The Pencil Place

Musings on writing, publishing, marketing, creativity, and that other… what's that word?

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Motivation and Spice

Posted by T J Pontious on November 17, 2009

I found my old recipe card in a book under my chair.  It’s a card that I refer to sometimes when I need to color outside of the lines.

Take some card stock or paper and list the following motivations.  Add any others that come to mind.

  • Vengeance
  • Catastrophe
  • Love / Hate
  • Chase
  • Grief / Loss
  • Rebellion
  • Survival / Deliverance / Escape
  • Discovery / Quest
  • Betrayal
  • Persecution
  • Rivalry
  • Ambition
  • Sacrifice
  • Metamorphosis / Maturation

Now, rip the paper up into strips with one entry on each strip and plop them into a hat.  The next step is to create a set of “Spice” ideas.  Add new spice ingredients as you think of them.

  • Deception
  • Criminal Activity
  • Profit / Loss
  • Un-natural or unwelcome affection
  • Making amends
  • Suspicion
  • Conspiracy
  • Suicide
  • Honor / Dishonor
  • Searching
  • Lost / Found

Again, rip the paper up into strips and put these spices into a different hat.

Now what? Well, of course you guessed it.  Now draw one plot element and one spice element from each hat.  Then spend ten minutes pondering how to mash the elements together into a story, and write down a bare bones plot outline.

Yeah, it might not be what you needed.  But I often find randomness to be a great creativity boost.  Just what would a Chase story have in common with Making amends?  I don’t know, so you’ll have to tell me.

I have a 3×5 card with the above motivations on one side and spices on the reverse.  It keeps me guessing about what the possibilities are out there. And as a writer, it’s all about possibilities, isn’t it?

Let me know if it helps you out!

Posted in Fiction, Plot | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

A Game of Clue

Posted by T J Pontious on November 13, 2009

“Allright. It’s four in the morning, I have a screwdriver, and something is either dead or gonna die!”

Have you ever had one of those nights? I had been up a time or two in the night jiggling handles and checking plumbing parts, but the running water noise was both getting worse and keeping me awake. The float valve had become too tired, and I had to coax it back into working order. It’s okay for now, but it will probably need replacement soon enough.

What I had said to myself kept ringing in my head when I went back to sleep, and somehow the idea of killing a noisy Professor Plumber with a screwdriver in the bathroom took hold. I’ve been in “Clue” mode all day. And another thought came around with it – too many times the protagonist in a story has too easy a time of it in the story.

I think of the Bourne Identity for instance – sure he is awesomely skilled as a spy and assassin. But nothing ever goes really wrong. Maybe I’m just too skeptical, but sometimes I’m pulling for the hero to have a leg cramp just to shut his pious pie hole up for a few pages.

Right now: I’m in the study with a computer, killing time. What have you killed today?

Posted in Creativity, Fiction | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Sometimes you have to go outside

Posted by T J Pontious on November 9, 2009

When I get stuck while writing, I sometimes find it useful to work on something completely different for a bit in order to let the brain reboot itself a little. I’m not sure how it connects in my mind, but my grandfather would sometimes say he had to go outside to have enough room to change his mind.

I was taking a tour around the ‘net, and I stumbled onto this video.  It is a 1927 colour film of London.

It’s absolutely stunning. If I were trying to describe 1927 London, I’m quite sure I would have gotten it so completely wrong as to be laughable. But then the odds are we are all in that boat.  Now at least there is a sense of the city.

And of a little girl selling peanuts.  That just started writing a story for me right there.  And the old boat on the Thames.

Evocative.  I’m really glad I found this video.  I think I’m nearly rebooted now!

Posted in Creativity, Fiction, Setting | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Query letters….

Posted by T J Pontious on November 1, 2009

Just when I’m wrestling with a question, the answer presents itself in the Internet before I really begin searching.

I have books about query letters. I have clippings and other odd bits of bookmarks tagged for research, study, and deliberation.  That doesn’t mean that I know what I’m doing, however.

I love days like this.

What is a query letter in 25 words or less?  Keep it simple – as in this blog post for query letters, for instance.  Thanks, Janet!

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Recharging

Posted by T J Pontious on October 27, 2009

That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Some batteries just need a quick charge and they’re good for a few hours. Some batteries you need to charge overnight and they still drain quickly.

With writers, the batteries need a variable charge at a constant rate, otherwise output suffers and performance is unpredictable.  This is science, I think.

For me, I’ve been reacting to a lot of different stimuli that has kept me distracted from some of my original goals, and that’s partly my fault.  A lot of these things are not really controllable though, are they?  Sick pets, financial stresses, the economy, politics – and all the rest.  I tend to bog down a little too easily at times.  I end up with too many to-do lists.

So now to recharge, I’m reading.  I have a stack of books that I’ve collected over the past two years or so, and an absolutely sick collection of eBooks I’ve downloaded – mostly novels and other works in the public domain.  They don’t do me much good if I don’t read them though, do they?

So I’m reading through the Nag Hamadi manuscripts, the Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition rules, and a biography.  Yeah, well not all at the same time. It’s hard enough to get my bifocals adjusted to a single page, much less that many pages.

And, with a little luck, my world will freeze over soon so that I can breathe easily for a few months – meaning that I will be back in audio book mode.  Otherwise I stop to make too many edits trying to keep the tar off the back of my throat.  I’m looking forward to it.

You know, I never had allergies until I moved to Indiana.  Hmmmmm…..

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The value of anachronism

Posted by T J Pontious on October 1, 2009

Anachronism: -noun; something or someone that is not in its correct historical or chronological time, esp. a thing or person that belongs to an earlier time (or a later time)

I started thinking about anachronisms this week. I was walking near a military facility, and I overheard a guy behind me complaining, “It doesn’t rain IN the Army, it rains ON the Army, so you better just learn to deal with it!”  From his strident tone (and yes, it was raining) I was expecting some young person, probably in uniform and walking with a colleague.  I slowed down and adjusted my umbrella because I wanted to see if my hunch was correct.

Yes, I do odd things like that sometimes… But I was very incorrect. Both men were in their 50s, a bit rotund, and obviously reminiscing about having to endure rain while in the service years ago. Neither one had a jacket and it was quite chilly.

While this wasn’t exactly an anachronism, it got me thinking about timelines.  If you’re stuck on a story line, maybe it would be more interesting in a different time.  Let’s look at some modern trends and see if we can jazz things up.

Vampires.  Teens eat these stories for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Goth is still quite popular, and the entertainment industry is sucking it for all it’s worth.  But let’s face it, the urban fiction angles have been about played out haven’t they?  Why not think about your vampire story as set on a space station or planetary outpost.  Or better yet, how would Neanderthal tribes have dealt with vampires?  Would they have figured it out or would they just be free food?  Is that what wiped out the Neanderthals?

If your book deals with politics, why stay with today’s headlines?  Why not move everything back 200 years?  Or better yet, find a nice timeline of maybe the Hundred Years War and set it ahead to maybe 2015.

I started a novel once that set a couple of modern guys back to an age that was somewhere between high fantasy and steampunk.  I never finished it because it got too wierd (yeah, even for me).  It was a hidden area where some magic still lingered, but steam power was used as well.  I think about that setting often, and wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t dust it off.

What I’m trying to say is – no matter what you’re writing, if you are stuck just throw it into a different time and see what you end up with.

Posted in Books, Creativity, Fiction, Setting | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Killer Dreams?

Posted by T J Pontious on September 20, 2009

As adults, I think most people discount dreams. We don’t pay attention to them, don’t put any significance in them, and don’t bother remembering them.

I’ve always been glad that I have never had that tendency. I dream often, vividly, in color, and I remember my dreams.

Today it paid off. I dreamed up a whopper, that is still vivid enough for me to think about writing it up as a test thought or two. It starts off with some boxes found in the sand on the shore of a lake that contain odd things, and as an investigator I am tasked with figuring out if there was a crime or not. Yeah! I love puzzles, and I love them when they come in my dreams. The problem is, this was not a puzzle. This was a murder that happened nearly 30 years ago, and the evidence in these boxes is a very sad tale that implicates the father of a friend of mine. We had heard that he was dead, so it should be all over, right? Right?!?

Maybe. Will I write it? I don’t know. I’m a bit busy with other stuff at the moment, but I may very well come back to this one. I’ve never tried a murder mystery.

So take it as a cautionary tale, my scribbling friends. Don’t discount your dreams. Write them down. Mine them for ideas. Follow where they lead.

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*Cough*

Posted by T J Pontious on September 18, 2009

Well, pardon the dust.  This is the new home for tjpontz.com, now under WordPress.  I’ve imported all of the old stuff that was on the typepad page, but the formatting has suffered on several items, and the other nitty grits are misbehaving.

A fresh coat of paint, a few throw pillows….

Really!  I may find myself accidently posting more often now. You never know, do you?

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The creepy season

Posted by T J Pontious on September 12, 2009

This blog is something I started as a place to talk about fiction writing.  The problem today is that I’ve been doing far more nonfiction writing, which is kind of a new genre for me.  So to get everybody caught up on what I’ve been doing, I’m going to bridge that chasm in my brain here and leave a breadcrumb for folks to follow.

First off, I did a modernized version of the Jefferson Bible. It’s a pretty modestly sized little book, so why not?  Derivative works don’t usually get updated as often as scripture, and I thought that it would be pretty interesting to see how well it works in today’s English.  You can read more about that project at http://jeffbible21.com. It dovetails nicely with my loves of history and language, and many years pondering theology.

The other project I have just completed is the Haunted Homeowner’s Survival Guide.  There is a ton of misinformation out there, and ‘reality’ TV shows of folks chasing spooks doesn’t help the situation.  I’m condensing the web site content into a downloadable PDF just to help people out. There will be a version on Smashwords for other eBook readers, and I will ask a modest price for the download to help cover the costs of my domain setup. There will be a coupon program too, so no fears there.

I think my favorite part of the web site (http://hauntedhomeowners.com)is when I short circuit a lot of the preconceived notions about paranormal events by letting you think about something parallel but completely different.

Let’s put the shoe on the other foot for a minute.

Suppose I say that I have an invisible unicorn in my closet.  I want you to find him and get rid of him for me, okay? He throws clothes off the hangars and into piles in the corner. He turns the lights on and off, and I hear his hooves on the floor sometimes.

How do you catch a unicorn?  I’m glad you asked, because there are two basic schools of unicorn catching.

1)  Believe there may be a unicorn.  You give me the benefit of the doubt, and try to find the unicorn. Set up your cameras, thermal detectors, magic field finders, and hoof sensors.  If you find any evidence that way, you’ll be inclined to believe you really did find a unicorn.  That’s what you were looking for, isn’t it?

2)  Believe there might not be any unicorn.  Using this method you would investigate the hangars to make sure the clothes should have stayed on them. Is there anything in the closet that could have knocked the clothes off? Check the piles of clothes to see if it is just normally discarded laundry (ew!) or if it has anything else going on.  Does the light switch have a second circuit, a faulty switch or a loose lightbulb?  Check out the floor carefully for construction faults, noises caused by seasonal expansion and contraction from heating systems or air conditioning.  Lastly, you’d think about getting an evaluation of me at the hospital, because most sane people don’t believe they have unicorns in their closet.

In this case, if you use the term ‘unicorn’ with me, it is an agreement that something odd is going on, even if there is no invisible beast in there with a horn growing out of its forehead.

With either method you may find a simply unexplainable phenomena. Or you may decide it was all just my cat.

What is a ghost? Many people would commonly answer that it is the remaining spiritual energy of a human who is no longer alive.  What is a demon? Many people would commonly answer that it is an energy force or a spiritual entity of a being who is not human, probably with hostile (or at best not friendly) intentions.

Great! But what does that mean in measurable, scientific terms? How can anybody know for certain the difference between a ghost and a demon?  What kind of spiritual energy is this, exactly?  Does it have a voltage?  How many milliwatts does it take to create an apparition or a moving shadow?  Energy fields are measurable, so this should be a piece of cake, right?

So if you happen to find a piece of ectoplasm, please save it for me. I want to see if I can charge my cell phone with it….   I’ve decided that creativity can be used in nonfiction writing.  Maybe that is a lesson appropriate for this page after all.

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Thinking about thinking

Posted by T J Pontious on August 21, 2009

The wheels of thought, though elastic, are hard as iron. They spin together like a great conflagration of metal and steam, pushing out new ideas faster than sausages. Each thought gives rise to new thoughts, each with its own children and cousins. These new thoughts percolate back through the system, achieving even grander results (at least sometimes).


This transformation of thought could be plotted on a graph, perhaps. The rate of change (or progress) is never constant.
Ah – but then again, these wheels once in full progress, can be hushed in an instant with any distraction as an excuse. That must be one hell of a braking system for those wheels.
Or, is it more like the process is ephemeral. Soap bubble analogies, anyone? No. Maybe not. Soap bubbles don't do anything but burst after catching the sun for a brief moment on the breeze.
I used to be content waiting for thoughts to come. Much like fishing, only in an internal lake of the soul. I would wait for them to come, casting my line where I observed, or hoped to find, some clues bubbling to the surface.
Now I must go scuba diving to find my thoughts. They hide under ledges, obscured by seaweeds, hidden in caves of deeply troubled rocky facades, and protected by predator fishes.
I can see why so many people choose not to pursue thinking. They prefer to stand on shore and have their little social parties and watch the time go by, mindless that there is serious work that needs doing.

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