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Author Topic: Produces interesting results...Try it!
Jeraliey
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Hi, folks!

We did a writing exercise in my class a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about story idea generation, and I thought I'd share it with you guys. (I hadn't seen it anywhere before, and I thought it was a really good one.)

Remember in high school or earlier when you had to prove that you read a story by answering a whole slew of questions regarding details, theme, characters, etc? It appears that a really good way to unlock hidden stories from your brain is to try to write a series of comprehension questions. Ask questions about setting, theme, character motivation, the true meanings of metaphors...whatever pops into your head.

When I did the exercise, I started with a thought I had that morning, formulated into a question about a character who hadn't taken shape in any dimension but her gender. I kept on writing the questions, and soon I was shocked to find a very compelling story (well, compelling to me...which is usually enough to get me writing) lurking between the questions I had described. (It needs to percolate for a while, but it'll probably be the next piece I write.)

(A couple of lines from my exercise, as an example:
-Why did the sight of the morning snow fill her with despair?
-Who was the man in the window?
-What brought her to the door when she swore she wouldn't set foot outside her room?
-Why is the window significant?
-What feeling do you get from this story? Is the ending happy or not? What makes you think that?
Stuff like that, for at least a page of text. Variety is important; be sure to hit all the story elements you can think of.)

So, if you're on a dry spell (or if you want to dig up some buried stories for the heck of it), I'd recommend giving this a try. Let me know how it goes!


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autumnmuse
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Chiefly what I remember about those types of leading questions in High School was that they allowed me to BS my way through the essay without either reading the book or checking Cliff's Notes. Now, I was an avid reader; when the teacher gave us a list of twenty books and told us to pick one, I'd read all twenty. But sometimes I was really lazy as well, and didn't actually get around to reading the __assigned__ text. But I got an A- in my Advanced Placement English course for my essays on "Antigone" without reading a paragraph of it, just because of questions like that.
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Jeraliey
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Yeah, that's about my experience with comprehension questions, too. I was a little skeptical of the exercise for that reason, but it turned out to be like going in the back door to a story idea.
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Jaina
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Me, too. I could BS those questions till the cows came home if I had the title and the author and fifteen minutes before class to talk to my friends.

Still, using them for this reason might be more useful for me. I might actually do something with this. Thanks, Jeraliey!


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dpatridge
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actually... it sounds to me that the whole point of using them in this way IS BSing...
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TaShaJaRo
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I think that only an avid reader and an imaginative writer could truly BS their way through those questions and manage to still ace the test. Just like someone who listens to a lot of music can begin to sing along to a song they've never heard before, you guys were able to anticipate how the story should go and fortunately for your grade, were right.

In essence, you were doing exactly what Jeraliey's exercise wants you to do. You created answers to fictional questions, thus creating a story. But the questions were designed for you to come up with a specific story because someone who already knew the answers wrote the questions.

You might be surprised at the number of stories you come up with by repeating that exercise. If you did it so well under pressure of faking your way through a grade, imagine what you can do when you're free to choose any answer you want.


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Survivor
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Fie on thee! Go and read Antigone, you wretches.
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autumnmuse
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I did. When I wasn't assigned to. And I enjoyed it a lot.

I am also one of those people who sings along with songs I've never heard before, but I never gave it much thought before.

I do like this idea of asking leading questions, except in the past when I've done similar things in my own writing I've been unable to move past the block. I have a world for my novel-in-progress that needed me to make some decisions about culture, climate, etc. So I posed a bunch of questions to myself and sat down to answer them. I got completely stumped. Couldn't think of a thing. This was a couple years ago. I still have the questions I wrote and still don't know the answers to several of them.

I should probably try again, but I was surprised and even hurt at my own reaction to this exercise the last time I tried. I still am not sure why it was so hard for me.


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Jaina
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Maybe you were trying too hard? Sometimes I think about something so hard that nothing will come to mind no matter what the subject matter is. That's when I know it's time to stop, go do something else, and come back when I'm in a completely irrelevant mood. Or a silly, crazy, off-the-wall mood.

For what it's worth, I'm also one of those who sings along with songs I've never heard. Guess that comes from being in band for eight years and listening to just about any kind of music under the sun.


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dpatridge
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i never sing along with songs i haven't heard before, but i have sung along with songs i've heard only once before and still haven't memorized.

the only mistakes i make are in the case of synonyms they use in repetition, sometimes i use the wrong word... weird huh?


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limo
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Sounds like a good idea. It's probably something you'd do automatically anyway in the long run. However having someone tell you to do these things early on makes life so much easier.
Agree about the BS, most stories follow standard patterns that you can guess by reading the blurb at the back and the last page (shame on me!)
li

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Survivor
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I'm intrigued.

Perhaps the answer to some of your questions is null/void/fail (there is no retry ).

For instance, I'm a big advocate of the idea that character is an expression of an underlying will responding to the environment rather than an inevitable outcome of circumstances. So when I ask a question like "why is this character bad" I get recursive answer. I can ask the question of why a character is bad in some particular way, but for me the reason a person is bad has no answer other than that some people are bad and this person is one such. Plug in "good" or "determined" or "impatient" or any of a dozen other general qualities that don't seem to come from the environment, and it's the same.

Or possibly your questions simply had nothing to do with the story. They lead somewhere, just not anywhere that mattered. I remember a story where the MC/narrator (it was first person) interviews a short, gelatinous pyramid who discusses the difficulties of sorting and boxing vargas. It doesn't matter what "varga" means, and the narrator says as much (after considering whether it might be important and troubling himself to find out that it wasn't). In a Fantasy story, you might ask what the castle's alchemist does in his time off. Or perhaps you wonder where the protagonist got her favorite necklace. And something like that could have an interesting answer, but suppose that it simply doesn't in this case. Well, that happens. Not every question has an interesting answer. Sometimes people have pasttimes that don't tell you much you don't already know, sometimes a favorite piece of jewelry was bought over the retail counter at a store when it happened to be on sale.

And then there are the "fail"s. The dreaded question that you cannot ask because the story falls apart completely. "Why didn't they just..." or "How did they..." or anything that suddenly reveals that you have a major inconsistency that will explode your story entirely if someone asks that question. They're particularly common when you're dealing with a fantasy/SF culture, and you have magic and various technologies mixed together with social attitudes that don't come from anywhere.

For me, I accept that there are certain things (and characters) that are the way they are simply because that's the way they are. And I don't have problems if it turns out that a question doesn't have a very interesting answer. It's when a guestion doesn't have an answer that won't explode the story that you feel like taking the question and throwing it in the garbage, only you can't because the story can't work unless it can answer that question.


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ChrisOwens
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That seems to be similar to OSC's 'What happened? And with what result?'

Why was the portal to Praetoria left unguarded? Because it's guard was killed.

Why was the guard killed?
Cause the guard betrayed his best friend.

How did the guard betray his best friend?
He leaked confidential family information that got his best friend's father in trouble.

How did he get this information?
He got his best friend drunk.

Why did he get his best friend drunk?
The guard was never his best friend's friend, just posing in an effort to get something on there family...


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