Tag Archives: Story Ideas

How to Boost Your Writer’s Imagination  

Writing Tips, ,

How to Boost Your Writer’s Imagination. Usually, I am all about discipline all of the time. Today I shall noodle a different tune. A tune I make up as I go along. Today I am all about lack of discipline all the time. Today is Distraction Day.

On Distraction Day, my imagination roams. Won’t you roam with me? Our object, if there is one, will be to see what happens, and perhaps be surprised. Our theme will be Less is More. Less careful attention. Less deliberate pursuit. Less clamor after control. Let us let go.

Instead of pushing yourself to do your very best today. Allow yourself to do whatever you end up doing, wherever you happen to be, however you happen to feel. We are not chasing achievement. We are, as the mystics say, simply being here now.

Start with your immediate environment. Where exactly are you? What is going on there? What will go on there when you let your imagination loose and follow the fantasy of whatever scenario may appear. When you allow the nature of the place to topple into the tale that unfolds.

Undiscipline your commitments. Put off your promises. The promises you have made to others. The promises you made to yourself, about what you would do in the several hours ahead. Watch it all slip-slide straight off your plate. Undo your To Do list, just for today.

Populate your presence with whomever happens to show up. Don’t turn off your phone. Don’t silence the notifications signal on your social media. If somebody knocks, answer the door. Invite everyone in by opening up to happenstance.

Stop thinking of distractions as a bad thing.  Distractions can lead us off our intended paths. Into adventure. Into unexpected venues. Around a corner we have never before turned. This is Distraction Day. A time to be carried away on whims of chance.

What are your personal time burners? The activities you ordinarily regard with guilt as a waste, especially of your declared intentions. Activities you think of as minimally productive to your career. What is the most difficult of these to resist? Desist from resisting. Indulge instead.

Welcome your own weirdness. David Lynch, frequent traveler of this territory, says, “It’s like fishing. I never know what I’m going to catch.” Take yourself on a fishing expedition. Accept anything that lands on your hook, the stranger the better. Astonish yourself if you can.

Meanwhile, there are a couple of rules to impose upon our anarchic experience of How to Boost Your Writer’s Imagination.

Open your senses wide and turn up their volume. See. Each detail around you at maximum vividness. Listen. To sounds bursting like a revelation. Taste. Any morsel that touches your tongue. Smell. Scents pleasant and unpleasant alike. Feel. Everything, both tactile and internal.

Write it all down. Notes. Fragments of thought. Impressions. Dialog snatches. Only enough to make sure you can summon back the scene, the sensations, the silliness later on. If you spot the spark of a writing idea, record it briefly. Then abandon yourself to distraction once more.

Most important, have fun. Fly free. Resolve to fly into fun again soon. Make Distraction Days a regular event in your schedule. Your unleashed writer’s imagination will reward you richly for doing so.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

Alice’s latest novel A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 5 – is available HERE.

A Time of Fear & Loving

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving: “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.” “The best one yet!”

All 0f Alice’s books are available HERE.

https://www.facebook.com/aliceorrwriter
http://twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks/
http://goodreads.com/aliceorr/
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Write Thru Crisis – Write It Down

Writing Tips, ,

Write Thru Crisis – Write It Down. “Go home, get some rest. Marnin’ the world new, every time.” In White Teeth by  Zadie Smith, gorgeous Jamaican Carla Bowden says these words to down-and-out Londoner Archie Jones.

Wise advice for today’s gone-to-madness world. Go to ground for a while and lick the wounds created by simply looking at, listening to, walking through the madness. Then, drag yourself up to as straight-back a position as you can manage and, if you are an author, Write It Down.

What is my own personal Biggest Mistake as a writer? Sometimes I don’t write things down. Crucial things that are the stuff of strong storytelling, because they have lots of Emotional Content. Which means they make me cringe and want to look away or, better yet, to run away. To do anything other than drag out my faithful notebook and record the psychic carnage.

We’ve got psychic carnage galore right now, right here in River City or anywhere. So, grab that notebook. Retrieve a stick of charcoal from the charred remains of what you once believed to be a sensible existence, and start scribbling. Fast as you can come up with words to describe the devastation. Because  this  reality is storytelling paydirt.

Too bad we are also in Biggest Mistake territory. I know this has happened to you, because it happens to all of us. The chaos of life presents you with a knock-your-socks-off story idea, so good you are blown away. So good you can hardly believe this super great fortune has been given to you out of the super obliterated landscape that surrounds you.

I call it the Idea from Heaven, or maybe, in these circumstances, from the other place. What has been given is a glimpse of narrative that, though it may be ugly to others, has for you, the storyteller, elegant symmetry. It is exactly the Inspiration you’ve been yearning for. Nothing short of paradise, or the other place, could deliver such a priceless gem.

You are struck profoundly. You are certain this moment will remain with you forever. It has been imprinted indelibly upon your soul. All the same, your writer’s practicality knows you should write it down immediately. But for some reason, often fairly trivial, you do not. For some reason, notetaking isn’t convenient for you at this particular time.

You don’t intend to put it off for long. You only intend to get done with whatever you’re into right now. Besides, this is the Idea from Heaven, or… A bolt of bestseller storytelling lightning has zigzagged across the deepest blue beauty of your writerly dreams sky. You absolutely will not forget a single detail. Except. You do.

You look for your priceless gem, maybe only minutes later, but it is gone, gone, gone. You search and search. You employ every memory-jog trick and technique you’ve ever heard of, but all you can recall is the feeling. All that remains is a whiff of the euphoria that blew in on this once-in-forever brainstorm. Everything else has evaporated.

You absolutely cannot believe what has happened, but… The story kernel that was destined to catapult you to the stars has flitted off, possibly to some other authorial imagination like a fickle tease, and your own authorial instincts tell you it will never return.

Brain science may have a theory or twelve about this phenomenon. Or maybe the universe if just screwing with you. Whatever the explanation, the upshot is always the same. You plunge into mourning. The Kubler-Ross five stages of adjusting to great loss lie ahead, and it is all your fault. Because all you had to do was write the damned words down, but you did not.

Meanwhile, back to our present definitely not- easy existence. Brainstorms are crashing and booming all around you. Pull your head out from under your comforting soft-stuff-filled comforter, mine is blue by the way. Gaze around you, take it all in, every earth and heaven rattling detail. Then. Write It Down. Write It Down. WRITE IT ALL DOWN!!!

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Alice’s latest novel A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 5 – is available HERE.  Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving: “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.” “The best one yet!”

A Time of Fear & Loving

A Thankless Season – Riverton Road Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 6 – the series finale, is in progress. Stay tuned for further alerts. And, Write Them Down!

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

https://www.facebook.com/aliceorrwriter
http://twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks/
http://goodreads.com/aliceorr/
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Tell Your Emotional Truth Story – Why and How

Storytelling, ,

Tell Your Emotional Truth Story. Why is it so important to do that? Because, if you don’t tell your emotional truth, your story will have no beating heart. Your story will not come alive on the page. Why not? Because your story has not first come alive in your own writer’s soul.

What is Emotional Truth? Emotional truth is what is really going on in your story, the real truth of what is happening to your characters. The surface of things, what your characters allow to be seen and heard, can be manipulated to conceal what they are truly feeling, but great stories are not about feelings being concealed. Great stories are about feelings being revealed.

How Do You Find Emotional Truth? Real life is the mother lode from which you mine your own emotional truth and then refine it into storytelling treasure. The deeply felt emotions that are the beating heart of your story come from your own personal experience of emotions you have felt yourself in your own life. They have the power to make your reader feel deeply too.

How I Found My Emotional Truth Story. I write romantic suspense novels. Scary things happen in my stories. Hailey Lambert, the main character of my book A Year of Summer Shadows, is assaulted and strangled. That happened to me once. My character and I both survived. Now we both benefit from my emotional truth of that awful experience.

The Details of That Emotional Truth Story. The powerlessness while it was happening. The shock and numbness after it was over. The way others might have seen me at that moment had there been anyone present to see. I didn’t need to take notes. All of that was branded on my psyche in indelible emotional ink. Deeply felt experiences do that to us.

Dig for Those Details and You Will discover Storytelling Gold. Unfortunately, we have all had similarly indelible experiences. We have been changed by them, traumatized by them, sometimes stopped in our tracks by them. Now we get to convert them into the very raw material of intense, dramatic, powerful storytelling.

Stephen King Agrees with Me. He has said, “For me, there have been times when the act of writing has been an act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair. Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”

I Agree with Stephen King. Despair, and the trauma that can cause it, are a way back to an act of writing from the most vivid and vital center of your bloody, beating heart. I don’t mean memoir writing, though digging for emotional truth is crucial there too. I’m talking about reimagining real-life experience into the “spit in the eye” that is a riveting piece of fiction.

Mining for Gold Requires Excavation. Our emotional truth is not usually what we show on the surface of ourselves. It is more deeply true than what we show on the surface. Your stories can be the expression of that subterranean truth brought to the light and recreated in words. The result can be the best writing you have ever done.

Find Your Gold Mine Stories. Whether you realize it or not, you know what these stories are for you. Check your heart, your stories are there. Write them, whether as fiction or non, the way your heart feels them to be true, which may differ from factual truth. Facts are verifiable. Feelings are not. Someone else’s emotional truth may vary from yours. BUT that does not make your truth any less valid, or hers either.

Emotional Truth Stories are Individual. Your emotional truth is what you honestly feel. Your character’s emotional truth is what she honestly feels. That honesty gives your story its authenticity, its bleeding, beating heart. That inner authentic truth is what really matters and makes your story really matter, to you as you write it, and to your readers as they read it.

So, dig down and dig deep. You will know when you hit the mother lode because it will zing straight to your heart, just before you zing it to the page and Tell Your Emotional Truth Story.  Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

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A Wrong Way Home – Alice’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 1 – is a FREE Kindle eBook HERE. Enjoy!

Alice’s latest novel is A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 5. Available HERE. 

Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving. “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “The best one yet!” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

https://www.facebook.com/alibettewrites/
http://twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks/
http://goodreads.com/aliceorr/
http://pinterest.com/aliceorrwriter/