Story Idea Generators

While The Shadow Scribe is out on query, I need to move on and keep writing. I know I should start the next Big One, but I just can't bring myself to do it yet. I started a long post on why that is, but it was too heavy for a Tuesday, so we'll save it for another day.

Instead, I'm moving on to some short stories. I am lucky to have a relationship with a weekly British woman's magazine that publishes short stories. Woman's Weekly have published two of my stories (2006, 2009) and part one of my first serial will hit the newsstand next week (serials run 3-4 parts of 3800 words each). (If you want to see some excerpts, head on over to my website.) WW recently OK'd another serial idea  so I just sent the first part for their approval. As I wait for word from the editor (yes, one more reason to refresh my inbox 30 times an hour), I need something quick to distract me.

But the question is "Where to Start?" Most of my short story ideas just come out of the blue but sometimes, like this week, I needed a jumping off point. When that happens, I turn to a story idea generator. At first, I was skeptical of the generators, which randomly pair up character, conflict and setting. Some go as far as adding themes, beginnings and endings. Results can be cliched, strange, or just plain nonsense. But for me, the results make me think.

A few months back, I used Cally Taylor's short story generator and it gave me: a business man, a playground, regains consciousness. Naturally that begs the question of what a businessman is doing in a playground. A pedofile? A devoted father? A developer looking at tearing it down and building condos? After musing on that for a moment, the idea for "Know Thyself," my first three part serial was born.

This weekend, I turned to the Seventh Sanctum Quick Story Idea generator. While some of these combinations were way too out there for me (lighthearted tragedy about an unbalanced princess?), I kept seeing the character of "ethical smuggler." It gave me a story idea - hopefully perfect for a 2000 word short for the magazine - that will be my project for the next few days.

The nice thing about short stories is that they give more immediate gratification. I know I won't be editing my story for months at a time. I know that if the magazine rejects it, I've only wasted a few days, not years of my life. And they pay. So I get to feel like my writing is contributing a little to my family.

And you? Have you used any story generators or writing prompt sites, whether for novel ideas or short stories? Do you ever distract yourself from your WIP by writing shorter works?

Writing is ruining my Reading

Too much knowledge can be a bad thing.

When I started college, I was in Television/Radio, which means that I know all those things that go on behind the camera and off-set. It ruined the way I watched TV.

When I got my culinary degree, I had to be Food Safety Certified. The way they train you is by grossing you out with all kinds of heinous videos showing chefs spitting in food, or cooking without handwashing after using the bathroom, or -- the worst -- waiters pi&&ing in the soup. It ruined the way I ate in restaurants.

As a food scientist, I know in great detail what that list of ingredients on the side of a package means. It ruined the way I shopped and prepared dinner for my family.

And now that I have written and revised and revised and betad and revised and revised, I know all those little quirks and grammar don'ts and pitfalls of writing. And it is ruining the way I read.

I recently finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I thought the story was intriguing, but as I read, I was bothered by the passive voice, the backstory dumps, the telling not showing. Some of this, I will chalk up to it being a translation and I think there is only some much leeway the translator has. But at one point, I caught myself thinking "Enough with the sandwiches!" because there were probably about 30 references to the MC eating sandwiches (one of my betas said something similar about my MC drinking too much tea).

For the past six months, I have had a real problem reading books without being extremely critical of the writing. In the past three months, I have given up on about six books, which is way out of the ordinary for me. I don't know if it just the books I have chosen recently or if it is because I am hyper-sensitive.

Any thoughts on this? Are you a more critical reader if you are revising or writing?

And on a side (and very late) note, KarenG, I have a $5 Starbucks gift card for you! If you send your address to the email  in my profile, I'll mail it to you. Thanks to you and to the others who indulged me and commented on my writing analogies.

Baking Blogfest

I'm taking part in Charity Bradford's Baking Blogfest. Since my MC in THE SHADOW SCRIBE is a recipe developer (and so am I - see this post on how recipe development works), this is right up my alley. Here's a scene where Lara is working on a project, preparing recipes and photographs to appear on the back of a cake mix package.

     Once again talking to myself, I brainstormed a few quick ideas. “One stir-in recipe…maybe almonds and coconut. Bar cookies…a variation on millionaire’s shortbread? Something healthy, maybe with fruit?”
     After translating the ideas into rough recipes, I gathered the ingredients for the first recipe and turned on the voice recognition software, setting the laptop off to the side of the work area where it wouldn’t be splashed by anything.
     “One box cake mix, a half-cup chopped toasted almonds, a half-cup shredded coconut, two tablespoons vegetable oil, a quarter-cup water...”
     “You say something, love?”
     “Oh!” I jumped a foot and splashed water down my front. My lack of sleep made me very twitchy. The plumber stood in the doorway.
     “No, sorry, I was working,” I explained, gesturing at the laptop.
     “Right, sorry about that,” he said and walked off toward the front door, avoiding Mike coming in with the wheelbarrow. I closed the door and then went over to the laptop to delete the last exchange from the screen.
     Four hours later, the smell of chocolate filled the kitchen and dirty bowls and desserts of varying degrees of edibility covered the counters. The coconut almond cake was delicious, the bar cookies tasty but too sticky, and the so-called healthy recipe with raisins and bran cereal was disgusting. Recipe development was not a job with immediate gratification. Some projects – like this one – took me five, ten, even twenty tries to get the recipe perfect. The bedroom, my makeshift studio for the day, was in an even worse state. Plates of mauled and mangled food were everywhere, the victims of my attempts for visual culinary perfection. My hero – the food actually photographed – still sat beneath the lights getting dry and stale, looking less than appetizing.

I've done recipe development for baking and for culinary applications, but my true love is baking. When I was in culinary school, our instructor said to the class on the first day, "Some of you are chefs and some of you are bakers. Here, you will do both, but you will find you are drawn to one side or another." And I found that to be true, both for myself and the other students in my class. Why the difference, you might ask?

Cooking is on the fly, meaning that for the most part, you can change and adapt as you go on. You taste, you adjust, you immediately taste again. Many chefs don't use recipes, but go by instinct and feel. Or they start with a recipe and immediately change course to make it even better.

Baking is precision. Consider this: cookies, cakes, and pastries are all made from the same basic ingredients. Flour, sugar, butter, eggs, raising agents. But you change the proportions and you get a totally different result. If you don't balance your recipe perfectly, you do not get the results you expect. And you usually have to wait for some time to find that out (an hour or so for it to bake).

UH-OH! Analogy alert! You could compare this to the difference between pantsers and plotters, right?

Which are you -- a baker or a chef?