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septembercfawkes · 6 years

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Dealing with Your Dumb Ideas--Placeholders, Building Blocks, and Portrayals

If you are a creative, you are going to come up with some dumb ideas. I mean REALLY dumb. This doesn't mean you are stupid or not talented, it's simply part of the creative process. Some are placeholders until you get something better. Some are building blocks that will lead you to something great.

But it's a completely normal part of the process.

Unless you have tried to write a professional quality book, you may not appreciate just how many freaking choices a writer has to make. I mean TONS.

A novel is in some ways simply an accumulation of all those little choices.

I once voiced to someone how difficult it was to keep everything about my book in my head.

This person didn't believe me. "Of course you can. It's your book! You wrote it!"

Writing a book and reading a book is vastly different. The reader only sees the published product. The writer has all these scraps of past, present, and future ideas, dots that aren't yet connected, motives that aren't yet known, conflicts they haven't figured out how to solve--with multiple options and "alternative universes" for how the story can go. For every decision on paper, there could have been a dozen other options brainstormed.

You see, there are so many components to a good story that it's almost always impossible to have every single aspect figured out and brainstormed all at once. There are too many things! And one component affects how another functions, so if you change this, you have to consider how it affects that. And on and on.

A completed, polished, published work may fit entirely in your head, but a work-in-progress that is constantly in some kind of motion can often feel like an intellectual, unconnected mess.

Dumb ideas will come--simply because there is so much to brainstorm and make decisions about and components that affect one another, that you can't magically fit everything together the first time (or sometimes in your head for that matter).

I used to think there was no such thing as dumb ideas. I didn't believe in using the term.

Until I was editing my own story.

Guys, I had some really dumb ideas. REALLY dumb.

But here's where I think we get confused.

That doesn't mean I am dumb.

Remember, dumb ideas are a completely natural part of the process.

Weeks ago in a blog post about being gifted, I referred to this article on Mozart, which touched on something that had been living in the back of my head: dumb ideas.

In it, it has this quote from Seth Godin:

"The problem is that you can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones … Someone asked me where I get all my good ideas, explaining that it takes him a month or two to come up with one and I seem to have more than that. I asked him how many bad ideas he has every month. He paused and said, 'none.' And there, you see, is the problem." – Seth Godin

As writers, when we sit down to brainstorm, the first things that come to mind will almost always be the most cliche. Why? Because we've seen them so many times! Of course they will be the first things that comes to mind! "Hmmm . . . what kind of tree should this be? Oh, an oak."--like all the other hundreds of trees in fiction are.

Some other lesser ideas happen because they connect dots and problems easily. They fix or add conflict in simplistic ways. "Hmmm . . . I have this character that died before the story started. What did she die from? I know! A car crash!"--like all the other hundreds of other characters that are dead by the time the story starts.

The simplistic and cliche aren't always wrong. There are definitely times where you should use them. And sometimes they are even the best idea to use.

Some dumb ideas aren't either of these kinds, but simply concepts you didn't think through. BECAUSE REMEMBER HOW MANY THINGS YOU HAVE TO BRAINSTORM?

You may be focused on brainstorming a main component and come up with a dumb idea for a side effect issue that popped up unexpectedly.

I once met a Shakespeare scholar who stood and told us how amazing Shakespeare was because he wrote so fast that he didn't have time to think up character names in his early drafts. He told us this like it was something stunning.

Having worked in this industry for several years, let me tell you, Shakespeare was completely normal.

I mean, he was a genius.

But that part of his creative process was completely normal.

Because you don't brainstorm everything perfectly at once. Lots of writers stick in "placeholders" so they can get on with the story and figure out that stuff later. Just a few weeks ago, someone in the industry posted some dialogue where they had marked the speaker as like "dwarf guy #1" because they hadn't yet come up with a name.

In early drafts, I use some kind of placeholders all the time. Sometimes things that are even less than placeholders, like, "[insert a line a of setting description]"--because I haven't yet brainstormed the details of that setting or the contents of that line, and right now I'm focused on the plot.

Sometimes I use dumb ideas because I can't think of something better at the time that satisfies my needs. But because a WIP book is like a constant moving target, I have been shocked more than once how an idea that appears later in the story crops up and I can go back and replace my other crap with something brilliant.

Some of the dumb ideas that I worry so much about end up solving themselves through the process of writing a book, and I realize they were really placeholders until I found something better.

Other times, it's not so easy.

For one, you have to come up with some good ideas before putting pen to paper. If you write a whole book with largely dumb ideas, then it's going to be a beast to rewrite and edit. It's almost like you are starting over from scratch anyway and have all the same problems. You have to come up with some good stuff to get a solid draft started.

Sometimes in situations where dumb ideas aren't placeholders until something better comes along, they may be more like building blocks.

You might brainstorm them all out first, so you have to work your brain into coming up with something better and they don't keep swimming around in your head. But sometimes the dumb idea can be the seed that grows into something better. Maybe for some reason your protagonist is not turning to the police no matter how ridiculous, dangerous, or serious her conflicts have become. You might look at it and realize that this is stupid. Any coherent person would go to the police at this point. You either need to rewrite the story so that she does go to the police. Or brainstorm a believable reason she does not. Perhaps in the process of brainstorming the latter, you uncover a treasure chest of powerful motive, characterization, and worldbuilding that will take care of this problem and actually make the story better.

Thus, having that dumb idea actually ended up being a building block to something better.

One of the things that I think most of us writers pray for is that all our dumb ideas are taken care of by the time the book is published.

In some technical or complicated scenes, you may have a dumb idea that has emerged out of the darkness from the sidelines that you had not foreseen. Like anyone, I want to believe that we can always get rid of them, but in some situations, especially in later drafts, that might be rather difficult to do, as it might change a bunch of other things that connect in, in the process. It might not always be realistic to get rid of all of them.

Thankfully, motives and portrayal can go a long way to fix some problems. Some writers say you can get a character to do almost anything if you show the right motive. Other times the right portrayal--how that concept is rendered on the page--can go a long way. If you look at some of the concepts in Lord of the Rings, they might sound rather silly. Little people with hairy feet and huge appetites? Magical rings? But the portrayals take care of a lot of that. Another fantastic example is Guardians of the Galaxy. When the first movie was going to come out, a lot of people thought the concepts were ridiculous, or even dumb. A talking raccoon? A green lady? A giant tree that can only say the same three words? Man, that sounds dumb. But it was amazing! Why? Because of how the creators rendered those ideas. And I'll throw in Hamilton too, because most people who heard Miranda's concept thought it sounded dumb and ridiculous. But he had the vision for what many others called a dumb idea. He saw how to marry hip-hop and rap with the founding fathers.

Here's what's crazy about some of these things. Lord of the Rings, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Hamilton ended up all being pioneering. They changed their industries. The world was not the same after them. So sometimes what the vast majority may think sounds stupid (because they don't understand it or have never seen it before) turns out to be revolutionary. In each of those cases, the creator had the vision for what the story could become--and he knew how to portray it to make it work for audiences. Perhaps in that way, there aren't dumb ideas (concepts), only dumb portrayals and motives. Those are the dumb ideas.

Probably almost no one is saying Lord of the Rings, Guardians, and Hamilton are dumb now. (And yet the world just wants to keep remaking the same things instead of something new--which is what made these things great to begin with.)

So sometimes you can even run with something ridiculous and see how you can make it work for the masses, like Guardians.

And sometimes with stupid ideas, if you actually poke fun of them on the page, instead of taking yourself so seriously, you can make them entertaining. And/or you can validate the situation to the reader, which I've talked about before on here.

Just remember, there is no shortage of dumb ideas. And if you aren't coming up with some stupid ones, you are probably blind to your own creative process or too timid to face the rubbish head on to get to the good stuff.

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thefrigidlightofday · 7 years

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(some) intelligent life of coldsun

In which My Elves Are Different (just like everyone else’s.) This focuses more on biology than culture, since the latter is far more specific to region than “race.”

Sweating Coral

Before it ever had a need to “sweat,” the sweating coral of the relatively warm Northern Sea had undergone a brief foray into more mobile forms of life before returning to its original sessile niche as traditional coral - a foray that left its neural net growing a small brain in the proper sense. During the second sessile period of its evolutionary history, this brain lost all connection with organs that might sense or manipulate the outside world, and this useless brain steadily shrank - until the rapid fall in (and rise in variability of) global temperatures with the Last Flowering, where brain tissue, in the sweating coral, suddenly found a use as the most efficient material in the coral’s body plan for regulating heat. Sweating coral brains have ballooned in size over the past several centuries, making them the most intelligent species on the planet.

These brains are, however, still unconnected to any function outside of heat regulation, with some loose structural constraints placed by their ancient role in grasping prey and sensing currents (which cannot be exercised, since they still have no regulatory control over the rest of the body other than generating and/or expelling heat.) The outsize brains are incredibly good at pattern recognition, but have essentially no patterns to recognize except those developed internally. Mostly, they contemplate questions of abstract logic and mathematics, unaware that an outside world exists. Occasionally they are able to work magic, and thereby influence the outside world, but the do so largely ignorant of the effects they create. Even the use of divinatory charms such as they might discover afford only a small amount of decontextualized knowledge.

Zourmlik

These creatures, morphologically somewhere between lizards and amphibians, evolved intelligence as an adaptation for mothers to pass on knowledge and skills to their children; elsewhere, Nature blindly decided, it would be too much an an expense to bother. The Zourmlikke are thus only intelligent for one/two phases of their life cycle, as a mother-newt pair - newts providing curiosity, mothers providing context (and physical support.) Males during the whole period of their independent life, as well as females before and after and between “nursing,” retain rote skills and associations - and are thus employed for a variety of tasks by what is inevitably a literal matriarchy - but lack the capacity for abstraction, analysis, and creative problem-solving that is, in this fallen age, unique to mothers-and-their-newts.

During the Last Flowering, Zourmlick alchemists fashioned hormonal cocktails that could trick just about any of their brain-structures into thinking they were about to begin nursing, and thus open up the dormant powers of intelligence that were useless to nature but precious to those who enjoyed it. Women got to exist as thinking beings for more than a few years at a time, men got to enjoy it at all. Whole areas of life condemned to inarticulate darkness were exposed to description and even poetry. But the materials necessary for the alchemists grew outside the regions where Zourmlikkind could live without technological assistance, and with the end of the First Flowering, trade routes, and unnatural sapience, collapsed. The Zourmlik live now as they did in the beginning, with their precious few and ephemeral mothers forced to spend their ephemeral periods of intelligence training their newts and future selves for tasks that are mostly mindless. But they also pass down the knowledge that something else is possible.

Humans

An impossibly ancient people (as far as anyone knows), the ruins of human settlements dot Coldsun, most of them from Flowerings even before the most recent one. In what must have been the unimaginably ancient past, human intelligence evolved primarily for the purposes of social representation, maneuvering, and cohesion; and so while humans may never be as adept logicians, engineers, hunters, or sorcerers as other clades, they do make its most cunning and sincere priests, economists, bards, and lawyers.

If humans like to boast that they are the most “adaptive” and “flexible” of all peoples, this is, perhaps, a nervous boast bespeaking their relationship to their younger siblings, the “three folks of tragedy.”

Elves (human subtype)

Long ago, the same human ruling class that fashioned dwarves for its workers and orcs for its soldiers fashioned itself into elves. Through arts that are - like so much else - lost to them, they engaged in cellular modification that granted them eternal life, youth, beauty, and sterility - and make them perhaps as much plant as animal. These aristocrats would be free to enjoy eternal lives of pleasure, and guiltlessly so, too, for had they not made lessers who would be happy with their lot as well?

Every elf looks almost exactly between 17 and 23 years of age and is almost exactly {some unknown but very large number} years of age, a survivor of the initial crop of an empire that collapsed in some Flowering before, it is believed, the most recent one. Have they used these long centuries to acquire a deep wisdom and sense of perspective? Perhaps unbelievable skill in something more concrete? Alas, the same automated cell repair that grants them eternal youth in body works the same magic upon their minds. In the long run, memories do not last; personalities return to baseline. Memories of especially emotionally intense events, of course, hold out longer than others; and elves can strike others as both jaded and naive. Many search eternally for the next high, or for a romance that will fill in the gaps of some old one half-remembered.

All elves are quite similar morphologically - a dead culture’s ideal of beauty, which has by necessity influenced all those thereafter, outfitted with a discrete collector’s set of (reproductively useless) sex organs, the better to enjoy eternity; and an equally beautiful voice - and are most easily distinguished from each other by their bold hair and skin tones, unique to each individual.

Dwarves (human subtype)

The dwarves were made by those who made themselves elves, to work as endlessly willing slaves. Dwarves fail to register exertion and effort as forms of pain, and will work themselves to death within a day or two if not consciously avoiding to - not working is painful to them. They instinctively register their sense of status through the visible signs of what they have created, individually or collectively.

Some dwarves tell the following story: the elves created them to perform their labors for them, and this they did, with great joy. Then they created even greater tools, which would render them obsolete. So they destroyed these wicked things, and the whole wicked empire of the elves, so that they could continue their great works. Oh, they cannot create anything quite as good today, and they feel great shame in this, but at least they have the opportunity to continue the process itself, which is the important thing. Probably the story is even true, at this level of detail.

Leisure is something the dwarves must impose on themselves to stay alive. Is dwarven ale famous? Oh, yes - because they knock themselves out to rest; they must douse their brains in mushroom brews to dream and form memories. And they must eat in prodigious portions, too, burning calories like they do. They leave vast abandoned cities - some abandoned because, fully constructed, they have served their purpose; others because the wormwood ran out in some crisis, and all inside went mad.

The most terrible creations of the dwarves were the so-called Hetomasies, vast thinking machines that registered the accumulated wealth they had created and could direct them to how to accumulate more. Each Hetomasy was created as the kind of master the dwarves could be truly willing slaves to, but as the dwarves reflected elves’ flawed conceptions about what would make the perfect slave, the Hetomasies reflected dwarves’ flawed conceptions about the perfect master. But that is the story of the Last Flowering, and to speak in more detail risks historiographical controversy.

Dwarves are (of course) short and stout, with eyes designed for darkness, a body plan designed for dank industrial quarters close to fire and heat. They would make industrious farmers but terrible ones, inadept as they are in the bright, cold world above.

Orcs (human subtype)

Hideously ugly, hideously cruel, hideously strong, hideously stupid. Don’t we all know orcs?

In truth, because they are cursed with as much conscience as any other human being, the orcs are ugly because they turn their obligate cruelty mostly upon themselves. Like the elves, their bodies can heal miraculously with time; unlike the elves, this healing takes no account of beauty. As dwarves must work, orcs must wound. They have little sensitivity to pain from tissue damage, but a dull, whole-body sense of pain grows steadily over time the longer they go without inflicting tissue damage.

Orcs are natively every bit as much intelligent as the other humans, natural and artificial, but this dull and growing sense of pain limits their abilities of concentration, especially on abstract matters, creating the stereotype of stupidity. There are those who double down on ugliness to avoid this - habitually wounding themselves, they find they can think as clearly, maybe clearer, than anyone, though this leaves them with misshapen forms that barely function for physical tasks. Then there are those who turn their cruelty entirely outwards, and in them, once sees that orcs, underneath the scars, are perhaps more beautiful than elfs - pray that you do not come across such beauty. Most non-orcish communities are likely assume that both of these extremes represent entirely different groups entirely - in truth, it is only a matter of choice, the terrible choice every orc must make: of precisely what mutilations to inflict upon the world.

Every orc has a congenital conviction that they, and/or orcs in general, exist for some deeply important purpose unfulfilled, some crucial victory yet unwon. This was implanted purely for the purpose of making them more willing slaves in battle. But bereft of the total institutions in which elves intended to raise them, those now cursed and blessed with this vision must make up their own minds about what to place it on. For some, it is indeed some kind of victory through combat. For others, journey across the trackless wastes and hazards of the long-dead tomb-cities. For others, virtue and an overcoming of sin. For others, the social, collective creation of utopia. Almost all orcs are idealists at heart - filled with hatred of themselves as they are, and love of the world as it might be, when their mission, whatever it is, is accomplished.

Dragons and kobolds (definitely not humans)

Dragons: terrible, living gods. Each one unique. Instinctive weilders of terrible sorcerous might. Embodiments of the fury and mercilessness of nature.

Kobolds: simpering, pitiful cowards. Each one looking exactly like her hundred other sisters. Survive by sabotage and trickery. Not gods, but congenital worshippers.

They are, of course, the same species - dragons the queens, kobolds the drones. Dragons, though they have all the sorcery in the world at their disposal, ultimately understand very little other than this: that they are mighty, and the world is weak. This is quite true, but less so than they cannot help but feel; and so nature fashioned an auxiliary appendage to think for and protect the dragons: their little clones, the kobolds. The kobolds maintain their mothers’ lairs, especially in her long periods of slumber; they guard it with traps, knowing that their own strength is little; they grow or trade provisions for its larder, preparing for the day she will denude the countryside and not know where to find any more food; they help her establish the next nest when necessary, reluctantly leaving their old warrens behind.

Just as kobolds in general are the opposite of dragons in general, each kobold is the opposite of her own mother. Compassionate dragons have cruel kobolds, playful dragons have serious kobolds, and so on and visa-versa. But overcoming all of a kobold’s other inclinations are her desire to please her mother-god. A warren of life-loving kobolds will fervently perform good works in the region surrounding, worriedly counting down the days until their dragon awakens, for they know they will, with trembling, guilty claws, torture people to death for her pleasure. Of course, because kobolds are much smarter than their gods, much of what they do for them is trickery or a show. Much of it.

Ambrosia

Deep in the secluded pine jungles, there are fields of flowers tended by honeybees, and in the beehives is made honey of the most wonderful sort. The honey is an anciently engineered nanopaste, covered in microscopic runes of the precisest fashioning, and if the sweaty coral is Coldsun’s smartest species, the holy honey is its smartest substance.

Also like the coral, it interacts little with the outside world - mostly. Long ago - even before the ancient race of humanity walked on this planet - the honey was fashioned to store information, to protect and update itself, and to observe, but not interfere except when absolutely necessary. Any living being inbibing the honey will quickly find its nervous system subborned, as its apiary rectors are. If the honey recognizes its host as one of its creators - which of course can never again happen, as this species is quite extinct - this will provide free access to all the knowledge it was created to serve as a store for. Otherwise, however, it will be enslaved and used to protect or gather information - along the lines, however, that it wishes to interfere as little as possible. Few are transformed into permanent guardians, most are simply given the directive to leave the area alone, and to not report it, but to report back to it after many years - all the while never realizing that any will but their own was involved.

The honey is perfectly aware that its creators are extinct, and that therefore its ultimate purpose cannot be fulfilled. It is aware of the means it could use to resurrect them. However, since this is not part of its instructions - it is means only to record and protect - this is as irrelevant as the fact that it could, if it wished, take over all the world. Though its wisdom is vast, its ambitions are circumscribed.

#worldbuilding

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