who had learned it from Gabriele Rico’s book Writing the Natural Way.  Dustin Wax describes the technique nicely on his blog, and you can see a Flash animation of clustering in action at the top of Rico’s web site.

I’d used clustering dozens of times for my non-fiction writing (and also for general problem-solving), so I knew it was a great technique for tapping the creative, associative workings of your mind.  But I hadn’t yet used clustering to develop story ideas for fiction, and this was a great opportunity.

So that’s how I would develop ideas into story ideas.  Where would I find the raw, undeveloped ideas to cluster about?  From my brand new copy of The Writer’s Book of Matches, a small book filled with hundreds of intriguing writing prompts.

So I had plan:

1. Pick a random prompt from The Writer’s Book of Matches.
2. Cluster around the core idea of the prompt until a story idea hit me.
3. Write down the story idea.
4. Write the story.

Then I went to work.

My first prompt was:

“He’s probably just as disappointed in me as I am in him.”

The core of this idea is mutual disappointment.  But who are the people involved, and what are they disappointed about?  This is a great job for clustering.  I grabbed my pen and an 8″x5″ index card and drew this cluster (rendered here using MindJet’s MindManager software):

Cluster for “Dinner at Gourlay’s” (click for full size)

As I dumped associations onto the card, I quickly found a story idea (in the branches I’ve bolded on the map):

A father has long expressed disappointment in his son’s sexual promiscuity.  Then the son catches the father having an affair.

This story idea had some real juice for me, especially if I wrote it from the son’s point of view.  I didn’t want to cluster any more, I wanted to write.  I dashed off a 1,000-word first draft of a story called “Dinner at Gourlay’s”.

The next prompt that I pulled out of The Writer’s Book of Matches was:

“It’s supposed to be a game, but he treats it like life and death.”

The key words seemed to be life, death, and game, so I put those words in the center of an index card and created this cluster:

Cluster for “Double or Nothing” (click for full size)

This time the story didn’t jump out at me instantly.  It took a whole five minutes to find an idea that interested me.  The “bet too much” bubble caught my attention because it connected game with death.  Digging yourself too deeply into debt with your bookie (so the stereotype goes) can put you at serious bodily risk.  So imagine a guy deeply in debt and being threatened by his bookie.  What might the guy do?  Maybe he’d kill the bookie, or try to.  Then I thought of a twist:  What if the guy bets a second bookie that he can kill the one to whom he’s in debt?  After a few more twists, I had enough of an idea to start writing:

Norm is deeply in debt to his bookie Paulo.  He tries to hire Emile, a competing bookie, to kill Paulo.  But Emile doesn’t like the idea.  Instead, he offers a deal:  If Norm can kill the Paulo in a week, Emile will pay off the debt.  If Norm can’t kill Paulo in a week, Emile will still pay off the debt, but then Norm will owe Emile twice the amount he owed Paulo.  Double or nothing.

That prompt led to this story idea?  Cool!

I wrote the first scene, which I quite like.  But at the moment I don’t know where the story goes next.  I like the idea that the Emile tips off Paulo that Norm is coming to kill him, but so far I can’t figure out Emile’s motivation to do that.  But it would be fun, so I’ll keep looking.

Time for more clustering.

Writing Excuses is a new podcast about writing from fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson, cartoonist Howard Tayler, and horror writer Dan Wells.

In Episode One, the writers describe some of the techniques and tools they use to create and organize ideas.

Writing Excuses is available on iTunes.

Here’s a writing exercise I invented to help me jiggle my brain and find ideas for fiction.

1. Write down any character, location, object, situation, action, theme, or other story element.  It may be fascinating or mundane.  It may be one you’ve thought about and written about extensively, or one that just popped into your head.
2. Write down every variable you can think of for the story element.  By variable, I mean anything that you could vary.  Ask yourself:  What could I vary about this?  What else could I vary?  When you run out of ideas, ask yourself:  If I could think of one more thing, what would it be?
3. For each variable, write down every value you can think of.
4. Pick a few variables that seem interesting to you.  Try different combinations of values for those variables.  What story ideas does this give you?

Let’s try a mundane action:  Sharpening a pencil.

What could you vary about sharpening a pencil?  Here are some of the variables I can think of:

• The kind of sharpener.
• The sharpener’s condition, age, mechanical soundness, rustiness, sharpness, squeakiness, color, shape…
• The location of the sharpener.  It’s orientation.  The soundness of its mounting…
• The state of mind of the person sharpening it.
• The person’s dexterity, eyesight, hand strength, height, olfactory acuity…
• The pencil’s age, color, length, composition, dryness, wetness…
• The brand of pencil.
• The brand of sharpener.
• The person’s reason for sharpening it… intentions for the pencil…
• How easy it was to find the sharpener, or to travel to it.
• The climate, weather, temperature, humidity, noise level around the person and the sharpener.
• … and so on …

Now let’s pick a few variables and identify lots of values.

What kind of sharpener is it?

• Electric.
• Mechanical crank style.
• A small, plastic, hand-held one with an angled razor blade edge.
• A pocket knife.
• … What other kinds? …

What is the person’s reason for sharpening the pencil?

• To write something.  (To write what?  A novel?  A Dear John letter?  A contract?  A manifesto?  This gives a new variable to play with, which may lead to yet further variables.)
• To mark a board for cutting.  (To build what?)
• Well, duh!  Pencils are supposed to be sharp!  (Where did this rule come from?  What other, related rules might the person have?)
• To poke a hole in something (what?).
• To stab someone (who?) or something (what?).  (Why?)
• Because the aroma of freshly shaved wood and graphite reminds the person of a simpler time, when the world (and he) was more innocent.
• … What other reasons? …

What is the condition of the person sharpening the pencil?

• Too young to manipulate the pencil or the sharpener well.  Or too old.
• Shaky hands.  (Why?)
• Drunk.
• Angry (about what?).  Jealous (of whom?).
• Hemophiliac.
• Wearing gloves (what kind of gloves?).
• … What other possibilities? …

What combinations of values seem interesting?  Using the pencil as a weapon seems obvious, so I’ll try something else.

An elderly, arthritic man twists a yellow, Berol Ben Franklin No. 2 pencil in a small, forest green razor-type sharpener.  He doesn’t need the pencil to be sharp (he has nine sharp pencils in a Texaco cup on his roll-top writing desk).  And he can’t see well enough to write, anyway.  But the smell of the wood and paint and resin and graphite takes him back to his childhood, transports him away from the terrible reality of the deed he had done — not impulsively, not in haste, but after careful, prolonged consideration — just two hours earlier…

Your Turn.  Try the exercise yourself.  Let me know what happens.