The weekend is almost here, folks. Hopefully you are gearing up for a long weekend of working on your projects.
After the house work is done and the lawn is mowed, you can sit back, relax and write a lot of words.
In the mean time, we have a lot of work to do. Still over 36 hours until we officially reach the weekend. We must keep our brains occupied.
Call me a bit of an odd duck. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life. Workaholic, for example, or king of never ending projects, and much much more (many of them a lot worse).
To escape writing, I often turn to writing. I know it sounds weird. I do client writing, website writing, novel and screenplay writing and so much more. When I get tired of writing one style, I switch to another. I’ve even been known to write out over half a million words in a single month.
I don’t get out much.
The point is, we all have other interests. If you think about it, though, it all comes back to writing. Why else would you be here?
Whatever you have going on in your daily life, you can use it for writing. Everything is an example. Each activity is a new lesson or knowledge for a story.
When you learn to think like a writer, it all falls into place.
You don’t even need to think about your current project. Character development, for example, can lead to new characters or future stories. You can have an experience today that leads to a new plot tomorrow.
While it can get overwhelming, let’s take our experiences and learn how to transform them into future ideas.
May 06
Write down everything you can remember from this past week that you took part in. From meetings, to dinner. If it happened and you were physically present, make a note of it. Then, pick two things and create two new characters and one new story line.
Learning to use your normal, everyday life for your writing is a great skill to have.
It is so simple, too. Just take a look at what you already do. You can become your own character.
Real-life situations are relatable. And, as we have discussed many times before, relatable equals reader engagement.
So think about your past week. What did you do that seems mundane? How can you craft it into a new plot or story line?
Maybe that Zoom meeting had a momentary glitch? That really happens. But we, as writers can then take it a step further and make that glitch only happen on one computer, and that viewer (your new MC) sees an alien transmission.
Give it a try. Using your notes from what you did this week, sit back and think about the people involved. Come up with two new characters that you can use in a future story.
Then pick a situation from your notes and come up with a new raw idea about a future story.
See how it goes. You can always share your ideas with us here. Or you can post a comment to let us know how you like to use your every day life to come up with new story elements.
