Short Story Writing Project: Using Articles for Ideas

February 29, 2008

As I stated in an earlier article, one of the great roots of a story is the question, What if? What if a man started receiving post cards in the mail every day that gave him odd advice? What if that man were a newspaper columnist? What if his wife was trying to kill him? What if the post cards were from his estranged father?

The problem with what if? questions is that you still need a germ of an idea in order to get started. For some people this is no problem. Ideas come easily for some people and not so easily for others. One of the great sources for ideas is articles. The world is filled with articles these days. From newspapers to magazines to blogs, people are constantly writing new articles about every topic you can think of. What you need to do is mine these articles for your fictional ideas.

I subscribe to a number of bloggers, from Scott Adams of Dilbert fame to Tim Ferris, author of The Four Hour Work Week to Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits. Just those three blogs alone can yield any number of ideas for a story. Here are the most recent articles from each of those bloggers:

Beauty as God - Scott Adams
Beating the Morning Rush: The 3-Minute “Slow-Carb” Breakfast - Tim Ferris
20 Money Hacks: Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Finances -Leo Babauta

I didn’t pick the articles because I thought they were especially appropriate, I simply grabbed the most recent articles. From them, I can come up with a number of what-if questions:

What if a beautiful high school cheerleader found herself in love with a homely science nerd with no interest in her? What if she started stalking him? What if no one would believe him?
What if a mother became obsessed with filming her young child? What if she started uploading the videos to YouTube? What if the child became famous?
What if a married couple living an extravagant lifestyle tried to put themselves on a strict financial regimen? What if one of them adhered to it and the other didn’t? What if one of them started to hide their money from the other one?

These are just ideas I thought up on the spur of the moment. Anyone is welcome to use them, but I would bet that my readers could come up with better ideas. Feel free to leave your own what if? thoughts in the comments.

Written by John Hewitt · Filed Under Fiction Writing, Short Story Writing · 5 Comments

Team Building: A trip to the dark side

February 28, 2008

I apologize for the lack of posting this week. I’ve spend most of the week being psychologically assessed, and the process proved to be more painful than I had imagined. Did I see a psychologist or check into rehab? I wish. No, I was being analyzed by my peers, a group of people with no experience or education in the process. I, in turn, was expected to do the same thing to them. Does that sound like Alcoholics Anonymous? No, this was a work function. It was a team building exercise.

The first part of this appalling experience began simply enough. About a month ago I (along with the rest of my department) was told to take the DISC personality assessment. Nobody asked if I thought this was a good idea or if I wanted to do it, I was simply told to log in and take the assessment.

The DISC assessment is a series of questions that involve statements that “most” or “least” describe you. You get a list of four statements. You pick the “most” and the “least” and you ignore the other statements. Additionally, in other parts of the assessment, you rank a series of statements in order from the most descriptive to the least.

A typical set of statements would be something like this:

I am very helpful towards others
I don’t like tempting fate
I don’t give up easily
People like my company

By going through this process, they determine your “behaviors” and your “values”. The behavior categories are as follows:

Dominance - Independent thinkers motivated to succeed
Influence - Social people who like the company of others
Steadiness - Amiable people who like harmony
Compliance - People who prefer accuracy, structure and control

These explanations are slightly more simplistic than the ones our facilitator gave, but only slightly. The other portion of the ~~test~~ assessment measured our values, putting them into the following categories:

Theoretical - Values knowledge and truth
Utilitarian - Values money and security
Individualistic - Values power and influence
Aesthetic - Values beauty and harmony
Social - Values people and relationships
Traditional - Values codes and order

I’m not going to reveal the results of my assessment. But I will say that I found the assessment very difficult because there was often little difference between the things I thought least described me and the things I thought most described me. In the end, I felt as if most of the items described me in some way or another, and it was only a matter of degree that separated these things. In some cases, I could have claimed the exact opposite answers and still been just as comfortable with my choices.

The real problem for me was the team building exercises we went through this week, based on these assessments. Many of us were uncomfortable with the results. I’m sure that some people enjoy getting information about themselves, but I felt as if I was being labeled. This was made worse by the fact that I was forced to share these labels with the rest of my group and have them interact with me based on this assessment.

One of the interesting things about their reactions is that they didn’t believe the results of my assessment. They wanted to put me in an entirely different category, and not for what I considered to be positive reasons. Most of their descriptions of me came from the negative aspect of the category rather than the positive. That hurt.

I didn’t feel particularly singled out in this treatment. It seemed like everyone was looking to point fingers and talk about how other people annoy them. They probably had these thoughts before, but now they had some sort of pseudo-psychology on which to hang their criticisms and the excuse that they were trying to work together as a team. After all, we had two whole days of training in this sort of analysis. That qualified us to pass judgment on each other. Right? Heck, were encouraged to point fingers by the end of the third hour.

The problem for me was that, up until this week, I really liked the people I worked with. Unfortunately, I no longer feel as if they like me as much as I like them. One of the reasons I kept this job, despite some pretty good indicators that I should move on, was that I liked working there. I looked forward to coming to work. I’m not looking forward to it now — so much for team building.

Well. If you stuck around until the end of my rant, thank you. With luck, I’ll start to feel more like myself (minus the labels) tomorrow. I’ll try to get back on topic as soon as possible.

Written by John Hewitt · Filed Under Off Topic · 14 Comments

My Thoughts on The Oscars and Juno

February 25, 2008

I love movies, but I’m not a big fan of the Oscars. Their taste in films has always seemed a bit stodgy and mannered for me. I like comedies more than dramas, on most days, and any movie that aspires to be an “epic” tends to bore me, especially by the third hour. These days, even the average movie seems to clock in at about two hours and twenty minutes. That would be fine if every moment of the movie felt important or at least interesting, but for the most part the extra time just feels like filler. Wedding Crashers for example, was a very funny movie, but no comedy should last two hours. Wedding Crashers could have been edited down to an hour and a half without batting an eye.

That is why I was so happy to see Diablo Cody win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Her movie Juno was pretty close to the perfect modern comedy. The dialog was crisp and funny. The lead character, Juno, had real flaws that were balanced out by genuinely admirable and lovable qualities. Juno was surrounded by people who cared for her, but who had realistic (and funny) views about her. The stakes felt real, but never dire, and the ending didn’t require some major, forced moment of realization. The victories were small but they had consequence.

I think it was a great screenplay. That said, I also give credit to the directing and the acting as well. I’m sure that every moment in the script didn’t make it to the screen. Juno could have been a two hour movie, instead of a brisk 98 minutes. Luckily, the people involved were wise enough to know what to cut and what to keep.

Written by John Hewitt · Filed Under Writing · 2 Comments