October Novel Prep Challenge

Freestyle brainstorming can be a powerful way to organize the ideas you already have and generate new ones that fit within the scope of your story. You are welcome to use any method you choose, whether you prefer to brain-dump your thoughts into a bullet-point list or paragraph form, or you prefer visual brainstorming methods like the mind-mapping technique, or, you prefer one of my favorite brainstorming methods, bouncing ideas around with a buddy.

We're all on the same team here, and we're all working on the same assignments. You won't find a group of people more uniquely qualified, in this very moment, to help you past your hurdles. Sometimes you get mired in the details, and all you need is a fresh perspective.

I tried posting two poll questions in scroll this evening about my plot without elaborating on the details, in an attempt to randomly choose which direction my story would go:

1. Was Molly accepted or shunned by the witches?
2. Did Quiver and Midge actually fall in love or was the coupling only experimental?

Naturally, everyone was too curious to settle for generic questions, so I had to elaborate. Once I explained that Quiver was a druid and Midge a witch, and that Quiver seduced her to experiment with the breeding potential between two species, and that Molly was the child born of the experiment, the ideas began to flow. By the time the conversation ended, I not only had the answers to my questions, but new questions had answers, too. And I discovered a fun fact about Molly, who is one of my protagonists: she knows how to use magic, which is fascinating to me, because she's been hiding it for a long time. Molly first appeared as a cameo in a novel I wrote in 2008, and over the years, she has grown more prominent. In all this time, I never suspected that she was not only capable of magic, but trained in it, too. She's been holding out on me.

Sometimes our characters hide secrets from us. Sometimes, brainstorming with a buddy (or several buddies) is the best way to unearth their secrets.

I've seen great conversations bouncing around in the forum, in scroll, and many participants have mentioned holding private discussions with buddies to iron out characters, plot, and setting. If you don't already have someone to bounce ideas with, it's not too late to find one.