Photo & Genre #4: Three photos, Infinite genres

Combining this week's Photo & Genre prompts (because yesterday was more of an adventure in klutziness than a prompt) today I'd like you to do three things.

First, choose one of these photos.

(Click on each photo to see it bigger or view it at the photographer's website.)

Second, decide on the genre that the photo best represents. For example, that first one looks like romance to me, but it might appear to be sci fi to someone else.

Last, choose an entirely different genre. If you thought the photo definitely showed romance, choose mystery or maybe western. Write a story from the photo you chose using that other genre, so you're putting two things together that didn't seem to fit. Sometimes I find the ideas that clash the most are the ones that inspire me best.

Let me know if this one does anything for you.

I'm currently devising a contest for anyone who's used any of my prompts throughout November. Details to come!

Impromptu prompt (ha) #1: Inspired by real life

Something a bit different today. Here's the scenario.

You're making yourself breakfast, trying to start the day right. You also brew yourself a lovely big pot of green tea with grapefruit. As you pick up the teapot and a mug, they click together innocently. The teapot explodes.

You end up with a kitchen full of glass shards, an arm steaming with boiling tea (also clinging to your sweater,) trousers covered in boiling tea, and a hand lacerated in three places, bleeding profusely.

See what you can do with that. If you'll excuse me, I'll be in the corner whimpering.

Field trip #4: Cemetery

This is it: week 4. This is when the threads are supposed to start coming together. The characters and their wacky comments are supposed to begin making sense. And there's a beautiful downhill stretch to 50,000 words.

...Usually. I admit I haven't found my joy yet. I keep bashing out words like a trainee blacksmith and they aren't exactly turning into Excalibur. (Count 'em: two metaphors in this post already so far.) But the end is nigh, folks, and when it's finished all that effort in hindsight will feel amazing.

We need one more field trip to wake up our minds and inspire us for the final countdown. So where are we going today?

Maybe the zombies of late October have long been banished from your mind, and maybe you don't like spooks and ghoulies anyway. That doesn't matter. Cemeteries exist here in the skeptical real world, too. In cemeteries families come together, because they've been torn apart. There rest generations that have come before us, and as Shakespeare says, "all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death." Death is inevitable. That might be a tragedy, or it might--after a long, good life with those who love us--be finally a relief. A cemetery represents certainty, fear, relief, regret, and all manner of other things we have to face because we're human.

But it isn't all intensity and gloom. There are all the people who work in cemeteries, and go there often without a fuss: grave diggers, gardeners, researchers, tour guides, planners, people whose job it is to make sure the tombstones don't topple on the living (whatever they're called...)

And then there are the famous elephant burial grounds. I'm jealous if you live close enough to one of those to visit, but it's something to think about, either way.

So off you go. Let me know if you end up battling the undead, or meeting your long-lost-brother-in-law.

Setting #3: Cruise ship

So where are we this week? In life, I'm bundled up in a wool sweater looking out at a November that keeps getting colder. So in our scene...

...we're on a cruise ship. It's one of the really big ones, The Queen Somethingorother and it's out in the South Pacific somewhere far from land. The sea is sapphire and the sky is a great stretch of azure so you feel like the whole universe is blue. Except the ship, of course. It's brilliant white. Up on deck there's a pool (because you need a pool on a boat, right?) and inside there's a ballroom with a shiny black grand piano. There's a carved wood staircase from one deck to the other, with a crystal chandelier--very Titanic, but no icebergs in this ocean. Just all of us and the ship, a floating city, full of all kinds of people you'd never get to know elsewhere.

And something very interesting is happening on this ship. Maybe it's planned, and maybe not. Maybe it's ominous, or very romantic. Anything could happen here. You tell me.

Genre #3: Erotica

Turn the lights down for a minute. Light a candle, or let your eyes adjust to the velvet darkness. Listen to your breath. And--

Am I embarrassing you? I know, you probably don't want to write erotica. Unless you already do, in which case: what do you care? But if you're like me, you'd rather write shlock for The Daily Mail than try to create a great sex scene that exists for its own enjoyment rather than a plot device.

Erotica takes incredible skill. It's not meant to be a pornographic slap to the face. *ahem* It's supposed to be a caress. Trying to bring that kind of intimacy to life in a reader's mind without alienating or making them uncomfortable is a huge amount of work, and a gamble. People feel vulnerable reading it, let alone writing it. And hey, maybe you just plain don't like it. Well, tough. Today you should give it a go. I've even given you an excuse. You might surprise yourself.

Just remember: it's not the length of the scene you write, it's how you use it.

Photo by Alex Gibson, available on flickr

Photo #3: Khariton

Female soldier in the Russo-Japanese War, 2 hours from her death.

Click the photo for more information.

Reunion #3: Stefan

My last two adoptable character sketches went over really well, but there seemed to be a general suspicion expressed about my ability to create a more cuddly character. Suspect no more! I promised cuddly, and by golly gosh I'll deliver.

Okay, wait. I'm thinking.

Er...

So here's Stefan. He's one of the good guys. He's over-tall, too thin, the kind of person you'd brush by in a crowd without realizing you'd hit him because you thought he was a wall. Or part of the furniture. He wouldn't really mind. He's got a logical mind and he always wanted to be something useful when he grew up, like a lawyer. He fantasized about being the kind of lawyer who'd take on impossible cases because the clients were so lovely. But let's face it, that won't happen, because he's too damn nice to survive law school.

He went to boarding school as a teenager. Not because he had to, but because his brother had to and he didn't want to leave the guy alone. And there Stefan did something that good guys tend to do: he fell in love with a wonderful girl who thought he was just all right. When his brother died--murdered, in fact--the girl lashed out and blamed Stefan. He understood she needed someone to blame and acted the martyr. She happily crucified him, and they'll never get together. But at least he stayed true to his heart, right?

In my mind, the thing about a great character is that they're only great because they don't let the world destroy them. I don't want to write about a cuddly person who's never been tested. Stefan has definitely been tested.

But you won't hear much about it. He doesn't like to complain.

Field trip #3: A museum

How was your weekend? Mine was up and down. Or rather, down and up. I wrote 58 words on Saturday and 3700 on Sunday, thus proving that a terrible writing day is not the end of the world.

Today's field trip is a little bit trickier. It's a place I don't go every day, or even every month, despite living in one of the most culturally rich cities in the world, where the admission to these places is usually zero.

Museums. There are armies of wonderful people in the world whose job and passion is to preserve all sorts of amazing historical things for that moment when we want to take a look. And they work in museums (or libraries, but that's another post.)

One of my favourite parts of any museum is The Vault in London's Natural History Museum. On the second floor, down a long corridor, through an enormous room full of low display cases peppered with rock, there's a tiny room behind a very big door. Here they put all the most precious stones that have been donated. I adore it. Almost no one makes their way down there, so it's usually quiet. There's one display with almost three hundred diamonds that change colour in UV light. There's a slice of meteorite. There's stardust in a vial.

Don't tell all your friends or it won't be quiet there anymore.

So our field trip is to a museum. There's one almost anywhere you live, whether you've made it there or not. I encourage you to go, because not only are there all kinds of people there with you, but there's all that fabulous stuff from years ago, from other places, other cultures, other religions. Each object had one role back in its day, a purpose for which it was created, and now it has another: to remind us of who we used to be. To act as a hint of another world that used to exist right here beneath our feet. If you can't find a story in that, you aren't looking.

Setting #2: The pub basement

For today's setting prompt I'm going to give you a piece of my life. That is, I'm going to give you where I was last night.

It's a pub in nearly-central London, about two streets away from Liverpool Station. There's an old fashioned style sign hanging above the door, but it's obviously not actually old. The paint is practically still wet. Inside the pub it's rammed, with businesspeople and groups of friends and sullen bartenders who'd rather be elsewhere. This is a standard London pub, but our setting is one floor down, in the basement.

This is also set up to be part of the pub, but it's inexplicably cut off from the rest of the building. There's a fully stocked bar, and tables and chairs exactly like the ones upstairs. Everything is that alcohol-cured dark wood, only slightly sticky to the touch, even the walls. It smells faintly of stale beer and polish. The lights are a bit dim. But no one is down here. No one drinking, no one serving. Upstairs is heaving, ready to explode with people who'd love a chance at a little more personal space, but down here it's barren.

Why? Is it haunted? Cursed? A time paradox? Is there some kind of private meeting being held? A surprise party, ready to jump out? Has the weekend manager lost the key? I don't know. But that's where we are. Tell me what you make of it.

Genre #2: Science Fiction

Yesterday I had one of those days when I wrote a few words, said, "I'll come back to this later," and then didn't. Welcome to the second week of NaNoWriMo, when writing seems like a little more work than usual.

But we trudge onwards. Because even the days when we wrote a few words are better than the days when we wrote nothing at all.

The only way I can connect this to the genre prompt for today is to say, You think you have it rough? Think of the sci fi writers. Now they have it rough.

Science fiction come with massive stigmas attached, including the fabulous stereotype of a fat man still living with his mother. It may be difficult to tell someone, "I'm a writer." It's that much more difficult to tell them, "I write science fiction." Wait for the glazed expression and the tiny step backwards.

Well, screw 'em. I love science fiction, and I'm a skinny woman who does not live with her mother. I rarely write it, though, so it'll be a challenge for me to write a sci fi story this month. If you're writing a full novel that has nothing to do with science fiction, you could either do the same as we did for Mysteries--that is, think of a science fiction story you love and consider why you love it, and add that to your novel--or you could have even more fun and investigate tropes.

Tropes are "devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations." They aren't cliches, they're simply common elements that are universally understood. They're much more interesting than cliches. And science fiction has some of the very best.

Aliens who inexplicably speak English. Alternate realities. The monster of the week. The end of an age. Precursors. Space pirates. Mechanical lifeforms. Time standing still. Things that burst out of your chest. And one of my personal favourites, the Mulder Moment.

Take any one of these and you have an element you can add to your novel, any kind of novel (well, maybe the aliens need a certain setting, but you know) and readers will buy it. Take a look at the rest of TVTropes.org for a lot more fun, too, but I warn you not to spend too long there. That site is dangerous and should be enjoyed in small doses, because in real life time does not stand still. And when you aren't writing, it moves faster. Honest.

Photo #2: Aisle

Are you ready?

Is your character?

Reunion #2: Jane

My adoptable character sketch today is of a woman who will tell you her name is Jane Smith. That isn't her real name.

When Jane was seventeen she was already helping her older brother steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from various institutions: some corporate, some federal. All of them unhappy about it. Her brother wasn't smart enough to hack these places but Jane was. And even though it was technically his fault--she was seventeen, for god's sake--when they got caught, she took the fall. The trouble was, she was too valuable. Rather than incarcerate her, Jane was traded from government to government, performing their own "illegal necessities."

She's beautiful enough to befuddle most men, and many women. Smart enough always have her own game going on beneath what she's allowed. Yet she lacks the confidence to fight her way free. Jane was promised that if she cooperated she'd be released from service in ten years. But the chances of that are pretty slim, and she knows it.

I don't think Jane will ever get a truly happy ending, or an ending without a lot of loose ends. But maybe someone can figure out where she goes next. If you're interested, however, let me advise you to keep your guard up. Don't take your eye off her or who knows what she'll do to your story.

I won't be held responsible.

Field trip #2: Public transit

I hope everyone's weekend was productive. I hope that sometime this week you wrote, sometime you felt good about your writing, and sometime you left your keyboard and home/office and got out into the world to wake up and seek new ideas.

On that note, we arrive at the second field trip for this month. I'm excited about this one because it has movement, it has personality, and it has conflict in the form of regular labour strikes. Yes, I'm talking about public transit. Our second field trip is to a station (train station, bus station) or, if you're feeling confident, it's to the transit vehicles themselves: the train, the tube, the bus, the tram--anything where the words "Maximum Capacity" are considered only a guideline during every rush hour.

Depending on where you live, public transit can be a home away from home (like it or not.) Depending on which shuttle you get, you might run into a friend or get stuck with a dozen strangers. Ever been on a bus in the rain, when the whole thing fogs up so it's like you're standing in a small room with a hundred people? Ever been on the Eurostar when the snow is too fluffy and ended up spending Christmas in a tunnel? In Northern BC there's a bus for people who are too sick to drive themselves to the hospital 700km away. I bet that bus has a few stories.

You meet a different sort of person when travelling from London to Edinburgh in a First Class carriage than you do when travelling to Aberdeen stuffed in the Megabus. You also encounter a different sort of person on the SkyTrain out to Surrey Central than on the Canada Line to YVR. I personally once received a little scrap of paper with a badly written proposition from a pervent in the seat ahead of me during a Greyhound trip from Victoria to Nanaimo. And then there's everyone who works in King's Cross or Grand Central, and the drivers with their shift work (and the strikes! How could you forget the strikes?) and the same commuter who wears an Armani suit at 8am but stumbles home at midnight, possibly vomiting onto the track. Ah, the stories those tracks could tell!

Now you get to tell those stories. Have fun!

Setting #1: The beach house

There's been a commotion about some people's perception of NaNoWriMo. Rather than rehash it and kill any inspiration for today, I just want to say: Let's remember why we're writing. Why we have to write. Got it? Now, does anyone else's perception matter? No? Great. Let's move on.

My first setting prompt has been in my mind for more than a year. It was going to be the setting of last year's NaNoWriMo, and then it wasn't. And it refuses to fade. It's a beach house.

The beach is long and mostly empty, with pale brown sand that stretches back to low hills that are bitten by the waves at high tide. The sand is fine but cold, it never dries, and the sky is a blue-grey reach that doesn't promise a lot of warmth either. The water is a darker shade, choppy, and there are no animals that you can see. Scrubby grass, whiplike and tough, grows up from the hills furthest from the ocean. And settled badly onto a flat is an ill-planned stone house. Parts of it are crumbling down the hillside--at least one half of the house is unlivable. But the other half has been patched together with boards and cement, cobbled into a secure few rooms huddled around one central living area, its massive fireplace a testament to the palace it was trying to be.

I know what's going on in this house in my story. What about in yours?

Genre #1: Mystery

It had to be #1. I love mysteries because they're great nestled in any other genre. A mystery can underly almost any type of story, in any setting, with any kind of character. But to actually write a classic mystery story, with a traditional sleuth of some kind, a villain, and a big reveal, is something that takes special skill. You have to keep your readers guessing, and also convince them at the end that they could have figured it out all along.

This is pretty harsh for a writing prompt. If you're writing short stories it's easy to say, "Now write a mystery." But some of you are writing novels so here's what I propose. Think of a mystery that you love. There must be one, whether you adore the original Sherlock Holmes detective stories, or if you simply thought that Bella was right to wonder about Edward's complexion for so long. I'm going to choose a thread from Kate Atkinson's One Good Turn.

Take that mystery that you loved and think to yourself: why did I love it? What was it that made me remember it? Was it the big reveal at the end? The slow reveal throughout? The hero who solved it, or if no hero solved it, was it the characters playing against each other? The villain who tried to keep everything a secret and failed?

Then write. Maybe you'll put whatever you loved about that mystery into your own work, or maybe not. Maybe you'll give it a twist--I love a good twist--or maybe you'll describe a character so paranoid they believe that everything is a mystery even when nothing's unknown. Whatever you like. But keep mystery in mind.

Photo #1: Protestant

I'm glad Henri was enjoyed yesterday! He's satisfied with the response and off drinking thick black coffee in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. I'll have to find an equally odd character for next week's reunion.

Today is the first photo prompt. So in the absence of 1000 words, here it is:

Whether you're using this as a writing prompt or not, try to guess which keyword I used to find it on flickr. It's just one word, and it's a necessary part of every story.

If you're looking for more photo prompts, Icy Sedgwick has been posting them each Monday and some of hers are stunning.

Photo is Protestant by Phelim Hoey on flickr

Reunion #1: Henri

It's Day 2, and if you had a rough day yesterday, it really doesn't matter. I didn't start my first NaNoWriMo novel until November 5th of that year. And if you can get yourself going, playing a little bit of catch-up can be a great rush.

So today I'm posting my first adoptable character sketch. I'd like to introduce you to Henri. He is a character from the spy novels I wrote a few years ago. Yes, I wrote spy novels.

Henri is not very attractive. He's not unattractive, but he's... odd looking. You might be more interested in gawking at him than admiring him. But he knows that. He's all right with it.

He was born in New Orleans and grew up among tattoo artists where he got an appreciation for that art. When he left the United Stations he settled in London, England, and helped run a gallery until the curator left and he took over in full. The first thing he did was install a huge Pegasus statue outside the gallery building, and challenges anyone who thinks its gaudy to consider their definition of art.

For a while he attended a group for recovering kleptomaniacs, but soon realized that he was the odd person out (again) because his kleptomania only applied to one particular person's belongings.

He has never exhibited any tremendous sexual desire, but this is not because he's asexual. I think if he did it could be very powerful indeed.

So that's my dear Henri. You don't have to take him whole, or even in part, but I hope whatever you're writing today gives you satisfaction. Henri just hopes you don't libel him too much.

Field trip #1: Grocery store

Good morning, and happy November 1st! Did you stay up until midnight last night to begin writing? Did you think about it, like me, then head to bed for sleep instead, like me, then wake up and realize that you didn't even have coffee and had to head out to buy some at 7am... like me?

In any case, today is Day 1 of NaNoWriMo and as promised here is my first prompt. It's a field trip. It doesn't have to be done today, but whenever you need to clear your head of (Halloween) cobwebs.

Our field trip this week is to a grocery store.

This is an easy one. You're likely to go there sometime this week. And you know what? So is almost everyone else. Everyone has to eat. You can see all kinds of people in a grocery store, friendly and rude, young and old, all races, all heights, all kinds of dress sense (or nonsense.) What are they buying? What would they never buy?

When I was there this morning seeking coffee I was amazed by how much selection there was, yet I couldn't find anything on my list. It wasn't my regular store, so this was a problem. What about someone who only shops in the same store their entire life? What would happen if suddenly that shop changed the layout, or the supplier?

When I was a kid I read a great book called The Toothpaste Genie, where a girl found a very old, weird tube of toothpaste that contained... well, I won't ruin it. But I'm sure there are a bunch of other things like that to be found behind the regular stock. Not to mention the strangeness of the regular stock, anyway, imported from all around the world, with all its different stories.

I'm off to write. Good luck, and enjoy!