I am still struggling with the creation of feasible plots. By feasible I mean plots that make me want to stay with the story over the long haul – weeks, months or years and finish rather than bury the story. Only in a few cases, the idea itself was strong enough to follow the story for months or even years – e.g. for the 24 Christmas stories that form a chapter of TYFYS (one for each time zone), and for GISELA, my latest publication – but most of the time I run out of steam after, on average, 7,000-10,000 words. Running out of steam usually means that I have another unfinished book that trickles through my hands like sand while in the background the clock of writerly ambition is cruelly ticking away…

Per esempio: in the last five years, I have buried (at least) 50 such literary corpses in the basement. Now, this is probably rather normal for people who write a lot, and the basement of my mind is not running out of space. But there’s a psychological toll: after serially murdering so many stories, one begins to doubt one’s sanity…time to shake things up a bit!

Yesterday, C reminded me of Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategy” method. Very simply, you devise a strategy in the form of a instruction on one side of an index card — with the other side of the card you can do what you like. I like to draw an image to imprint the instruction more deeply. I used her advice and designed a few such strategies myself including some extras – a short text and a photo (I love photos) after a little research (I love research, too).

You’ll notice that the instructions aren’t all that straightforward. This is because I was hoping (rightly) that already reading the instructions would have a paradoxical effect on me and strike a spark off the fiction flint stone straight into the firewood pile. The plots that I generated using these were surprisingly fresh and interesting and I’m looking forward to putting them through the paces.

1. What would Napoleon do?

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2. Explain your plot idea to an alien lifeform.

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3. What is at the heart of all your stories?

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4. Describe a photo that inspires you.

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5. Cannibalize dime stories.

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Bonus Strategy: Take the Rilke Route. (@Fictionaut only)
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Rilke letting go in Switzerland.

PS. on a more practical note: these screenshots were taken off drawings that I create in OneNote (a free notepad app) using a Wacom Intuos Art pen tablet. Pulling together text, drawings and other media inspires me. To work out the plots, I now use Scrivener (all-purpose story editor, to work on the text itself) and Twine (an open-source non-linear story editor, to experiment with the order of plot elements). All highly recommended. If you’re a gadget fiend like me, the digital world’s your obedient oyster.