creativity
Discovering Character Secrets from Your Relatives!
Much of the time, we treat relatives as obligations: “Yeah, but what can you do? He’s family.” This year, during the holiday break between December 25 and January 1, the kids and I and Grandma and Grampa piled into a rented minivan and trekked 7 hours to southern New Jersey… where the aunts and uncles [...]
How to Beat Writer’s Block: The Definitive Course
Today, Holly Lisle releases her definitive course, How to Beat Writer’s Block. But as an affiliate of Holly’s web store, I’m making a special offer available only to you and others who are reading this blog post. For those who order Holly Lisle’s How to Beat Writer’s Block through my affiliate links at the bottom [...]
Character Ideas Through Substitution
Here’s another way to generate character ideas. Substitute one reaction for another. We all tend to make our characters behave like ourselves or like people we know. So let’s say I’m a computer geek who tends to be shy and reserved, except when I’m talking about computers. Then I’m talkative and outgoing. They say, write [...]
Better Character Ideas: Throw Two Away
Here’s a simple way to generate better character ideas, or story ideas of any sort. This isn’t so much a source of story ideas as a way to improve existing ideas. You can do the same thing with setting, plot, or whatever story idea you need. It’s exceptionally simple. Just throw the first two ideas [...]
A Necessary Step to Creativity
The brain is a marvellous thing, the most complex organ in the human body, and the most important for everything we do. Why do we so often treat it like a drill press? During my years as a software engineer, I’ve seen more brain abuse than I care to think about. (How’s that for irony?) [...]
Where to Get Character Names
After all my bellyaching about how little character names really matter in the grand scheme of things, here are some of my favorite on-line sources for character names.
How to Handle Too Many Ideas
Keep an idea journal. For your stories, for your blog or podcast, for your business, for your personal development, keep an idea journal. It’ll help you in more ways than you might expect.
Where to Get Character Ideas
I’ve discovered a new source of character ideas, at least for me. Anyone can get ideas in the same way, even if not from the same source.
The Secret to Naming Characters
This is something that pops up from time to time on the writing boards: How do you choose names for your characters? Writers are desperate for a magic formula, a secret for coming up with perfect charcter names. Well, I have it.