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.

Last week John Joseph Adams posted a promotional giveaway for the July 2008 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Adams offered a deal:  You get the free issue if you promise to blog about it.

For the past 25 years I’ve read very little short fiction.  Lately I’ve been writing some short fiction myself, and have become interested in learning what makes excellent short stories excellent.  I began picking up the odd copy of F&SF and other speculative fiction magazines to study as well as to enjoy.  This promotion seemed right up my alley.

I ordered my copy on Thursday, received it on Saturday, and read the final story tonight.

Here are the stories and my reactions (no spoilers here).

"Reader’s Guide" by Lisa Goldstein.  I was surprisingly touched by this lovely story about one of the more mysterious aspects of the art of writing fiction.  I can’t say anything about the plot without giving away the beauty of the story, but the story is written in the form of a reader’s guide.

"Fullbrim’s Finding" by Matthew Hughes.  A "discriminator" goes in search of a client’s lost husband, who has himself gone in search of the meaning of life.  (From this story alone, I get the sense that a discriminator is something like a galactic private investigator.  F&SF’s intro to the story suggests that the main character has appeared in other short stories and novels, and I suspect that "discriminator" is clarified in those).

"The Roberts" by Michael Blumlein.  Technology helps a man solve the problem of finding a "perfect" mate.  But what if the imperfections are not in the mate?

"Enfant Terrible" by Scot Dalrymple.  A story of a man doing a job that is both necessary for the protection of society, and dirty enough that it’s best kept quiet.  Dalrymple tells this story second-person point of view–i.e. the main character is "you".

"Poison Victory" by Albert E. Chowdrey.  In late 1949, a German chemist struggles to atone for his role in bring Germany to victory in WWII.

"The Dinosaur Train" by James L. Cambias.  A setback in a family business–a sort of circus with live dinosaurs–brings three generations of unresolved conflicts to the moment of truth.

My strongest reactions were to the two more experimental stories.  I liked "Enfant Terrible" least, specifically because of the second-person point of view.  Second-person always makes me fear that the perspective was chosen more for the author’s amusement than for its ability to illuminate the story.  In this case I stumbled over the POV, and it didn’t offer any compensations that I could see.  I liked the story, but I liked it less for the POV.

The story I liked most was "Reader’s Guide."  I enjoyed my initial puzzle of "how the heck do you tell a story in the form of a reader’s guide?"  As it turns out, there’s something about the experimental form that seems necessary to the story.  The story itself arises partly from the form, and without that form would not be as effective.  That’s an experiment that works.

When I pick up an issue of a fiction magazine I expect to enjoy one or two of the stories.  I enjoyed all six of these stories.

Two types of scenes. Most of the scenes I write fall into one of two types: Action scenes in which the point-of-view (POV) character acts toward a goal and encounters conflict, and reaction scenes in which the POV character reels from a setback and decides what to do next.

Each type of scene has a typical structure. For an action scene, the structure is:

1. Goal: The POV character has an immediate goal (called the scene goal), and acts toward the goal.
2. Conflict: The character hits an obstacle, usually in the form of an opponent, another character whose goals conflict with the POV character’s. For the bulk of the scene, the POV character and the opponent struggle with each other, each to attain their goal.
3. Disaster: The POV character either succeeds or fails to achieve the goal. Most action scenes end not only in failure, but in disaster: The character is worse off at the end of the scene than at the beginning.

The structure for a reaction scene:

1. Reaction: The POV character reels from the preceding disaster. This may include an emotional reaction, an rational reaction, or both. Usually the emotional reaction comes first.
2. Dilemma: The character calms down enough (perhaps just barely enough) to explore options for what to do next. All of the options are bad.
3. Decision: The character chooses the least bad option and commits to it. This becomes the scene goal for the next action scene.

Beats. The middle of each kind of scene proceeds in beats. A beat is a tiny cycle of flow and ebb, of forward and back, of progress and setback.

The conflict in an action scene proceeds in conflict beats. You can think of a conflict beat as starting with either the POV character’s action or with the opponent’s (or environment’s) action. Here’s the POV-character-first version, which I think of as an Action-Result beat:

1. Action: The POV character takes action toward the goal.
2. Result: The opponent acts against the POV character.

And the environment- or opponent-first version, which I think of as a Stimulus-Response beat:

1. Stimulus: Something happens to which the POV character must respond.
2. Response: The character acts in response to the stimulus.

Each kind of conflict beat gives a different perspective on the events of the scene. With Action-Result beats, the POV character appears to drive the sequence of events. With Stimulus-Response beats, the opponent or environment seem to be driving. Neither perspective tells the whole story: The POV character and the opponent co-create the sequence of events. I find it helpful to explore a sequence of beats from each perspective.

In a reaction scene, the dilemma proceeds in dilemma beats:

1. Forward: The character thinks of another possible action toward the goal.
2. Back: The character realizes the disadvantages of that action.

A caveat. These scene and beat structures are templates. If you apply the templates too rigidly, your story will read as if, uh… as if you wrote it by rigidly applying templates. I reach for templates like these only when I don’t know what to write next. They’re a great way to jiggle my brain. If the words are flowing without the templates, I don’t think about these structures.

Further reading. I learned these most of these ideas from Dwight Swain and two other writers who have expanded on Swain’s work:

• Techniques of the $elling Writer by Dwight V. Swain.
• Scene & Structure by Jack M. Bickham.
• Randy Ingermanson’s Advanced Fiction Writing web site–in particular his article on “Writing the Perfect Scene“. Randy also has a helpful blog.

Other names for these ideas. Swain uses different names than I do for these ideas, and Bickham and Ingermanson follow Swain’s lead:

• What I call an action scene, Swain calls a Scene (capital S).
• What I call a reaction scene, Swain calls a Sequel.
• What I call a Stimulus-Response beat, Swain calls a Motivation-Reaction Unit (MRU).

As far as I know, “dilemma beat” is my own idea, though it’s probably implied by Swain’s description of Sequels.

Also, other people use the term beat in other ways.

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.

My NaNoWriMo novel this year was inspired by an idea posted by roefactor on last year’s NaNoWriMo “Adopt-a-Plot” thread:

What if everyone started living the same day over and over again, but, unlike most situations, everyone knew about it?

I’ve adapted this marvelous idea slightly:

On August 10, 2008 at 2:39 am GMT, the universe reverts to the state it was in on August 8 at 9:28 pm GMT. Then on August 10, it happens again. And again. The universe is stuck in time loop that lasts 29 hours 11 minutes. Only one thing transcends the resets: consciousness. People retain their memories through the time loops.

That’s nearly all I have to start with. I currently have no plot and no characters. I do have a scene or two in mind to get my fingers moving. And I’m starting to flesh out some of the social, political, scientific, and religious implications of the time loop. All of that speculation has yet to yield a single plot idea, but this is NaNoWriMo, so it’s okay if I have no idea what happens next.

Listen as award-winning science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer pitches his upcoming book Rollback to distributors.

Terry Brooks advises novelists to write an outline before writing a novel. He does acknowledge that many successful writers write without outlines. Then he says:

But if you check what most writers who don’t outline have to say about their work habits, you will discover that they end up doing several drafts of a book and any number of rewrites afterwards.I don’t. I do one draft, one rewrite, and I’m done.

…

By outlining, you are doing the hard work in the beginning–the thinking, the organizing, the weighing and considering, and the making of choices. By doing it early, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort at the end. [Sometimes the Magic Works, p 95]

I don’t think Brooks’s advice fits for me.

I wrote my first novel in November as a NaNoWriMo project. In the month before, in October, I prepared by writing a partial outline. I sketched out 20 or so scenes. Most of these were action scenes, in which a viewpoint character tries to accomplish some goal, bumps into a conflict or obstacle, and (usually) ends up worse off at the end of the scene. For those scenes, I noted the goal, the conflict, and the outcome.

A handful of scenes were reaction scenes, in which the viewpoint character reacts to a setback, ponders the available options (usually all bad), and makes a decision about what to do next. For each reaction scene I noted the reactions, the options, and the decision.

Those 20 scenes seemed like a great beginning for the novel–they left the main character on the edge of his sanity. But I didn’t know what would happen next. I put in a lot of thought, but couldn’t think of anything that satisfied me. I had a vague idea or two about the ending, but I didn’t know what would happen in the middle of the story. I ended October with a detailed outline for the beginning, an idea or two about the ending, and no clue about the middle.

On November 1st I began writing the scenes I had sketched in the outline. On most days the words flowed well. Other days the words came slowly. But they always came.

Somewhere around the 14th, I ran out of outline. But I kept writing, and the ideas kept coming. On most days the words flowed well. Other days the words came slowly. But they always came.

By the end of November, I had written about 18,000 words according to the outline, and another 34,000 words without an outline. Mostly my process stayed the same, outline or not. And the quality of my writing stayed the same. And my hopes and worries about my writing stayed the same.

So it isn’t clear to me that the outline helped, or that it saved me any time.

My first draft, at 52,000 words, is just barely a novel. It’s certainly not a good novel. It is sketchy. It’s full of holes. The characters do a few things with little motivation. In a few places, I made characters do downright stupid things in service to the ending I had cooked up ahead of time. I have a lot of work to do to flesh out the story and make it satisfying. In a sense, my first draft is not much more than a detailed outline.

It’s possible that this first draft gave me no better understanding of the plot–the main events of the story–than I would have gotten from completing the outline. Even if that’s true, I’d still prefer the writing, for two reasons. First, as much as I enjoyed outlining, I enjoyed the writing far more. That counts for a lot.

Even more important is this: As I was outlining–thinking about the story–I had a general sense of who the main characters were. But I didn’t have an experience of the characters no matter how much I thought about them. It was only by writing them into trouble, and writing their reactions to the trouble, that I could decide who I wanted them to be.

As I outlined, I thought about the plot and the characters. As I wrote, I experienced the the characters. Experiencing was better than thinking, in the same way that eating a strawberry is better than thinking about eating a strawberry.

A year after running away from home, twelve-year-old Jeremy Crowther returns to resume the life he left behind. But when nobody recognizes him—not his mother, not his brother and sister, not his best friend—when even the physical evidence denies that he ever existed, what life is left for Jeremy to return to?

That’s the premise behind Jeremy Comes Home, my first National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in November.

I start writing tonight at midnight, along with a mixed metaphor of other enthusiastic NaNoers at a cafe in Dixon, CA.

I got the germ for this novel while sitting in a theater in Berkeley on October 2. Some writer friends and I were listening to Neil Gaiman read some of his short stories from Fragile Things. One of the stories, “October in the Chair,” was partly about a boy who had run away from home. As I listened, I had the thought, what if he went home and his mother didn’t know who he was? And a plot was born.

[Update November 1] You can track my progress on the NaNoWriMo progress sheet. Yes, my user ID on the NaNoWriMo web site is Bleen Booley.

At the AYE conference last week, I attended Johanna Rothman’s and Naomi Karten’s excellent writing workshop. During the workshop, I mentioned some of my favorite books about writing. Several people asked me to post a list of books that I’ve found helpful. Here’s the list.

First, here are the books that have helped me the most.

Being a Writer by Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff.

“The two main skills in writing are making a mess and cleaning up the mess.”
[Full Review]

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams.

How our choices of words, and our choices for arranging words, affect readers. How to revise your writing to better fit those expectations and make your writing clearer and more coherent.
[Full Review]

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.

“Everything I say as a teacher is ultimately aimed at people trusting their own voice and writing from it.”
[Full Review]

Writing from the Inside Out by Dennis Palumbo.

“All good writing starts from where you are now.”
[Full Review]

Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Rico.

Centers on clustering, a technique for quickly making explicit the ideas and associations we have about a topic.
[Full Review]

Writing with Power by Peter Elbow.

Three important themes for writing: freewriting, energy, and experience.
[Full Review]

I’ve also found the following books very helpful.

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan.

Giving yourself permission and confidence to be fully creative.

Accidental Genius by Mark Levy.

Writing as a way to solve problems.

Adios, Strunk and White by Gary and Glynis Hoffman.

Fun book with lots of tips from improving your writing style.

The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes.

“If you’re not scared, you’re not writing.”

The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams.

How to make a claim and support it.

The Deluxe Transitive Vampire by Karen Elizabeth Gordon.

A morbidly hilarious book about grammar.

Edit Yourself by Bruce Ross-Larson.

A zillion examples of troublesome words, phrases, and patterns, with suggestions for improving each.

Effective Writing by Bruce Ross-Larson.

How to improve sentences, paragraphs, and whole pieces. Three books in one.

The Elements of Nonsexist Usage by Val Dumond.

Tips for gender-inclusive and gender-neutral writing.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White.

A classic. Concise and useful.

The New Well-Tempered Sentence by Karen Elizabeth Gordon.

A zany and delightful book about punctuation.

One Continuous Mistake by Gail Sher.

“If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.”

On Writing Well by William Zinsser.

“The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.”

Rhetorical Grammar by Martha Kolln.

“The purpose here is … to help you understand the structure of sentences so that when you write you will understand the choices that are available to you — and the effect of those choices on your reader.”

Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg.

Expands on the ideas in Writing Down the Bones. Wild Mind includes more exercises than her earlier book.

The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler.

Creating characters and stories based on enduring mythic themes.

You Don’t Have to Write a Book! by Hal and Sidra Stone.

A painfully funny book about a thousand and one ways to make sure you never write a book. I can add a thousand-and-second way from my own experience: before writing your book, read all of these books about writing.