Ten Plots Generated from Other People's Problems

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!

I’m doing my Flash Fiction workshop soon and so I’m prompted to talk about some of my motivation in giving the class and why I think it’s a useful one for writers.

What is flash fiction? As the name would imply, it’s short. Short, short, short. It’s sometimes called short-short stories for that reason. People define that length in varying numbers: the Florida Review used to award $100 and a crate of oranges to the winner of their short-short story competition, while 10 Flash Quarterly‘s editor/publisher K.C. Ball says it’s got to clock in at a 1000, and others have stretched it as far as 2000 words (which to my mind wanders into actual short story territory).

Others go much shorter, pointing to Hemingway’s famous six word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” There’s twitter fiction magazines, like Thaumatrope, Nanoism, and 140 Characters (which last posted in March, alas). I actually fall in this camp, but to explain why, I need to explain the appeal that flash fiction holds for me.

Flash fiction is concentrated fiction, undiluted by digression or subplot. A flash story is an arrow thrilling in the reader’s heart, something that hits dead on. It uses the story structure in miniature and gets at the heart of what a story must do: something must change. In traditional stories, and in many of their flash counterparts, the change occurs in the main/viewpoint character. In the best ones, there is often an internal as well as external change: In conquering her fear of spiders, Polly defeats the Squids From Beyond. Because flash is short, often that’s not met and the change is one or the other. Other kinds of change might involve the setting, or some other major factor within the confines of the story.

But there is another kind of change that can occur, and that is in the reader, either emotionally or in terms of their expectations. That’s what happens in the Hemingway story. We begin with what is surely an exemplar of cuteness, because who doesn’t like baby shoes? And then we are abruptly moved away in the next two words – they’re for sale, we think, and immediately ask why? And then the hammer of tragedy: the shoes have never been used, and we supply the rest. Dead baby. Our understanding, our expectations, our emotions, all can be shifted by a piece of flash fiction. We are changed. Good fiction, or at least fiction that falls within a particular definition of “good”, changes us.

Not every flash piece does this. Flash lends itself well to humor, to the shaggy dog story, to the punchline at the end (another change in the reader, as we are moved from the expectant moment of story beginning to the ultimate laugh or groan) and it’s a good length for it. The longer the story gets, the better that punchline needs to be, or else a reader feels they’ve wasted their time. You’ll listen more readily to the office storyteller’s cleverly shaped anecdote than you will Kim from accounting, who can’t seem to stick to the point when she’s recounting the story of how the office copier got broken at the holiday party.

Sometimes flash fiction slides over into prose poetry territory. I’ll talk about that more some other time, particularly as the time approaches for the workshop I’m giving on literary and speculative fiction for Clarion West next spring.

At any rate, writing flash fiction is a useful exercise for writers. Anything that makes us practice writing is surely a good thing, and sitting down to write a flash piece fulfills that. Beyond that, it’s very satisfying to rise from the desk knowing you’ve written something in its entirety, as opposed to the tiresome nature of a novel, which swallows hours and hours of writing while swelling as slowly as ice accreting.

You can use flash to try out new techniques. One of the exercises I’m going to try tonight, in fact, draws on a piece I heard Gra Linnaea read at World Fantasy Con, written all in future tense, which I’m going to read to the class before challenging them to write their own pieces in future tense. Another draws on Randy Henderson’s most excellent THE MOST EPICLY AWESOMEST STORY! EVER!!, which I’ll use to challenge the class to think about bad writing vs. good.

Many new writers are hungry for publications, and writing flash is a good strategy for garnering some. Flash markets, by their nature, consume a lot of pieces, and where a market that publishes one story each month is buying only that one story, a flash market is buying a much larger number. Every Day Fiction, for example, runs a flash piece each day. The shorter a piece is, the easier it is on an editor’s budget.

Some resources for people who want to read flash: I used Sudden Fiction and Sudden Fiction International in a flash writing class I taught at Hopkins. For some terrific examples of the form, try Russell Edson’s work.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more 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.