Exercise Your Head

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by James Scott Bell

Writers are always there, seldom here.

More often than I care to admit, my wife will say something like, “Jim? Jim, are you listening to me?” And I’ll say, “That’s an odd way to start a conversation.”

But she’s right. After nearly 40 years as a working writer, I am in the “write mode” all the livelong day.

Even when I’m not writing. I was at a Starbucks once, sitting in a nice chair, looking out the window at the parking lot. By which I mean I was working, thinking about my novel-in-progress, picturing how a scene might go, then changing it and watching it again. My blank stare moved a fellow in the chair across from me to lean over and say, “Are you all right?”

“No, I’m a writer. Pray for me.” (Is what I should have said.)

And yet, that is the part of our brain that is most precious to us, the creating part, and we need to nourish and cherish it (which is another reason to avoid the atrophy caused by overuse of you-know-what, the thing that shall not be named).

What If? + Conflict

When my kids were young they loved a show called Ghostwriter. It was a program designed to encourage kids to read and think. Imagine that!

Anyway, one of the stars of the show was a young actor named Sheldon Turnipseed, who would do a little promo by looking at the camera and saying, “Exercise your head! Read!”

I liked that. Young, developing brains need regular exercise. Writers’ brains, too. That’s why I like to brainstorm with myself, even when it only produces a light shower.

Which is why I’m always thinking with the formula What if? + Conflict.

Try it.

Let’s say you’re driving down the street and see a billboard for some sort of sunscreen. A beautiful woman in a bikini and sunglasses is lounging under a hot sun as a bronzed Adonis applies the protective glop to one of her honey-colored legs.

Apply What if? + Conflict.

What if…he’s a hitman who is supposed to kill her? What can we do with that? He’s fallen in love with her, which brings up all sorts of conflict with those who hired him. His own life may be on the line now.

What if… she’s having an affair with him? Who is she married to? Maybe the most dangerous man in Las Vegas. Or, for a more literary take, an older man she has fallen out of love with.

What if… he is rubbing her not with sunscreen, but a substance from another planet that will turn her into a half woman-half squid monster with a thirst for blood?

Heck, I’d have fun with all of these. Coming up with good ideas shouldn’t be the issue. Deciding which ideas to develop should be. (I’ll tackle that subject next week.)

For now, try this:

  1. Come up with at least 10 “What if…” scenarios by the end of the day.
  2. For each one, have a Lead character and an Opposition character in conflict.
  3. Tomorrow, choose your three favorites.

For each of these, come up with an elevator pitch.

My formula for the pitch is:

Sentence 1 is character + vocation + current situation.

Sentence 2 starts with “When” and is what I call the Doorway of No Return––the thing that pushes the Lead into the main plot.

Sentence 3 begins with “Now” and the death (physical, professional, or psychological/spiritual) stakes.

Example:

Dorothy Gale is a farm girl who dreams of getting out of Kansas to a land far, far away, where she and her dog will be safe from the likes of town busybody Miss Gulch.

When a twister hits the farm, Dorothy is transported to a land of strange creatures and at least one wicked witch who wants to kill her.

Now, with the help of three unlikely friends, Dorothy must find a way to destroy the wicked witch so the great wizard will send her back home.

Play What if? + Conflict all the time. Soon your writer’s mind will do this on a sort of automatic pilot, and you will have the pleasure of hearing conversations start with, “Hello? Are you listening to me?”

What are your favorite ways to get creative? Do you ever “space out” thinking about your WIP?

21 thoughts on “Exercise Your Head”

  2. I love those moments when everyday experiences lead you to those ‘what if’ questions and possible story ideas. I confess I get side-tracked by real life a lot, but that’s what makes those random moments even more fun.

    The best ‘exercise your brain’ for creativity time for me is when reading history. Since my preference has always been writing historical, random books you read on various historical topics are wonderful for generating ‘what if’ scenarios.

    Hope everyone has a wonderful time brainstorming those ‘what if’ scenarios this week!

  3. Good post! I like your elevator pitch formula.

    I don’t ‘get creative’ per se, because I don’t try to think of scenarios. I definitely zone out. I’ll see something, like a headline, and immediately a story pops into my mind. One of those was a few years ago in a Nebraska newspaper.“Wakefield Woman Arrested in Connection With Fraud Case.”

    Without thinking about it, I knew that a woman named Mattie in 1880 was fleeing a dangerous situation and met a sick woman on a train. After the woman died, Mattie was going to tell the would-be husband what happened, but when someone asked if the Wakefield woman had arrived, she said yes, and became that woman. The rest of the story unspooled like I was watching a movie. This is how all my stories come to me, from historical fiction to contemporary suspense.

    • I had the exact same thing happen with a news item I clipped out of newspaper (remember those?) A bizarre story about a guy who shot his wife, then drove to a freeway overpass and shot himself. His body fell to the freeway below, hit a car, and killed the driver. It kept haunting me. I finally wrote an opening chapter that began with a similar incident, having no idea where it would lead. When I finished, it struck me that this could be the narration of a protagonist, and the driver who died was his fiancee. That became the first page of my novel Try Dying. My favorite first page ever!

      • I absolutely do love that first page. Who, what, when, where, why, how, and, the last question my journalism teacher taught us to always answer, so what? The so what is your story, the reason someone would keep reading.

  4. Great stuff here, JSB!

    Here’s a what if question I constantly ask myself as I fall asleep at night: “What if I wake up tomorrow & it’s not there?”

    I haven’t come up with an answer yet.

    🫪

  5. I was looking for a setting for an opening gambit for one of my Blackthorne, Inc. novels, and found an article about how the cartels were kidnapping American engineers to build cell networks. That became the foundation for the book, not just the opening gambit. And it let me put a non-operative character into the protagonist’s role.

  6. Hubby and I were directed by the museum docent in a remote Kansas town to a place far out of town. She explained that there were some massive rock formations right out in the middle of the prairie. So hubby and I, with nothing else to do, took the dirt and gravel road to this distant site. Fifteen miles later, after several twists and turns, I turned to hubby and said, “What if . . . there really isn’t any ancient rock formation. What if the entire town is aliens and we will be sucked into a space ship while we’re out here? Or we drop into a deep crevise and our brains removed?” I went on to pontificate on several more ‘what ifs’ until hubby glanced at me with a worried frown. “You’re crazy.”
    Nope, I’m a writer.

  7. I space out all the time. Yesterday, while chatting with a friend, I was reminded of a game my mother, brother, and I used to play. She’d say, “List 5 – 10 things or animals you can find in that cloud. Two winners per round: most finds and most creative.” It was a fantastic way to get our creative juices flowing. I’ve continued to play that game my entire life but forgot its origin till yesterday.

  8. Jim, I also like newspaper headlines that set the brain a-stormin’.

    A couple of summers ago, I was driving to Flathead Lake to buy cherries. Just off the highway was a burned out house, half still standing, surrounded by hazard fence. Behind it was a cherry orchard that sloped down to the lake. The wrecked house had sat untouched for months and no one knew what had happened.

    What if… the homeowner is in debt and is accused of arson to get insurance? What if, when the ruins are being demo-ed, a body is found in the basement? What if the orchard owner is now not only suspected of arson but murder too?

    I “what-iffed” my way through the rest of the story. It became #9 in my thriller series, Fruit of the Poisonous Tree.

  9. What if…

    So fun and practical. For our book, Island of Bones, I was inspired by one of my favorite songs, J. Geils Monkey Island. The lyrics begin:

    No one could explain it
    What went on that night
    How every living thing
    Just dropped out of sight
    We watched them take the bodies
    And row them back to shore
    Nothing like that ever
    Happened here before.

    I couldn’t get that out of my head. So I asked myself, what if Louis found the skull of a baby washed up on the beach after a hurricane?

    The rest is….a book.

  11. Every afternoon at three, an American Airlines plane lands about 3 miles from me. I see the plane go over the small space in the trees. And every day a what if question comes up.
    What if an assassin is waiting for one of the passengers. What if the pilot has suicidal thoughts… What if the plane skids off the runway?
    It’s a great exercise! Great post.

    • I lived about 15 miles from Hartsfield-Jackson Airport here in Atlanta, under one of the three runway approaches, for about thirty years and used to wonder who (if) anyone was looking down at me at the same time I was looking up at them… did our eyes lock?
      What if they did?
      Would I see them somewhere around town while they were visiting or back at home, and know it was them?
      How?
      Where?
      What next?
      Added to this is my dad was an airline pilot and how many times had he taken off or landed over this same old house, and my bride’s family who’d lived there since before airplanes looked up and “seen” him before meeting him…
      What if… what if… what if…

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