Creativity Exercise: Bradbury's List of Nouns

After listening to Scriptnotes episode 321: Getting Stuff Written with John August and special guest Grant Faulkner, the executive director of National Novel Writer Month (NaNiWriMo) and author of the new book Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo.

One exercise he describes on the podcast and in the book is Ray Bradbury's List of Nouns. Bradbury would write a list of 20 nouns and then write short essays, 100 to 200 words, about each word he called 'pensays'. This would warm him up and get him writing stories that he would later become famous for in his career. 

My adaptation of this exercise is to write the 20 nouns, then pick one and write a short paragraph story that involves that noun in some way. For example, in my list I wrote the word FLOOR. Within seconds a story popped into my head that I wrote down. 

    Gina was standing in the center of atrium watching the other students gather into their groups, carry their lunches into the cafeteria or linger before the bell rang. Under her foot a crack appeared in the floor out of no where with no warning of a rumbling or shaking. The crack split into more cracks and those cracks split into more cracks until there were enough cracks that the whole floor started to fall away and all that was left was a deep black hole. The other students began to scream, the ones at the edges ran for cover, but it happened so fast those in the middle didn't have time to run, so as the floor fell away so did they. Girls reached out for the strong arms of boys, but they couldn't hang on and slipped away, the boys too falling in after them as the more and more of the floor broke away or struggling to pull them up led to them being pulled in themselves. Gina stood on the edge watching the horror take place. Feeling helpless, feeling scared a voice broke through the panicked room. Kurt from homeroom reached out his hand begging for Gina to grab on while wrapping his other arm around a pillar holding the ceiling from the floor. The breaking glass from the library windows shattered as the dissolving floor continued to consume the school. Gina turned and threw out her arm making contact palm to palm with Kurt just as the floor caved in the total weight of her body shot straight down and her hand slipped out from Kurt's grip. Gina watched as everything faded away, the bright vibrant colors of reflected from the sun's yellow rays stretched farther and farther away until the high-pitched voices of terror were silent and all around her the landscape was darker than that of the deepest sleep.

Of course you can adapt this exercise to fit whatever creative endeavor you enjoy, whether it be writing, photography, painting, drawing, music, film, programming, sculpting, etc. A list of nouns can help you find inspiration in the most common or weirdest of places. Whatever it is you do create please feel free to share with me your stories, photos and art of all kinds. 

Thank you and happy creating!

Stranger Things (2016) and the Future of Stories

Anyone who grew up in the 1980's can probably name every movie, TV or book that fuels that itch in your brain that says, 'Wait, I've seen this, no maybe not.', in the Duffer brothers series for Netflix Stranger Things. Teens or young adults too may recognize some of the influences due to the remakes of many of the influential media in this reboot culture, or because it feels like it was produced by J.J. Abrahams. The thing to remember when we watch Stranger Things is that it is neither a reboot, a remake or even a wannabe, it's influenced.

Everything in the show feels like something we've seen before, the telekinetic girl, the Dungeons and Dragons playing boys, the parallel universe, the sadistic scientist and his government funded fringe science laboratory. It squishes all these familiar elements into a fresh new package, even though the comparison pitch for this show would be: it's like Super 8 meets Twin Peaks, a Stephen King novel meets Goonies, Freaks and Geeks meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Breakfast Club meets Lovecraft. Even the opening credits was like an NWR film, that's Nicolas Winding Refn for anyone who hasn't seen The Neon Demon, with the bright neon colors and low thumping electronic theme song. Is smashing all these influences together a bad thing? No, I don't think so.

They don't hide this fact. They come out and say it upfront that it is an homage to 80's pop thrillers and is inspired by the plethora of media formally mentioned. Is our willingness to call foul on everything that comes out make it necessary for them to say this or is it necessary to inform viewers who weren't born in the 80's that they aren't plagiarizing the works of others because they didn't put that remake branding stamp on it? Will everything that we create from now on that feels familiar in any way need a footnote to the media or ideas that influenced it? Anyone reading a philosophy book written in the last twenty years might say 'yes' because Plato's thoughts on death have to be referenced along side every other philosopher's idea on death before the modern day philosopher can give his philosophy on the subject that includes centuries of scientific data supporting a new more up to date version of the idea. So how does anyone ever have a truly original idea anymore?

At the GenCon convention's 2016 Writers Symposium, they held a panel asking that same question on Creating Truly New Ideas. What did we discover from our inquiry, are there truly new ideas? No, not really. Why?  The fact is there are only six basic emotional arcs of storytelling. You can read about those here. In short a group of computer scientists fed a computer 1,700 stories then data mined the most common emotional arcs and found six. One day, in the hopefully not so far future, we will be able to link our brains to computers to stimulate our emotional senses using one of the six basic arcs instead of having to read or watch the story itself to experience it. 

Of course there are more emotional story arcs than that, but there is a consensus that a lot of ideas have been done before and a lot of plots are being reused over and over. John August and Craig Mazin, two hollywood screenwriters who talk about the business of writing scripts on their podcast Scriptnotes, discussed this very question on their show. In response to the low number of six emotional arcs Mr. Mazin remarked, "the story may be known, but how the characters react in their surroundings can be new."

The character's are never the same. They live in different communities. They grow up or have grown up in different circumstances. They make different decisions just like I do and you do. That's why you yell at the girl in the horror movie to 'run' and scream curse words when she doesn't or does run, but in the wrong direction. That's why when a movie like You're Next comes along it's so refreshing, a girl in a typical horror movie situation doesn't lay down and take it or cries about it, she fights back. Hell yeah!

The communities themselves can be different enough to put a new coat of paint on something we've seen before. Hawkins, Indiana is not so different from Chippewa, Michigan, but contain details that are specific to the community of the characters that determines their culture and influence their choices. Most religions or cultures have a flood story, but not all stories are the same. They are different between cultures and communities because of the power of myth, hero worship and ancient aliens. We look for those differences to explore how something already told can be told again and influence a new generation of people.

That's why I like Stranger Things. Instead of just making something we've seen before or making something we haven't seen but slap a brand name on it, Ghostbusters, they take everything we love and breath new life into it. You could call it derivative, but I think Stranger Things does something we should start doing more of and that is to make more things created on influences. Then it will be awesome to watch the next generation of shows and movies that have been influenced by this generations shows and movies. Everything continuing to build on top of each other, until it all comes crashing down and we have to start building all over again, those lucky bastards.