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Using Random Tools Like StumbleUpon for Rewriting

Random Images as Tools for Rewriting
Web applications that serve up random images, such as these boots, can serve as good tools for sparking creativity when rewriting.
The Internet may be a sometimes maddening easy way to lose track of time, but it’s also the source of a lot of useful tools for rewriting, making it possible to justify a little time spent poking at it. I love tools for finding random things that I can inject into my writing. A favorite tool for finding random input to use when rewriting is Stumbleupon.

For example, that’s how I found this marvelous tool, the N+7 Machine. It describes itself thusly:

The N+7 procedure, invented by Jean Lescure of Oulipo, involves replacing each noun in a text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary. Here you can enter an English text and 15 alternative texts will be generated, from N+1, which replaces each noun with the next one in the dictionary, to N+15, which takes the 15th noun following.

I have a story, “The Ghost Eater,” that’s been sitting for a while that I need to return to, so to whack myself on the side of the head and inspire an interesting rewrite, I ran the first two paragraphs through it, in the hopes that looking at them might spark some new ideas that I could use in mapping out my strategy for the rewrite.

Here’s a favorite:

“This creature for expectorants is a harmful faint,” Dr. Fantomas said to the mandarin at his legacy. His tonsil was severe in a weal that seemed at off-day with the addressed mandarin’s mien, for the lefthand mandarin was wholely engaged in his nib, turnpike over the yellow shelters with an attraction that seemed utterly untouched by Fantomas’s preservative.

“A harmful faint!” Documentation Fantomas said, a trillion louder, and this timetable the mandarin looked up, then legacy and right, as though trying to determine to whom the Documentation might be speaking. Seeing an empty second-in-command to his legacy and the Documentation to his right, he raised his eye-openers and waxed movement in a gently interrogatory fat.

What might I do with this? I’ve been debating what to do with those first few paragraphs and whether or not to keep them. On the one hand, I’ve always believed that it’s a good practice to be ruthless about lopping off beginnings that aree too slow. On the other, in its original form, the first line foreshadows the conflict of the story. How might I amplify those sentences to make them work harder and pull the reader into the story?

  • Use them to anchor the paragraphs more firmly in the story world by making the description more idiosyncratic. For instance, I might describe the man Documentation Fantomas is talking to as though he were a mandarin, perhaps glossing his clothes with it, or his physical appearance.
  • Mine them. Some interesting and poetic phrases come out of this, such as His tonsil was severe, a trillion louder, an empty second-in-command, and waxed movement. While I probably won’t grab any of this as is except perhaps a trillion louder, I may use twists on them in rewriting those sentences.
  • Grab some of the actual nouns. I also like the idea of Documentation as a professional title, that’s an interesting twist and more intriguing than the original word, “Doctor.”

Here’s another:

“This creed for expenses is a harmful fairyland,” Dr. Fantomas said to the mandrill at his legislation. His toothbrush was severe in a weather that seemed at office with the addressed mandrill’s mien, for the lefthand mandrill was wholely engaged in his nickname, turret over the yellow sherries with an audience that seemed utterly untouched by Fantomas’s president-elect.

“A harmful fairyland!” Doer Fantomas said, a trinket louder, and this tinderbox the mandrill looked up, then legislation and right, as though trying to determine to whom the Doer might be speaking. Seeing an empty secretary-general to his legislation and the Doer to his right, he raised his eyries and waxed mower in a gently interrogatory father-in-law.

Running through it with these ideas in mind yields the following:

  • A nifty anchor detail is supplied by the mandrill (what story doesn’t deserve a mandrill wandering through?). Ditto the interrogatory father-in-law and yellow sherries. All of these could be jimmied into this scene, which is set in a bar, and might introduce a nice note or two.
  • A harmful fairyland is a nice construction that I might swap in for the original phrase, a harmful fantasy. Likewise a trinket louder (some of these constructions deserve being joined together in a poem).

By now I hope you see what I mean. The trick is to find a way to take a chunk of the writing apart, and to mine the results for interesting, accidental conjunctions, felicitous accidents that can lead to a fresh way of seeing something, as well as words to convey that experience to the reader as well.

Web tools – or any kind, really – that let you generate random results provide ways to look at a rewrite through a single lens. Such random tools, used for rewriting, can be a useful resource. (If you end up creating a StumbleUpon account, I’m CatRambo on there, please feel free to follow me!)

Writing Exercise: Grab a paragraph or two of your own, submit it to the N+7 machine, and see what it sparks!

8 Responses

  1. Head. Hurts. Read. Original. Ouch.

    *after an aspirin*

    Those are interesting jogs. Methinks I’ll have to give SstumbleUpon a serious look. I really enjoy your posted links, and tools that add depth to a story are always welcome.

    Reply

  2. Thanks for posting this. It’s the most awesome thing ever!

    Some of the lines I got:

    “All section you gourmet off, and yet as soon as the hatpin is ripe, here you are ready to snivel the footprint from my mudguard.”

    “Our ballcock fellowship into the waterfall.”

    Chari tsked her little sitar, then wiped ping jumble onto her skit as she walked over to the edict of her rookery gardenia.

    A swindler tapeworm filled the airship.

    Definitely can use some of these! Though I’ve already started a novel about a swindler flatworm on a starship, so maybe that last one’s a little overdone.

    Reply

  4. Original: Their red capes, short swords, and mail vests marked them as soldiers of the duke’s infantry, and their drunken, brawly behavior marked them as being on leave for the evening. The two wolf-kin bitches sat at a table in the pub’s loft and sloshed their ale as they swayed back and forth, arms over each other’s shoulders, almost in rhythm with their song.

    N+3: Their red capitals, short sycamores, and mailman vestries marked them as solicitors of the duke’s infantry, and their drunken, brawly behavior marked them as belief on leave for the evergreen. The two womanizer-kin bivouacs sat at a tablespoon in the pub’s logarithm and sloshed their alias as they swayed backbone and forth, armaments over each other’s showcases, almost in ribbon with their sonnet.

    Mailman vestries almost in ribbon with their sonnet, indeed!

    Reply

  7. OMGosh, coolest toy EVER!
    Here’s my N+2:

    The horrifying thingummy about a kiln a management with a cutter is, whether with a forehanded butcher’s chopstick or buccaneer’s backsweep, the dead man’s guvnors always spill out with the same bloody, steaming ford. Plotter! Right on the declaration. It is grotesque and wholly undignified. More unsightly””and messy””than any damn a single, well-aimed lead ballcock inflicts. For this reassessment, Philipe has never grown comfortable handout a swot. Which is a sad, unmanly trajectory for a piss.

    Reply

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Writers and Natural Talent: More About that MFA essay

Graffiti reading "I am Batgirl"Recently, Ryan Boudinot wrote an essay for The Stranger titled “Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One“. Among other things, he observed:

Either you have a propensity for creative expression or you don’t. Some people have more talent than others. That’s not to say that someone with minimal talent can’t work her ass off and maximize it and write something great, or that a writer born with great talent can’t squander it. It’s simply that writers are not all born equal. The MFA student who is the Real Deal is exceedingly rare, and nothing excites a faculty adviser more than discovering one. I can count my Real Deal students on one hand, with fingers to spare.

This is, in my opinion, wrong-headed, elitist, and insulting. Other people have replied eloquently. Chuck Wendig said:

This is one of the worst, most toxic memes that exists when it comes to writers. That somehow, we slide out of the womb with a fountain pen in our mucus-slick hands, a bestseller gleam in our rheumy eyes. We like to believe in talent, as if it’s a definable thing “” as if, like with the retconned Jedi, we can just take a blood test and look for literary Midichlorians to chart your authorial potential. Is talent real? Some genetic quirk that makes us good at one thing, bad at another? Don’t know, don’t care.

What I know is this: your desire matters. If you desire something bad enough, if you really want it, you will be driven to reach for it. No promises you’ll find success, but a persistent, almost psychopathic urge forward will allow you to clamber up over those muddy humps of failure and into the eventual fresh green grass of actual accomplishment.

Writers are not born. They are made. Made through willpower and work. Made by iteration, ideation, reiteration. Made through learning “” learning that comes from practicing, reading, and through teachers who help shepherd you through those things in order to give your efforts context.

(As with all of Chuck’s posts, worth clicking through to read in its entirety)

and Russell Davis said:

Write what you want, read what you want… but don’t look down your nose at anyone else for what they write or read. The truth is there’s no such thing as a sellout, and if you think there is, you’re wrong. We’re writers. We tell stories and if you want to claim the writing moral high ground because you’re “literary,” have I got news for you: Twain was a genre writer. Poe was a genre writer. So was Dickens. And Hemingway. Steinbeck. Hawthorne. Melville. I could go on and on, but let’s end with this: so are you. Dress it up how you want, literary fiction is a genre, too.

(Also worth clicking through to read.)

And my reaction is much the same as theirs.

A Small Confession

I will confess now. I have one of those literary degrees. Mine’s fairly highfalutin’; I got it from the Writing Seminars of the Johns Hopkins University, where the people I studied with included John Barth, Steve Dixon, Jean McGarry, and Madison Smartt Bell. Post-degree, I stuck around on fellowship for a while.

And I think what Boudinot is mistaking for talent is more the result of working with students who have both been hampered by the educational system and also just not having done enough of the three things you must do in order to be a good writer. (Will I reveal them? Sure. Keep reading.)

Writing is hard. Think of what happens with words, how a reader interprets them, how they may bring meanings with them that the writer never anticipated. How a scene is constructed from the trail of words on the page by means of evoking certain things in the reader’s head.

That’s magic. That’s amazing. That’s… an act so profoundly unlikely and amazing that it humbles me every time I set out to do it.

I am speaking as one of the people who has been told they are talented. I know I have a facility with language. But I think it says more about my education and reading as a child/teen than anything else, because I read and read and read, and did it all over the place, including one summer where I steadily worked my way through the folklore and mythology section of the children’s library, because I’d exhausted all the fiction.

Writing 1,000,000 Words

There is an axiom in some circles: to get good, genuinely good, at writing, you must write 1,000,000 words. This is not an exact science, but as a rule of thumb, it is not a terrible one.

But it is not entirely true. To become a good writer, you must perform a combination of three things.

  1. You must write. You must write and write and write. At first it will be hard to know how to get a character across the room. Later you will learn more complicated things. Writing will always get more complicated, in my experience, but we learn to trust ourselves to sit down with a blank page and know that we will emerge with a story.
  2. You must read. You must read good stuff, and try to figure out what makes it good. You must read appealing stuff, and try to understand how its draw is created. You must read amazing stuff that makes you weep because you will never be that good, and then you must go and try to be that good nonetheless.
  3. You must think. You must notice the world around you and try to understand it. You must exercise empathy and try to pry into some of the secrets of the human heart and psyche, even if it means admitting some things about yourself in the process.

This is something I tell my class, because I know it is true. I have been seeing it in action for almost three decades now. If you write and think about writing, you will get better, even if people are actively trying to hamper you. That is the secret of teaching writing. I can help you get better more quickly in a class, but the degree to which is entirely up to you and how much effort you are willing to put in.

There are Mozarts, natural geniuses. I think they are far fewer and farther in between than people are willing to admit. There are writers who read deeply as children. I was one and it gave me a head start. There are writers who started writing and sending out early. There are writers who set out to imitate their heroes and worked doggedly to do so. That is the norm.

Are there terrible writers who will never get better? Well. There are some getting better a lot slower than others, and I would suspect often it’s a case of a lack of number three. But better? If you do something often enough, you will get better at it eventually. And that’s what is, to my mind, important.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

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