5 Ways to Jump Start Your Fiction
by Adam Krause
One of the best pieces of advice about writing comes from William Faulkner, who said, “I only write when I’m inspired. Fortunately, I’m inspired at 9 o’ clock every morning.” If you wait for an otherworldly message from the Muse to hit you before you sit down at the desk, you may have the same odds of being inspired to write as you do of being struck by lightning. It often helps to have some specific, small challenge to meet that gets you to think about the writing process in a new way. In this, the first installment of a series, Eduify presents five ideas to help you start writing fiction.
1) Surprise your characters.
At some point, almost every writer produces a story about a jaded young person who makes cynical, knowing comments about everything around her, but has no challenges or obstacles to confront that she isn’t already prepared for. This is wasting an opportunity to draw in the reader with tension and conflict. Often, the most interesting scenes in fiction are those in which a character is knocked off guard and has to adapt to the situation.
For instance, you might write a scene in which a character has to pretend to be someone they are not, in order to negotiate a set of tricky circumstances. In the process, they might grow into the new identity with more confidence. (This is a variation on the many identities everyone assumes in the course of a normal social day: to quote Indian author Vikram Chandra, “It is very common for a person to speak one language at home, use another on the street, do business in a third, and make love in a fourth.”) Or you might take a cue from Douglas’ Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which one sodden, unhappy character is always followed by rain clouds. He is a rain god, and doesn’t know it. Create a character that causes trouble, or some other recurring event, wherever they go, and has to deal with the consequences.
Finally, you could write a scene between two characters that do not speak the same language, but urgently have to communicate. You do not necessarily have to be bilingual to write such a scene. The important thing is not what the characters, initially unintelligible to one another, say; it is their conflict or cooperation as they deal with the unusual situation that could make the scene into compelling fiction.
2) Stretch your style.
French experimental author Raymond Queneau wrote a book called Exercises in Style, in which a mundane encounter on a bus (an older man tells a young man in a tall hat to move aside, and the narrator later sees the same young man in a tailor’s shop having a button on his coat raised) is written in 99 different and increasingly wild prose styles. For instance, one of the entries is written from the point of view of the inanimate objects in the scene, who naturally see themselves as more important than the people. Another narrator, who uses the anecdote to lodge a complaint against the government, substitutes “taxpayer” each time a person is mentioned.
As a reading experience, the book sometimes feels like it is spinning its wheels. However, as a writing exercise to imitate, it is excellent. Take notes on a public encounter that you witness (something involving at least two characters) and write the same scene using five or more writing styles. If you can’t think of five styles, try taking on the mantles of different authors that you admire. How is the way that hard-boiled detective author Raymond Chandler would see a scene different than the way that free-associative, lyrical James Joyce would see it? Knowing that the author’s palette of words, or how they choose to write about something, is at least as important as what they choose to write about, should always keep you from complaining that you don’t have any writing material.
3) Make headlines. 
Now that supermarket tabloids are all about celebrity gossip and unflattering photos captured by paparazzi, it makes one nostalgic for the bygone age of Weekly World News and the old National Enquirer, whose stories were primarily composed of supernatural nonsense. “Bat Boy Endorses Al Gore” was a typical headline, accompanied by photos of a Nosferatu-faced feral creature standing next to the smiling vice president at a campaign rally. “A Baffled Scientist” was often the source quoted for expert opinion.
Make up your own outlandish headline and then write an accompanying fake newspaper story, or other short work of fiction, to go along with it. Or go the opposite route: look in a more legitimate newspaper for a local, national or international story that tells what happened, but not why it happened. Making up the background – the nuanced relationships between characters that eventually led to a newsworthy occurrence, which might be the climax of your story – is part of the fiction writer’s job.
4) Family ties.
One of the deepest seams a writer can mine is their family. But you don’t have to be limited to your own experiences, with your parents as parents and you as the child. You can go back in time and show, with all the clarity and immediacy of fiction, the origin stories of how people became the way they are.
For instance, you might write a scene in which your parents meet for the first time. Did they have a memorable first date? What details of another time and place could come out when you imagine that scene in detail? Or you might have an eccentric uncle who collects rare fish and seems to prefer their company to that of people. What paths in his life may have led him to that state? Pick anyone in your family over the age of, say, forty, and just from anecdotes you have half-listened to, you probably know enough about their past to make them a complex and compelling fictional character. If you don’t know something in their history, make it up. They never have to read it, and you might now be halfway to creating a character of your own.
5) Personal inventories.
There are many ways into a character, but one reliable and deceptively easy way to figure out the person you are rendering on the page is through the objects around them. Some objects reveal a person’s profession and standing in the world: a student’s private school uniform, a musician’s jazz trumpet, a police officer’s badge. Others reveal their personal tastes and quirks: a collection of swizzle straws, a fridge full of condiments but no food. What do your characters have in their sock drawers, duffel bags, coat pockets, locked safes, space shuttles?
Make a list of at least a dozen items each of the characters in your story keep with them. Try to keep these objects physical and tangible so that you can describe them, and stay away from using digital possessions – iPod libraries, and the contents of Facebook photo albums – to sum up your characters, unless their music tastes and embarrassing photographs are absolutely key to who they are. Even if little or none of this information ends up in the story itself, it will make the characters seem that much more real, since the author has gone to the work of imagining their inner lives. And, most importantly, it might be a simple enough project that it breaks your mental block and gets you writing in the first place.
