Going from a musical collective to a group of musicians who can put out a finished song takes some hard work and practice, as we here at Not Bad are learning every day. Turns out that songwriting – good songwriting, anyway – is challenging too. Just because it rhymes doesn’t mean it sounds good.

Plus, just because it sounds good as a song, does not mean it will look good on paper.

Personally, I find it tough to shut up my inner editor when I’m staring at my attempts to pen pop songs. But Amy and I recently discovered a wonderful exercise to generate starting-place material. It makes you laugh and gets you past the hump of “where do I even start, hasn’t every single topic been done to death?” (Well, yeah.)

Here’s the exercise (it works best with partners, who can choose for you!):

• Choose a common song topic. Yes, it’s supposed to be cliché! Pop songs are cliché as hell! Here are a few to get your ideas flowing: first love, a broken heart, loss, dancing, the club, true love, revenge, rivalry…
• Choose an artist you’re familiar with. Again, popular is good here – you want their style and “tells” to be obvious and easy to emulate.
• Choose something entirely random. If you’re totally stuck, look around the room and pick something you see. We’ve done “the Pyramids,” “bacon,” “walnuts,” and “Big Ben” before.
• Set yourself a timer. Don’t give yourself more than 10 minutes… You’re supposed to have to move quickly enough to run right past your inner critic.
• In the duration of your timer, try to write as much as you can of a song about the topic you chose, mentioning or featuring the random thing you chose, as if the artist you chose would perform it.

Ta-da! When you’re done, you’ll have something resembling a song. If it’s anything like mine, most of it will be crap, but you’ll have a line or two that sparks an idea for a full original song of your own.

Or, at least, the mental capacity to tell yourself, “OK, maybe I can do this.” Some days, that’s all you need.

If you’re someone who writes collaboratively and regularly, and you’re interested in being part of an author collective, please contact me! I’d love to talk.

One of my earliest fandom characters was Rufus Hemmingway the golden retriever, who I wrote to be an original creation set in John R. Erickson’s Hank the Cowdog universe.

Here’s a little excerpt from “The Case of the Missing Beef Bone,” circa 2002:

…my story begins on a breezy fall evening in November, right on the day humans call Thanksgiving. Leaves were fluttering down from the trees, signaling the change between summer and winter. My humans were all excited about the holiday and about their family supper…so excited, in fact, that little Joseph snuck me a whole luscious beef bone at dinner.

If you go hunt down one of Erickson’s books, you can compare and see my clumsy attempt to steal his style. That’s because I had no idea what I was doing when I was 14. And I didn’t trust my voice.

For good reason! Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I should have been cockier at the time about my writing quality. But you can clearly see me fumbling with the conventions of someone else’s voice. I was sort of picking up on what Erickson was doing; I just wasn’t laying it back down in a coherent fashion.

These days, my close friends and family can spot something I’ve written in a lineup. (I won’t talk about which of my stories have been arrested.) That’s because I found my voice, and I trust it enough to let it do its thing, at least a good portion of the time.

How did I find my voice? I read a lot of books about how writers I admire found theirs, and gained a lot of small exercises that helped, but the real key was practice writing what I wanted to write. Sitting down and doing it. Over and over.

That meant that when writing lost its joy, I went back to exercises like Cool Things to Write About ™ again and again, and revisited old characters that I still love. I wrote meaningless fluff about my current obsessions; I wrote fan-fiction; I wrote stories for other people.

Did I mention that Cool Things exercise? Because it’s really important, and here’s why: besides practice, the other way to build trust in your voice is to believe you know what you’re doing.

And that’s tricky for a lot of writer-types. If you’re a writer, you’re an egomaniac or you’re a self-flagellating masochist or you’re both. If you’re the masochist type, then you’ll probably never really believe in yourself. Which is why you have to devote yourself to practicing with subjects you adore. It’s the only way you’ll have a modicum of faith that you, of all writers, can do those subjects justice.

Make lists of stuff you enjoy writing about, and then

I’m sorry I don’t have a “get good quick” road map for you. All the good books on writing are true: to write well, you have to put in the time, both in reading and writing. But focus on practicing writing what you want to write (and reading what you want to read, for that matter, so long as you keep your genres and sources diverse enough to let you develop a non-derivative voice), and on believing you know what you’re doing, and… well… you’ll get there.

I believe in you.

If you’re someone who writes collaboratively and regularly, and you’re interested in being part of an author collective, please contact me! I’d love to talk.

The first thing you learned from another writer, most likely passively, was by partaking in their unique way of telling stories. If you’re a writer today, you’ve spent your whole life until now learning from other writers.

Writing is about shared meaning — through the spoken and unspoken agreements humans have about how the components of language work, as well as through the cultural movements that impact many aspects of a writer’s voice and life. Although it’s vital to being a good writer that you go out and live a life full of details worth writing about, it’s also vital that you sit quietly and listen, one way or the other.

Here are some ways you can set out to intentionally learn from your fellow writers.

Actively

Ask someone to review your work. You may not want to reach out to your favorite bestselling author to request their time in this way; save your burning questions about writing in general for those interactions. This is for your fellow hard-working laborers in obscurity! Reach out to someone you know who writes and see if they’d be willing to do a feedback trade. You can gain so much by listening to someone else who understands how to craft stories talk about your current work.

If you want a real burst of motivation, collaborate on a shared story with a fellow writer. It’s weird. I’ll tell you, trying to write on the same thing with a brain you have zero actual access to is weird. But it’s fun! And it can give you a real kick in the pants to get moving and produce something. Plus, trust me, you’ll learn a ton from the other writer(s) you work with — about style, characterization, and process (both what you’d like to steal and do yourself, and what you’d like to avoid ever doing).

If you’re lucky enough to get the chance, take a class from another writer. Workshops are also weird, but they can be really amazing if they go well. If you don’t have the opportunity to take a class, there are some online resources for watching video series from writers with credentials, such as Masterclass. Videos are nowhere near as good as the real thing, but I understand not everyone will have that chance.

Passively

Re-type their work so you know how it feels to write well (and in their voice). One of Jake’s favorite stories about his favorite writer, Hunter S. Thompson, is how he learned what it felt like to write like the big guns. He would take a novel like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and furiously re-type it until he had a sense of the “music” they were writing. You can do the same when you’re stuck on a certain passage or scene — find a writer you admire who has created similar scenes, and re-type away until you know what it feels like to write that kind of scene well.

Read their work critically. Instead of simply being entertained by a written work, a critical reader pays attention to what the writer left unsaid, and what is implied by adding up what they did say. The next time you want to learn from a writer, pick up something of theirs you’ve read before and go over it with a metaphorical fine-tooth comb.

Read what they’ve written about writing. Whether it’s King’s “On Writing” or Bradbury’s “Zen in the Art of Writing,” writing about writing has a storied (ha!) tradition. These days, a lot of authors write about writing on their blogs. I like to look at this kind of reading exercise as “curious consumption”: I’m open-minded, but I don’t let myself feel guilty if I don’t immediately click with another writer’s process. The point is to absorb a lot of different processes, and filter aggressively until I have my own system that works for me.

Everyone these days wants to write more words. Or they want to teach you how to write more words. Either way, it’s kind of an ebook craze right now.

I’ve been reading a bunch of those “write faster” books lately – partly for research and partly because, well, I do actually want to produce more words – and I decided to put together a few of my favorite tips from what I’ve read. These are all really practical, and you can start doing them right away. As in, right now. Get to the bottom of this blog post and write, you animal!

Ahem.

Word sprints

Yeah, yeah, I know I harp on these a lot. But so does everyone else, because… they work. Chris Fox has it right: if you track your word sprints, you get a lot out of them. You start to really feel the progress you’re making, motivating you to keep writing, to keep sprinting. (Try out his tracking spreadsheet! I personally use something simpler, but he’s done a lot of work to make it easy.)

If it helps, challenge someone else – another writer or aspiring writer – to join you or participate in a friendly competition. NaNoWordSprints on Twitter is a great place to find strangers to sprint with, if you don’t personally know anyone who wants to participate in such chaos.

How to start: Set a five-minute timer, put yourself in a position to write using your favorite medium, and don’t stop until the timer’s up. Do this until you’re satisfied with your word count.

Invisible ink

As I wrote in a previous blog post, invisible ink is a tactic to keep you from looking at what you’ve been writing and therefore wanting to edit it.

How to start: Open your favorite word processing software of choice, and change the font to match the color of the window (in the case of Microsoft Word or OneNote, it would likely be white). Keep typing, because you can’t slow down to read what you just wrote!

The Parentheses Process

Another one I’ve written about before, the Parentheses Process basically goes like this: if you can’t think of it now, put brackets around the most useful description of what should go there, and move on.

How to start: Choose a piece of writing you’re stuck on, and use brackets right now to “skip past” the hard stuff. Keep skipping every time you reach something you can’t write right now, and you’ll get to the end faster.

Dictation

I’ve just started down this path, and I’m sure I’ll have updates for you soon. In fact, a good portion of this blog post was actually written with my voice! I’m lucky to have a very nice microphone, but you don’t really have to have a fancy setup to get started. All you need is a copy of Windows 10, a microphone of some sort, and a quiet room to talk to yourself.

I don’t actually recommend dictating everything. The system isn’t really optimized for fiction (not even Dragon Naturally Speaking, the industry’s leading dictation software). But this blog post, as mentioned above, was fairly easy to dictate. The style is conversational, and it’s not that hard to think about where I need to punctuate.

How to start: Make sure your Windows 10 computer is on (at least) the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Use the shortcut Start + H on your keyboard to open the dictation bar (it seems to work in Edge and Microsoft Office products for sure), and start dictating.

To make things a little easier, here is a starting list of phrases you’ll need if you want to punctuate as you dictate (full list of what the native Windows speech recognition can do is here):

• “Period”
• “Comma”
• “Exclamation mark”
• “Question mark”
• “Open quote”
• “Close quote”
• “New line”

Cheatsheets

I’m working on a how-to book right now, intended to help aspiring short story writers get their sea legs, and the way I’m structuring the content, I’m going to create myself a cheatsheet, a tactic I’ve mentioned before. Content that is repetitive or structured in a certain way is ripe for this kind of “hack.”

How to start: Take note of all of the elements in the repetitive content. Are there headers, sections, common transitions? Build yourself an outline that touches on each of these elements, and save it somewhere for easy copying the next time you need to produce that kind of content again.

Setting your scene

I recently read a book called Novel Shortcuts, Chapter 4 of which was about setting up a scene before you start writing it. Whitcomb writes about three tactics she uses to ensure that she skips past a lot of “shitty first draft” problems, which I’ve found incredibly useful as I revise my novel “Portent.”

How to start: List out your scene’s physical and internal actions, beat by beat, including the goal, the conflict, and what is unresolved (whether or not it gets resolved in your scene). Next, write the dialogue version of your scene – “write out what has to be communicated,” is how Whitcomb describes it. (When you actually write the scene, this will likely get distilled down into just a few key crisp lines.) Finally, write the “heartstorm” version of the scene (instead of a “brainstorm”) – focus only on the sensory details the character(s) will experience.

Now, when you sit down to write the real scene, you’ll already have all of this raw material to draw from. This keeps you from going off track and keeps the scene moving in the direction the story needs to take.

As a kid I thought invisible ink was awesome. The stuff of mystery books, to be sure, but still very cool and with its potential uses in real life. I never did get around to using physical invisible ink, but I’ve happened upon a rather funny way to utilize it in the digital space.

On the theme of “trick thyself into creativity,” here’s a tip for maximizing the effectiveness* of your word sprints: If you can’t see your words, you can’t edit them.

Instead of sticking with the defaults in the writing program you use (I happen to use Microsoft Word and OneNote), where the “ink” is usually black, set the text color to the same as the background (in my case, that would be white).

Is this disorienting? Abso-freakin-lutely. In fact, it sort of necessitates that you just keep writing, and writing, and going and going and going, because if you don’t keep moving you won’t remember what you’ve already written.

You could end up with a few repetitive lines of dialog, sure. And you could also end up with an actual, factual manuscript that you can then edit, or have someone else edit. Smile!

Grit your teeth, turn the ink invisible, and spill it onto the page.

*Word sprints are most effective when you just pour out words without stopping, and get as many of them onto the page as you can. You’ll be shocked to learn that it’s easier to edit something kind of terrible that exists than something perfect that doesn’t exist…

When I’m perusing Half Price Books and spot a book with an amazing cover and jacket text to match, I often find myself muttering the title phrase of this post – half out of rage, and half out of sheer awe. How did I not think of this? Oh, right, because I’m not as brilliant as the author who conceived of it, actually wrote it, and then got it published.

I say this despite having done this very thing. That’s because, it turns out, I approach every new idea with the same trepidation and terror I had with that first idea I successfully carried to completion. I’ve been writing for 25 years now, people, and I still get blocked in a major way.

And then there’s that feeling of despair that I experience when I’ve just read a marvelous book: How will I ever create something like this?!

If you, too, get this post-book angst, I’m writing this to intervene with your inner desperation. You can get an idea just like your new favorite one. It’s possible. I promise. It’s hard work, just like everything else in writing, but it’s very much a thing you can do.

Now that I’ve made that bold claim, I guess I’d better break down how I do it, huh? Disclaimer: This might not work for you, but the point of writing about writing is getting out something that works for me, just in case it could work for you too.

I start by picking a focus, because the glorious problem with ideas is that they proliferate like mice as soon as you get two in the same room. So instead of starting a giant list of all my favorite everythings, I pick a single one that I’d really like to emulate right now, given my mindset and capacity. Then I answer all subsequent questions with that one favorite in mind. Otherwise, I’d end up in the same bottomless ocean of potential concepts I usually do, unable to pick the one that’s clearly better than the rest.

So you’ve picked an idea you’d like to emulate. After that, it’s time to make lists. And freewrite. Lots of lists, and lots of freewriting. Fair warning: that’s basically what the rest of this post is, so feel free to skip around between lists and illustrative paragraphs to find what inspires you to write right now.

Find the essence

This exercise is very subjective, but very, very important. You had this feeling of wanting an idea “like that” for a reason; the point of this exercise is to get at that reason.

You can choose how you’d like to go about this process: by making a list, free-associating, word-bubbling, freewriting… Whatever helps you write down what it is you love about the idea.

There isn’t a magical, pre-determined list of things that make an idea awesome or captivating or haunting. For example, if you ask me what I loved so damn much as a kid about The Last Battle, I’d start with the line that Jewel the unicorn cries out to his companions as they joyfully wend their way through the afterlife: “Come further up, come further in!” It captures the soul of the story in six simple words.

On the other hand, ask me why I adore Watership Down and regularly re-read it to this day, and I’m immediately put in mind of a character moment: Hazel, weighing up the flaws of a possible ally and deciding that kindness is more useful than criticism, tells Bigwig, “Good. We shall be glad to have you.” It’s Hazel who makes his story what it is for me, and if I were trying to emulate Adams’ novel, I’d likely begin with “an endangered family of creatures” and “a tenacious, reluctant leader as the protagonist.”

To keep things focused, as I’ve advised, I suggest that you make a list of no fewer than three things and no more than ten things that make the story what it is to you. Then go back and circle the ones it wouldn’t be the same without. I’ll call this the Love List.

This is what you’re going to start with to make your own amazing idea.

Gather the elements

Every story has certain components or elements, whether they’re explicitly acknowledged or utilized or not. These lists of exercises can help you understand the mechanics of getting to an idea “like that” by breaking the idea down into parts you can understand and change.

Start by creating an Element List that covers each of the following elements for your favorite idea, preferably in no more than 10-12 words at the most:

• Title
• Point of view
• Voice
• Character
• Problem
• Setting
• Plot
• Device

This might feel like a book report, or just gushing to a friend about something you enjoy, but that’s exactly the point. Enjoy it! Then you can move on to fleshing out more details about your favorite idea.

You may find you draw from your Love List to populate the Element List. That’s a good sign.

Character

Characters are the lifeblood of a story, without whom a plot is just a timeline. Chances are good that even if you weren’t too keen on a story’s main character, the supporting cast at least stood out to you. Here’s your chance to find out why.

Before you get started, though, which characters in your favorite work would you gladly (or at least curiously) read some fan-fiction about? Those are the ones you should focus on for the other exercises.

• List your favorite lines of dialog from these favorite characters. Try to limit yourself to the quotes that perfectly capture their personality and attitude.
• Write down the physical and personality details about your favorite characters that make your heart squeeze when you think about them — the reasons you love them so.
• What makes your favorite characters unique? Is it the contrast of their occupation (a thief) with their personality (a heart of gold)? Is it the way they don’t fit with their setting (a pot-healer in a synthetic future)? Capture these oddities.
• What are your favorite characters’ secrets and inner wounds? List as many as you can remember.

Problem

What struggle does the protagonist face in the story you’re choosing as your inspiration? That’s the “problem” — also known as the conflict, or the central challenge. It lies at the heart of the story, and the protagonist’s (nearly) every move should be an attempt to solve this problem.

This problem is likely something simple and human at its core: love, family, home, safety, survival… Nearly all of us face these problems in our own lives, to some degree. It’s the specific mix of character, context, and setting that make the problem come to life.

• What are the obstacles that stand between the protagonist and solving the problem in the story you’re using for inspiration? List them out one by one.
• What one word or phrase (no more than five words) can you use to describe the problem (see the above list for inspiration)?
• Go through the jacket text for the story you chose, and highlight the specific vocabulary words and phrases that refer to the protagonist’s core problem.

Setting

The where and the when of a story can inject personality in a way that nothing else can, not even perfect characters. Choosing a time and place that provides ample vocabulary and circumstance to flavor a story is a masterful art many skillful authors practice. Perhaps it’s the setting of your favorite story that makes it sing…

• Describe the when and where of your favorite story in the simplest terms possible: “19th century England,” “a far-off planet in 2000 years,” “10 years ago in a city like mine.”
• What are some of the unique features of the world that set your favorite work apart, even from other works in a similar setting? Jot these down.
• How does the setting of your favorite story manifest in the narration? Come up with 4-5 examples.

Plot

A plot is a formula: character + problem + setting + time = plot. It’s what happens to who, because of where and when it’s set. Not all stories about naïve protagonists, set in space an ambiguously “long time ago,” will be Star Wars, in large part because of who those protagonists are and what happens to them. Think of the plot as the window through which you will see the characters: how long the audience is with them, and for what key events in their lives.

• What plot twists do you find particularly satisfying in your favorite story? Spoilers are welcome for this exercise.
• Which parts of the plot of your favorite story feel inevitable, but not cliche? Describe them in 3-5 words.
• What is the cheesiest moment of the plot of your favorite work? How about the most dramatic? Where do these fall in the timeline of the story?

Devices

Devices are storytelling vehicles. They run in all shapes and sizes, from “one-syllable words only” to “Hans Christian Anderson-style fairy tale” to “the narrator watches the events unfold from a security room, so sometimes the story occurs concurrently.”

A good writer uses the device to squeeze the most emotional tribute out of their audience as possible. A fairy tale, for example, might set up the expectation of some sort of “happily ever after,” and if you choose this device, you can throw more and more seemingly impossible obstacles in the way and readers will still buy that things turn out alright.

• What scenes or plot points does the device enable in your favorite story? (In other words, which would not be possible if the story had been told in another manner?)
• Can you think of stories that are similar to the one you’ve chosen, but that use different devices? You may have to think hard on this one – a good device can disguise many elements.
• Make a list of 10 or more devices you enjoy (from different stories). When you’re done with the list, go back through and circle any recurring themes.

Titles

OK, here’s a little secret: titles don’t really matter. Whoops! That’s going to get quoted out of context. Look, it’s not that titles don’t matter. It’s that you, the author, the person who’s closest to this work and its most fiercest defender, are probably not the right person to come up with a title that will matter. And when I say “matter,” I mean in selling your idea, in convincing a potential buyer to shell out some hard-earned money for it. Leave that to the marketers and publishers in your life; they’ll help you cross that bridge when you come to it.

But the right title sticks with you, and so if you’re inspired by the title of your favorite work – if you feel it’s so integral to that work’s meaning, it wouldn’t be the same without it – here are a few questions to ask yourself.

• What are some other possible titles that your favorite work may have been given? Brainstorm 8-10 options based on pithy quotes, character names or roles, dramatic events, cultural references, or whatever else was memorable material. How would these alternate titles change your perception of the story?
• What is the cadence of the title? One syllable, or eight? Is it simple or full of complex meaning (or both)? Come up with some titles that “feel” similar, but are meant for entirely different works.

Point of view

A story’s point of view indicates both the perspective used (first-, second-, or third-person), as well as which character(s) the audience is privy to. Third-person limited point of view, for example, means that a character is not narrating the story themselves, but the audience will witness only that one character’s thoughts.

Genre and content can dictate point of view, but you should feel free to experiment on this element.

• How does the point of view chosen for your favorite work help the storytelling? Does it keep the audience in suspense like the character, or does it give the audience a breath-stealing view into what will happen before the character is ever aware?
• As a reader, you’re led along by the chosen perspective of a work. How does that of your favorite story help you better understand – or intentionally misunderstand – the protagonist?

Voice

Ahh, the buzzword of my industry. I purposefully chose to use “voice” here because it’s ambiguous. It means the writer’s own tone and word choice – and, by proxy, that of the protagonist – but it also means the characters’ dialog, the way they speak and what the writer allows them to say.

• Go back through your favorite work and jot down 8-10 favorite lines. If these are dialog, even better.
• Describe the style of your favorite work’s author in a few paragraphs. Pretend you’re writing a book report focused solely on the stylistic choices they made.

Put your spin on it

Ahh, 50 Shades of Grey. What a crazy thing! Someone took an extremely popular idea they loved that happened to inspire them, broke it down into its elements, changed just enough of those elements, and spawned another hit franchise in doing so.

Guess what? There’s an actual legal definition of “just enough.” It’s 20%. Twenty percent of your work has to be materially different from the original, and then it’s legally not the same idea. It’s derivative, sure, and maybe not every writer would be proud of themselves for walking as close to that 20% line as E.L. James did. But then again, she’s making bank, and I think artists should be proud of themselves for making something that people like enough to pay money for it. (I digress. That’s a topic for another time.)

So here are some ways you can put your own spin on your favorite idea. The thing is, even if you “only” change 20% of the elements you’ve been listing in the above exercises, your work will still be something unique born of your own voice, experience, and sense of wonder. Don’t worry too much about how far you’ve pushed the envelope. That can come at the revision stage, when an editor or sharp alpha reader can help you bolster the things that are unique about your work and downplay the things that aren’t.

Three degrees of separation

This is a pretty straightforward exercise. Take the Element List you created for your favorite idea, choose three of the elements, and change them. (Or use some of the material you generated in the more specific exercises.)

Now start exploring how these new elements affect the others. How would the characters act differently in another time period? What plot points would become irrelevant if the setting changed? How does the narrative change if you remove the device altogether?

Use this list for inspiration:

• Make the story about a different character.
• Give the protagonist a different problem.
• Give the same problem to a different protagonist.
• Put the same story in a different setting.
• Put a different story in the same setting.
• Tell the same story from the point of view of a different character.
• Using the same point of view, tell the story of a different character.
• Tell a different story about the same character.
• Use the same device on a different story.
• Frame the same story with a different device.
• Throw in an unexpected twist to the plot.
• Take the plot and set it in another time.
• Give the story a different title.
• Come up with another story that could share the same title.
• Change the voice to tell the same story.
• Try to emulate the same voice, but for a different story.

The final touches

By this point, you probably have something that you’re pretty excited about starting in on. Hold up, one last thing! Just to bring this whooole exercise full-circle, make a Love List for your new idea.

Of course, you don’t know yet what your future story won’t be the same without, or what your audience will savor forever about your story. But hopefully your writerly heart is beating a little faster and your word-ful blood is pumping a little harder, and you already kind of know what it is that makes you want to do all of the hard work of dragging an idea out of your imagination and into the world.

Whenever you falter, whenever you start to question why you bother, pull out the Love List for your idea – and remember why you once told yourself, “I want an idea like that!”