Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

There are times in the life of every creative person when they find themselves staring at a blank page, canvas, or whatever, simply stuck. Generally this isn't because they have actually run out of ideas, it is because everything they can think of to do feels as though they have done it before. For writers, This is the dreaded "Writer's Block" and there are dozens of ways to overcome it. One of my personal favorites is called Box Dancing.

All this requires is a piece of paper, a pen, and about five minutes. For the amount of effort you put into the exercise, the rewards can be quite astonishing. What happens to people is that our thinking is like walking in grass. If you walk through a field once, you can tell you were there, but it is easy to choose another direction because there is no path. Walk the same way hundreds of times, as you would writing a novel, and you will wear down the grass, creating a path where none existed before. This is fine while you're writing that same novel, but sometimes when you finish it and it is time to start something new, your thoughts want to stay in that path of least resistance you've created, leaving you stuck in a creative rut.

Box Dancing is a way to bypass that path, and access your creative subconscious more or less directly. It's also rather fun. 

Take a piece of paper, and draw eight boxes down the left hand side. In each of these boxes, you are going to write a word, so leave yourself enough room inside to do that. For my example, the eight words I chose were donkey, vertigo, stilletto, crayon, baton, Rhode Island, and razor burn. As you can probably tell, it is important that the words be as random as possible. Don't think too much, just pick random specific words to fill the slots. 

Now comes the fun part. Using brackets, make random pairs of these eight words, and on the line write a different word that those two make you think of.  Try not to think about which words you're choosing to combine, just pair them up. So in my example, donkey ended up combined with baton. These two things hardly seem to go together, but the first thing to come into my mind was circus, so I wrote circus on the bracket between them. In the same way, vertigo and razor burn made me think of film noir, stilletto and Othello of murder, and crayon and Rhode Island of kindergarten. Having combined them, my eight words are now four very different words. We then repeat the process to turn those four into two, and again to turn two into one. Going back to my example, circus and film noir combined to form ninja, and kindergarten and murder combined to form expositi (ghosts of unwanted children exposed in ancient times).  On my final combination ninja and expositi combined to form undead assassin.

Will this answer, undead assassins, be the seed of my next novel or short story? Possibly, but probably not. The real benefit to this process is not the final answer you create, but all of the thoughts and ideas you accessed along the way. It is, in essence, a quick and fun way to jump start the creative process, and get you thinking along new lines. Hope you enjoy.

Cheers,

Michelle