I joined StoryStorm to get more good ideas. The month is almost over and I’ve done well with StoryStorm.

Brainstorming:

But if you didn’t join, that doesn’t mean you can’t do your own Story Storming.

For instance, I came up with the word Flower. I wanted to make that relevant to something. So I thought of the skunk from Bambi and my sister’s stinky cat that was afraid of everything and lilies and irises and peonies. Then I tried to come up with some way for all of those to go together. I managed it. And I wrote the opening lines for a book.

I love the opening lines.

I don’t know where the book will go yet. I hope that the idea will sit stewing in my brain and some day soon, maybe next week so I can write the book for 12×12, I will come up with the rest of the story.

Creativity:

Creativity is often joining two disparate things together. Find a list of nouns. Print it out. Throw a dart at it. Write that word down. Then throw the dart again. Put those two words together and make a sentence.

OR play the pickle game. Also known, among other people, as Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon. My family played it as 6 degrees to a pickle.

Child 1: Watermelon

Child 2: Watermelon is something you eat and a pickle is something you eat. Score!

Child 2: Our house

Child 1: Our house has a yard with green grass. Grass is green and so are pickles. Two!

Child 1: Grandma’s old trunk.

Child 2: Grandma’s old trunk is now Mom’s. Mom likes pickles. Two!

Apparently pickles are much easier to reach than Kevin Bacon.

The POINT is that you can connect some incredibly amazing and difficult dots, if you just do it. That’s creativity.

Play date:

Give your writing self a play date. Go out to a junk store or a thrift shop or an antique store. Send yourself on a scavenger hunt. I’ll give you some things to find this first time. After that, it’s up to you.

• something yellow
• something older than your mother
• something you used to own but don’t any longer

Now that you have found those three things, how could they go into a story? Obviously it’s going to be a story set back in time a bit–or I can’t think of any way to get something older than my mother into the modern scene without it being part of the time period. Maybe you can.

Found stories:

Go to the library. Peruse the adult fiction section. Write down 5 cool titles that are not connected to anything you are already working on. Try to figure out how to put three of them together.

You can also do this online–but honestly we both need to get up off the chair/couch and move.

If you must do it from your computer, you can put in 2019 books (or some other year) and write down 5 cool titles.

I found five cool titles in the 2019 books published, before I’d gone through three scrolls.

• City of Girls
• Night Tiger
• The Last Cowboys
• Game Change
• In the Dream House

I have not read a single one of those books. I have no idea what they are actually about. That’s not the point. The point is to put them together to make a story…

They thought they were playing D&D but at the last moment, their GM said they were going to play In the Dream House. They were the last cowboys in a city of girls and they had to find and tame the night tiger–even though no one had ever seen it.

I like it already!