I first learned to do a Rough Sketch in a writing class.  The purpose of the Rough Sketch is to provide a snapshot of your work-in-progress (WIP), capturing all the important information on one page so that you can see it all at a glance.

This technique is especially useful when you need to give a short excerpt of your WIP to a critique partner who has never seen the project before.  In the writing class where I first learned this technique, all the students were submitting from novels-in-progress so the Rough Sketch was essential for bringing the rest of the class up to speed.  Since taking that class, made some adjustments to the Rough Sketch, adding some of my own touches.

Prompt:  Here’s how to create a Rough Sketch for your WIP.  First, download a Rough Sketch Worksheet by clicking the link and fill it out.  Read on for an explanation of the worksheet.

Title:  This one is obvious, but worth mentioning nonetheless.  Make sure the title of your WIP is at the top of your Rough Sketch.

Flap Copy:  The flap copy is the description you would find on the inside flap of your WIP if it were a printed book.  It’s like a short teaser enticing readers to want to pick up your book and read it.

Important Characters:  Choose three.  Yes, just three characters out of your entire cast.  I know it might be tough, but narrow the choices down to the three most important players.

World: Briefly describe the setting or world where your story takes place.

Narration: What is the point of view for your piece?  1st Person?  3rd Person?  Who narrates the story?  What words capture the voice of the narration?  Formal?  Conversational?  Snarky, perhaps?

Fortune Cookie: The rectangle represents the fortune inside a fortune cookie.  In this rectangle, write a fortune cookie saying that captures the theme of your story.  (E.g. The Wizard of Oz might be summed up by “There’s no place like home.”)

Music:  What song or piece of music captures the mood of your piece?

Images: Collect a few images that communicate the essence of your story and attach them to your rough sketch.  You can also iclude a paint chip or fabric swatch.  If you have artistic tendencies, you can also include doodles or sketches.

Using this worksheet, create a Rough Sketch for your Work-In-Project.

As you might have noticed, I’m really into design.  A graphic designer and product manager in a past life, you could say I’m a little bit obsessed with clean lines and balanced designs.  I love problem-solving so that form and function work together seamlessly.  One of the areas that most fascinates me in design is color theory and color symbolism.  I find it remarkable that certain colors seem almost to have certain personalities or identities.  Much like characters in a story.

Combining colors lends nuance.  Blue alone might symbolize peace and calm, but add red and yellow, and you get the primary colors which imply youth.  Replace the yellow with white and you get a patriotic color combination.  When you pair colors together, their meanings can change or acquire nuance.

Introduction to Color Theory:
Red, Yellow and Blue are the primary colors.  They are called primary colors because you cannot mix any other colors together to get these three.

Note: red, yellow and blue are primary colors for pigment.  When you’re talking about color and light, the primaries are actually red, green and blue but that gets us into the differences between the color of light and the color of pigment and that’s the subject of another post.

Orange, Green and Purple are secondary colors.  They are called secondary because you can make them by mixing only two primaries.

See the color wheel below for primary and secondary colors.  Primaries are marked with a 1 and secondaries are marked with a 2.

Colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel are complementary colors.  These colors complement each other well and provide contrast.  Each of the primary colors has a secondary color as its complement.

Remember back in grade school when we used to cut up magazines and glue the pictures on a board to make beautiful artwork?  Believe it or not, collaging is a great way for writers to explore and express the mood of their project.

I learned the benefits of this technique when I was in design school studying toy design.  “Mood boards”–where we captured the mood and overall look of a design project–were an integral part of each portfolio presentation.  In these focused collages, we learned the importance of communicating the essence of a product or brand through imagery.

How do you make a mood collage?  There are no rules.  You can clip pictures from magazines or cut out letters and words in different fonts.  You don’t even need to use concrete objects or words but can make a cool background by using printed fabrics or textured papers.  Use whatever inspires you, as long as it fits the mood of your project.

Idea: Think beyond the flat page and create a three-dimensional collage by gluing down trinkets or 3D objects.  Flat canvas not your style?  Glue your collage to the outside of a round metal canister or the inside surface of shoebox.

Once you’ve collected your materials, lay out the pieces in a way that inspires you and move things around until you’ve got a design that you like.  Finally, break out the glue-stick or glue-gun and start sticking the pieces down.

Sometimes I use Photoshop to create mood collages because it’s easy to download pictures from the web, clip them compile the images in one digital file.  A bonus of making collages digitally is that it’s easy to print them out in different sizes, email them to people or even post them on websites or blogs. Other times, though, I prefer making my collages the old-fashioned way with scissors and glue.  Whatever your preferred method, the goal is the same: to capture the mood of your work-in-progress with your collage.

Here are a few mood collages I’ve made:

Mood collage for a road trip project.

Mood collage for a project about a wedding.

Mood collage for a project about cats.

Try This: Set aside one hour to make a mood collage for your work-in-progress.

Tip: The one-hour time limit is crucial.  After all, you don’t want to invest so much time making a mood collage that you sacrifice your valuable writing time.  Force yourself to work quickly so you stay within this time limit so you avoid tinkering with the collage for too long.

Clip pictures from magazines or print images you find online and cut them up.  If you like, while you’re clipping pictures and gluing, listen to some mood music that inspires your story.  The idea with this project is to get completely immersed in the mood of your work-in-progress.

Once you’ve finished your collage, give it a place of honor in your writing space.  To those brave writers among you, scan the collage and share it on the DIY MFA Facebook page so we can all ooh and ah at your awesome project!  Can’t wait to see what you come up with!

This week, we’ll be using music to inspire creativity.  This prompt will help you exercise your hearing, which many writers often overlook in favor of visual inspiration.  I’ve selected five pieces of music, each one leaning toward a different genre of writing.  You can choose a piece at random or select depending on the genre you you would like to write.  Follow the steps below to get the most out of your listening.

Weekend Writing Prompt:

Step 1:  Block out at 45 minutes to do this exercise.  Find a quiet, comfortable spot to write.  Have a notebook or word processor ready so when you’re done listening you can dive right in.

Step 2: Choose one of the five pieces below.  Don’t listen quite yet.  Here’s what you will do: You will listen for at for approximately 2-3 minutes, until you get a feel for the piece. Set a timer if you need it.  (Note: most of these pieces are longer than 3 minutes, so feel free to stop midway through.)  Do NOT watch the videos that go with the music, just listen to the track.

While you’re listening, imagine the character or world that this piece represents.  What story is the music telling?  If this piece were the soundtrack to a story, what would that story be?

Choose one of the following links:

Fantasy: Saint-Saens – Carnival of the Animals – Aquarium
Action: Copland – Fanfare for the Common Man
Adventure: Holst – The Planets – Jupiter
Horror: Mussorgsky – Night on Bald Mountain
Romance: Beethoven – 6th Symphony – Andante Molto Moto

Step 3: Now click play and listen.

Step 4: When the 3 minutes are up, pick up your pen or go to the computer and start writing.  Write whatever comes to you.  Write the story inspired by the music.  Try to write at least half-an-hour, but feel free to go longer if you like.

Step 5: When you’re done, read over what you’ve written and think about whether this is project or piece you want to keep working with.  If so, you may want to build an entire playlist of music that inspires this story.  (Need some listening suggestions? Just let me know. There’s a lot more great music where these pieces came from!)

I’d love to hear your take on this exercise.  What did you like best?  What did you find most challenging about it?

As mentioned in Monday’s post, one great way to get new story ideas or kick-start your writing is to use the five senses.  In addition to helping spice up flat descriptions, the senses are also a great source of inspiration.  Here’s a short sampler of ways you can engage the five senses to get a new perspective in your writing.

Sound

This sense forces us to focus.  When we listen–really listen–to something, we zoom in and focus on it in depth.  It is important to practice listening and not just letting sounds wash over us, so we train our minds to pay attention.  This is the first of the senses that I always turn to because once I can focus, the writing comes naturally.

Warm up your writing chops by listening to some music.  The Planets by Gustav Holst is a great piece for just about any writer because each movement captures a completely different mood.  On Friday, I’ll share more of my favorite pieces of writing music.

To hear the different moods in Holst’s The Planets, click on the following links:
Mars     Venus      Mercury      Jupiter      Saturn      Uranus     Neptune

Sight

This is probably the one of the five senses that we use most often.  When we describe things in our writing, it’s easy to forget the other senses and focus only on what we see, because vision is so powerful.  But there are other ways we can use sight to inspire us as well.

Look at a painting or photograph and try to figure out the story behind it.  Who is the main character?  Why is he there?  If is photo or painting is a snapshot of a moment, what happened just before that moment?  What happens after?

Another exercise I love is going to a paint store and browsing the paint chips.  A color can sum up a mood in a way that would require dozens of words.  In fact, I often give my protagonists a “signature color” and post the paint chip on my bulletin board for as long as I’m working with that character.

Touch

Touch forces us to notice the little things.  When we close our eyes and ears, and rely only on our fingers, the ordinary things in life become extraordinary.  Try this: close your eyes and pick up a small object (a paper clip, a small stone, a seashell, etc.).  Let your fingers explore the object and notice all the minute details.  By examining a object through touch alone, you will notice things about it that you would not have picked up on otherwise.

Taste

This sense is all about interaction.  When we taste something, we gobble it up, drink it in and experience it from the inside out.  Taste also elicits very visceral reactions.  If we don’t like the taste of something, we know right away and we know it in our core.  When I need to access raw emotion, I turn to taste because there’s an immediacy to it that none of the other senses seems to capture in the same way.

Give your writing a jolt by tasting something that gives you a strong visceral response.  I often turn to jelly beans when I need to access this one of the five senses.

Smell

Finally, there’s smell.  This sense is unique because of all the senses, smell is the only one that has a direct pathway between the receptor (in this case the nose) and the memory center of the brain.  Think about it, smells often bring up unexpected memories or make you remember things that had been buried for years.  I know that whenever I smell one particular scent (which I can’t name because it’s a combination I can’t even describe) it makes me think of my grandmother’s house.  Smell is a powerful sense because it’s loaded with so much memory and emotion.

When I turn to smell, I use it to access memories.  This lavender lotion I use reminds me of a vacation I took years ago to Scandinavia.  The smell of coconut reminds me of drinking coconut water on the beaches of Brazil when visiting family.  If I need to remember a moment or put my character in a setting I visited long ago, I try to draw on a smell to bring that place to life.

The senses are such a powerful source of inspiration for writers that I have actually designed an entire writing course based on the five senses.  This course works equally well with adults or kids as young as elementary school because the senses are something that writers of all ages can latch onto and “get” pretty quickly.  For this reason, when I really need to jump-start my creativity, I often turn to the five senses early in the brainstorming process.  This is also why I thought it was important to introduce this concept early on because it’s something we’ll be talking about a lot as we continue through DIY MFA.

Do you use the five senses for inspiration?  Which of the senses do you turn to most often?  Which ones could use a little more attention?  This week, choose one that you use less often and do something with with it to inspire some writing.

When it comes to getting in the “zone” for writing, sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s really hard.  There are days when I’m just not “in the mood” and I can’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike.  Instead, I’ve learned a few tricks to help me set the mood even when if feels like the well has run dry.  You know that saying, “fake it ‘til you make it”?  It’s the mantra I whisper over and over until my muse decides to cooperate.  (Some days she never does.)  Here are a couple of ways I “fake it” when I need instant inspiration.

1) Establish Rituals.  I’ve been writing with the same type of notebook and pen for years, and it’s not uncommon for writers to have rituals like this.  I once heard of a writer who wore different hats for drafting and editing so she could get into mindset of the different tasks.  Other writers have a particular place where they like to write or a preferred beverage sitting next to them as they work.  You name the quirk and chances are, some writer out there has it.  Whatever the ritual, though, there has to be a reason why writers do this and why it works.  Here’s my guess: these rituals are sensory cues that remind your brain “OK, time to buckle down and write.”  While they may seem silly at times, they help get you into that writing mood even on days when your muse has decided to go on vacation.

2) Tap Into the Five Senses.  This goes hand-in-hand with the idea of setting up rituals.  Engaging the senses is sort of like jump-starting a car; it can jolt your brain out of its comfort zone and into action, helping you get those writerly juices flowing.  Everyone has one of the five senses that really pushes his or her creative buttons.  For some writers it’s sounds or colors.  For others, texture or taste.  Personally, I find smell to be especially powerful, and I often need only one whiff of a familiar scent to get my brain right back into a particular project.

3) Break Out of Routine.  While rituals and sensory cues can be a great reminder that it’s time to get to work, sometimes they can get out of control.  It’s a fine line between using rituals to kick-start your writing versus depending so much on those routines that you can’t write without them.  Suppose one morning Zabar’s happens to be out of your favorite chocolate eclairs.  You can’t just have a meltdown in the middle of the baked-goods aisle.  Instead, you need to use this change in routine to your advantage.  Sometimes all it takes is one small, new thing to boost you out of a writing rut.

4) Set a Timer.  It never ceases to amaze me what a simple time constraint can do for my productivity.  If I sit down with a huge chunk of writing time ahead of me, chances are I’ll waste at least half of it reading email, checking twitter or surfing the web.  If, on the other hand, I have only 30 minutes to work you can bet I’ll be writing up a storm during that short block of time.  Sometimes I’ll purposefully schedule appointments with oddball blocks of time in between where I know I’ll be forced to work fast.

5) Realize There Is No Such Thing as the “Right Mood” to Write.  In the end, you don’t need the right pen or the right egg timer or even the right chocolate eclair in order to write.  Just apply some glue to the seat of your pants and sit your backside in that chair.  (OK, the glue is optional.)  Seriously, though, some writers get so caught up in getting our surroundings “just so” that they never get started on the real work: writing.  Sometimes you just have to dive in and figure out later whether you know how to swim.  Or as Ray Bradbury put it: “First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.”

What do you do to set the mood for writing?  Any go-to rituals in your repertoire or a something you do to shake up your routine?