Your prompt: Collect three ‘Story Sparks’ every day for a week.

By ‘story sparks’ I’m not talking about a fleshed out story idea, nor even a lesson you want the story to impart, or a fully-realized setting or character.

I’m talking about one-liners, flashes of memories, five-word character sketches, overheard lines from conversations, an arresting photo you saw online… any little thing that could be a spark for a story.

I want you to commit to doing three a day in order to create a habit that feeds itself*. When you begin looking for new creative ideas every day, you train to brain to start looking for them everywhere, subconsciously. If you know you have committed to finding three story sparks today, you will start to listen to the woman in front of you in the supermarket line; you will pay attention to the little girl twirling in the falling cherry blossoms – how she holds her arms, what she does with her feet, her face; you will listen to the way you retell an incident that happened to you and wonder if that might make a good story for a character.

Not only will you come out of the week with 21 sparks for stories, you’ll have turned on your writer brain, the one that notices and stores up details for later use.

*(If you need help making yourself stick to new habits, check out BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits.)

Keeping Your Sparks

Faced with a blank screen, it’s hard to remember what had you feeling so creative when you were walking home yesterday. So write your story sparks down in the sketchiest way you can (three words, one sentence, quickly, quickly) and store them somewhere you can retrieve them.

If you like to write on paper, that’s great – as long as you keep to one notebook, so you don’t lose myriad scraps of paper.

I always carry my phone, so I’ve started keeping my story sparks in a big long text document on that. I keep it simple because, for me, nothing kills a creative idea faster than trying to classify it.

If you lack my irrational fear of organizational systems, a good option is to create a Google docs form and create a link to it right on your smart phone. Create a text-paragraph field that you can type your story spark into. Optionally, create keyword fields that can help you find the idea again later (e.g. for the girl dancing in the cherry blossoms, you could write about that, but also put ‘cherry blossom’ ‘young girl’ ‘spring’ ‘joy’ into the keyword fields). The advantages of capturing your ideas this way are that:

• You have access to them everywhere,
• The form automatically date-stamps your story spark for you,
• Google automatically stores your ideas in a spreadsheet which is certainly simpler to search through and organize than my clunky text file.

Care and Feeding of Your Story Sparks

When it comes time to write, use your story sparks as just that: sparks.

Sit and look at your story spark for a while. Put yourself back in the place where you decided it could be the spark of a story. Don’t rush this. Think about the line and who spoke it, the character, the memory, or the image. Think about whose story it belongs to. What are they like? What do they want?

At this point you can start writing or outlining (depending on your style) and you’re off.

But don’t forget to keep collecting more story sparks.

Will you collect 3 story sparks a day for the next week?

This week we’ve been talking about using images to spark ideas and capture the heart and soul of your story.  In keeping with this theme, DIY MFA is now on Pinterest, a online pin board that allows you to collect and share pictures that you love.  I’ve decided to use Pinterest to create a library of inspiring images for writers.  When you visit the DIY MFA page on Pinterest, you’ll find pin boards with all sorts of visual goodies for writers:

• Portraits to develop characters
• Images to spark stories
• Surreal and magical settings
• Office eye-candy for writers
• Books to fuel your DIY MFA journey
• Quotes to inspire your writing
• …and more!

The DIY MFA Pinterest page is meant to be a resource for all you fans of DIY MFA, with images that can be inspiration or a starting point for a story.  Click the picture below to check out the page.  Also, the nifty Pinterest widget in the sidebar will show you the latest DIY MFA pins.

This week we’ve talked about ideas and how it’s very difficult to protect them.  This means it’s important to be cautious about where and with whom you share your ideas.  At the same time, sitting on an idea and hoarding it means you could miss out on great opportunities for collaboration.  So, how do we find balance between blabbing our ideas from the rooftops and coddling them like Gollum with his “precioussss.”

My Theory:  If you get good at generating new ideas and following them through, each individual idea becomes less valuable.  When it comes to creativity, my secret fear is that whatever project I’m working on right now will be the “last good thing” I ever produce.  Sounds absurd, right?  When I’m working on a novel draft or polishing a short story, I always stall a bit toward the end because I’m afraid if I finish, I’ll never have another good book/story/project in me.

Bull-honkey!  Ideas are like subways during rush hour: if you miss the one you want, there’s always another one right behind it.  As creative people, our problem isn’t that we have a dearth of ideas, it’s that we don’t always know how to generate them when we need them.  Not only that, when we do have a great idea, many of us have a hard time following the idea through.

This is where this week’s prompt comes in.  How do we generate ideas and see them through?  The answer: we have to have faith in the process.  We have to believe that the ideas are there and we just have to dig them up out of the darkness.  We also have to believe in the step-by-step of putting ideas into action.  We need to trust the daily grind of taking baby steps, one word after another.

Prompt:  This week I have a nifty-gifty for all of you.  Remember those fortune tellers we used to make in grade school?  (You know, those folded paper things that revealed if you would marry your crush and how many kids you would have.)  I’ve designed a fortune teller with prompts to help guide you through the idea process.  All you have to do is download it here: DIYMFA-FortuneTeller and follow the simple instructions below to fold it!  Then start playing and generate some awesome ideas.

Fortune Teller Folding Instructions
(For best results, make sure your folds are nice and crisp.)

Step 1: Cut along the dotted line.

Step 2: Place the large square piece face down.

Step 3: Fold one corner to the opposite corner.

Step 4: Repeat Step 3 with the other set of corners. When you unfold it, you should see an X marking the center of the page.

Step 5: Fold a corner so that it meets the center of the X. Repeat with all four corners.

After Step 5 your Fortune Teller should look like this.

Step 6: Flip the Fortune Teller over and repeat Step 5 one more time.

After Step 6 your Fortune Teller should look like this. You're almost done!

Step 7: Fold the Fortune Teller first along the horizontal and then along the vertical.

Step 8: Your Fortune Teller is finished. Adjust the folds so you can insert your fingers under the numbered flaps. Now go ahead and play!

This week, we’ve been talking about how to start the year of write–I mean, right–and both posts have been all about ways to get inspired and stay motivated.  Today, your task is to invest in writing inspiration.

Weekend Prompt:  Treat yourself to some bargain-priced inspiration.  Some ideas: Write down inspiring quotes and pin them to a bulletin board.  Treat yourself to a small writing “mascot” or a funky new notebook.  Make a writing playlist on your iPod.  Get a box of magnetic poetry and play with your words.  Invest in a writing craft book you’ve been meaning to get.  Take photos of images that inspire you and post them around your writing space.

Remember that making your writing more festive and inspiring doesn’t have to cost a lot: a visit to a thrift shop or $o.99 store may be all you need.  And don’t forget that that most important element: FUN.  Give yourself permission to be a little bit playful or whimsical with this prompt.

What kind of bargain-priced inspiration works for you?

These past few posts, we’ve been talking about making writing resolutions and putting them into action.  As we start the new year, I thought I’d add one last post on this topic, only this time with words of wisdom I’ve collected over the years from various creative people.  We can make big plans and dream up fabulous scenarios but ultimately, we have to come to terms with the fact that sooner or later we will fail at our resolutions.

This is probably not what you want to hear and it’s certainly not something I want to say, but the truth is that as soon as we set a goal, we are opening up ourselves to the possibility that we might fail.  After all, if our goals were so easy that failure was impossible, then they’re rather wimpy goals, aren’t they?

If failure is so inevitable, how do we keep ourselves from giving up?

Focus on bouncing back.

The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.
~Randy Nelson (Pixar executive)

According to an interview with top Pixar executive, Randy Nelson, when looking for new innovators to join the Pixar team, he doesn’t so much look at whether an individual has failed at something in the past.  Rather, he explains that what he cares about is how that person bounces back.

This, of course, makes perfect sense.  After all, everyone makes mistakes now and again and if we spend our whole lives avoiding failure we’ll end never taking worthy risks or trying anything challenging.  Next time you make a mistake or slip up on something, don’t waste precious energy worrying about what’s already happened.  Focus on what you can do moving forward to fix the problem.

You are NOT your project.

Don’t say “I failed.”  Say “this failed” and move on.

Someone (I can’t remember who it was) said this to me in passing and while I can’t remember whose words these were, the words themselves have made a lasting impression on me. In fact, I jot this quote down on the inside cover every time I start a new writing notebook so that it’s the first thing I see every time I start writing.

Remember: just because something didn’t work out the way you wanted doesn’t mean that you have failed.  Maybe that project just wasn’t meant to be.  Or maybe you need to approach it in a different way.  But none of these things make you a failure.  You are not your work.  Once you’ve gotten comfortable setting that boundary, you’ll be able to face just about any hurdle.

Make it better.

Ever tried.  Ever failed.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.
~Samuel Beckett

My very first design teacher used to say “Make it better” to every design we brought in for critique.  This didn’t mean that the design was bad–in fact, many of the students in the class presented projects that were quite creative and well-executed.  The teacher’s point was that no matter how good your design, you can always try to find a way to make it even better.

The same is true in writing (or any creative endeavor, actually).  You try, you fail.  Then you try again and you might fail again but that time you’re closer to getting it right.  In the words of Beckett, you “fail better.”

Whatever direction you choose to go, you’re always going somewhere.

If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
~Yogi Berra

Sounds like a silly quote, right?  In fact, many people quote Yogi Berra for humorous effects but the truth is that some of the things he said actually made a lot of sense.  For instance, it might seem obvious that if you come to a fork in the road you should take it, but the beauty of this statement is in its simplicity.

Sometimes you have to make a tough decision (choosing which road to take) and a lot of people get stuck making that choice because they’re scared.  What are they scared of, you ask?  Failure.  I’d be willing to bet that every person who stalls in a decision is doing so because he or she is afraid of making the wrong choice.

But what if you just assume that there is no right and wrong?  What if you just choose and deal with the challenges that pop up when they appear?  Every decision you make propels you forward toward something.  The trick is adjusting your trajectory when you realize your current route isn’t taking you toward your goal.

Imagine the impossible…

Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
~Lewis Carroll

…and figure out how to make it possible.

My dear friend, clear your mind of can’t.
~Samuel Johnson

I once attended a panel discussion about science fiction and how television executives, writers and movie directors envisioned all those gadgets and technology of the future.  One of the panelists said something along these lines: “it’s easy, you just take technology we have now and move it ahead 20 or 30 years.”  If you think about it, all those great sci-fi movies and TV shows of the twentieth century did just that.  Look at all those classic James Bond spy toys or the communicators they used in Star Trek… they work a lot like smart phones or other modern-day gizmos, don’t they?  The point is, sometimes you have to imagine the impossible (and what’s more impossible to imagine than something that hasn’t happened yet).  Of course, imagining the impossible will only be useful if you also think of ways to make the impossible possible.  Don’t say “I can’t,” say “how can I?” and do it.

These quotes have helped me deal with failure and challenges in my own work and I hope they will inspire you as well.  Sometimes all it takes is a little fire beneath one’s backside to help a writer go from “I don’t think I can…” to “Bring it on!”

So go ahead and show the world you’re a literary bad@$$.