Oct
26
Brainstorming – Creative Writing
One thing I understand about learning is that there are different ways to approach a problem. Planning for creative writing is always a good idea, as such enables the brain to follow a prepared path to pursue one’s imaginations. Planning creatively is also a good idea, and one way to achieve this practice is to pursue several paths of thought before choosing one to pursue, as is presented below.
Indeed, the quick story outlines below present a result subsequent to three certain activities, including: studying the metalanguage and skills for creative writing; evaluating the anthology of 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories (no, that’s not a mistake – this collection presents short short stories!); and practise upon the Guildford Divergent Thinking test. For a word document version of much better presentation and formatting than what is shown here email me at [email protected].
7 Future Stories…
1. The first is about a guy whose wife has finally chosen to leave him. She does so because he has spent 12 months ranting madly about the nature of a light in the sky he saw the year before, a light that physically blinded him. For a year he has neglected everything to pursue an obsession to identify an alien influence, whilst his wife has had to care for him in his newly handicapped state. The story is set on the occasion when finally, she has had enough. The twist is that his blindness is then immediately “cured”.
2. The second is an account of a specialist spacecraft on assignment, and a journalist has come on board to interview the crew. The craft is specially armoured to protect it from a rare form of cosmic radiation – it delivers a physical catalyst to a certain kind of solar system that changes the composition of the elements in the system, and thus allows other crafts to mine the resources of the star. This is a kind of “Moby Dick” story, where the captain (but not the crew) fails to see that he has ensured his own destruction through his success – such cosmic events are rare, even exhausted, but the captain won’t stop. The narration is a mix of the interviews between the journalist and the crew, and… the article perhaps? No, maybe the private musings of the journalist in third person would work much better.
3. In this story a mirror-shaded cyberpunk mercenary is infamous for his composed statue-like awareness, and having “eyes on the back of his head”. His enemies ambush him, and at the climax of the tale one successfully plunges a knife into the back of his neck and thus disproves the rumour. Fortunately in the conclusion, we learn that the mercenary wears an armoured collar. I would set the story in a crowded futuristic bar/cafe, and look to William Gibson’s fiction and the documentary by Michio for inspiration in the descriptions of technology and culture.
4. The fourth story is about a visit to a doctor in the future. The doctor has a challenging view about the sanctity of the human body, and convinces his patient to replace many of his own failing parts. Unfortunately the doctor is not to be trusted – once he has a signed consent form he unethically enacts the legal disclaimer to life and harvests the patient’s corpse! The comfort initially achieved through descriptions of the ultra-modern context is thus reversed “with a twist of the bloody knife”.
5. An adventure into the past through virtual reality, where the enthusiastic student learns a true lesson. Hmmm… Troy, Pompeii, Hiroshima… I’m not sure. The interaction between the student’s avatar and his virtual mentor will be the locus for the moral – the AI will react differently to the student, and perhaps prove more “human”. Maybe the AI will look upon the virtual children and his living student with the same respect for being, and try to encourage his student to think along the same lines?
6. 100 year potion story? About a person who wishes to convince his family to let him sleep?
7. Taking Grandpa to the cinema of tomorrow where, in the future, all the “actors” are famous robots. Grandpa is not impressed, and complains the whole time about how things were different in his day (ie. 2010 AD).