iTelligent

The biggest problem with the iPad? No one can see what you’re reading. How is that hot chick on the subway supposed to know what a studly-but-literary guy you really are? How is that cute professorial type with the bow-tie and patches on his elbows going to know you’re totally hot for Shakespeare?
Enter the iTelligent. Just snap it onto the back of your iPad, and it displays the cover of any eBook you want—the one you’re reading or the one you want everyone to think you’re reading! Broadcast to the world your passion for Proust and Dostoevsky. Or let the world think you’re mad about Quantum Mechanics while you’re secretly reading The Onion.

Chip-Off-the-Old-Book Charging Station

So you got the iPad, and you’re ready to toss out your collection of dusty, musty, space-gobbling books.  You could throw them in a landfill, but think of all the money you spent buying those books.  Why not get some of it back?
Now you can with the Chip-Off-the-Old-Book Charging Station.  It’s a book shredder! It’s an incinerator!  It’s a power generator!  Just one book (or half a Dan Brown novel) fed into the Chip-Off-the-Old-Book Charging Station can generate enough power to recharge 10 iPads!  And with the optional Power Umbilical Cord, you can charge every device in your house.
Free, clean, book-burning power:  The energy source of the future—right off your shelf!

BookBrat

If there’s one thing kids love to ruin it’s books. Chewed pages, dog-eared corners, ice cream, doodles, inkblots, boogers—there seems to be no end to their creativity in destroying the printed word. But now, thanks to the iPad’s glass, steel and silicon construction, a precious childhood pastime is about to disappear.
That’s why you need BookBrat: the book destruction simulator. Load this 5 time Oppenheimer Award winning app onto your iPad, and your kids can spend hours destroying digital books. Flame thrower, acid, tug of war and toilet bowl, lawn mower, escaped gerbil—anything they can imagine is there. Even 35 different breeds of homework-chewing dogs! Best of all, when they’re finished playing BookBrat, you can hit “Reset” and your eBook’s as good as new.

HoloGift Tree Stand

Probably the most popular gift at Christmas time is a book. But now that books are going all virtual, the hoard under your tree is going to start looking mighty sparse. Unless you have a HoloGift—the new combination Christmas tree base and holographic giftbox simulator.
Just mount your tree in HoloGift’s decorative base. Its built-in WiFi will connect to your iPad, and very time you download a new eBook, HoloGift will project a holographic image of the book under your tree—complete with giftwrapping. Plus, when it’s finally time to open all those virtual gifts, the HoloGift provides 11 different wrapping paper tearing sounds, 6 degrees of cardboard impenetrability, and up to 30 seconds of virtual bubble-wrap poppage. For an extra $5.95, you even get random paper-cuts!

TGRB Emergency Information Guidance System

It’s the end of the world as you know it. Every major city has been reduced to rubble, and Internet clouds have been replaced with real clouds—mushroom-shaped.
Suddenly, Little Joe Jr. has appendicitis.  You try to look up “appendectomy” on your trusty iPad, but no Internet means no searches and no downloads.  So little Joe Junior is toast, unless . . .
Unless you’re smart enough to be carrying TGRB’s Emergency Information Guidance System! Plug the EIGS’s antenna into your iPad, launch the Book Repository Locator app, and its patented technology will guide you to the nearest information storage facility (aka, library).  There, you’ll find hundreds of non-DRM-protected books on every subject from solar stills to growing corn—even yanking out an appendix.  And since these books don’t rely on electricity, software, the Internet, or Amazon, you don’t have to worry about losing your connection in mid-operation or having your credit card rejected. The information is always there, at your fingertips—literally.
So what does Joe Jr. say?  “Thank God for Real Books!”

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Yeah, we’ve all done plot exercises, either at workshops or by ourselves.  But what makes these exercises a little different is they’re meant to be done in your head, not on paper.  That’s where your ideas come from, after all, and the more you can work out a story in your head, the stronger your instincts will be when you sit down to write.

Do these exercises with at least one other person (or two, or three, or four, if you got ‘em), and don’t spend a lot of time on the details.  Just try to come up with the essential elements.  If you tend towards a particular kind of plot, try to vary your ideas: realistic plots instead of sci-fi; a survival story or quest instead of a love triangle.

1)  PLOT SPRINTS

Start w/ 3 elements:  a character, an object, and a setting.  Come up with the best plot you can using all those elements.

Examples:

Elements: Nun, toaster, airport security.

No plot: Nun going on a trip w/ her favorite toaster.

Okay plot: TSA agent, seeing nun clutching toaster, suspects she is going to blow up plane.

Better plot: Nun bringing toaster for sister’s wedding. In security line, she obsesses to off-duty cop about how awful groom is, how he hits sister, etc. Cop starts to suspect she’s going to kill the groom—with the toaster. But how?

2)  MY BORING DAY

Take the most boring moment of the day. Try to make it exciting or intriguing by adding 1 or 2 sentences.

Examples:

Boring:    I got up, took a shower, clipped my toenails.

Plot 1: I got up, took a shower and was clipping my toenails when it finally hit me:  my daughter is never coming back.

Plot 2:      I got up, took a shower and clipped my toenails. I scooped up the last clumps of hair and my toenail clippings, and put them all in an envelope. “To: My Asshole Ex-Husband.  From: Your Dying Ex-Wife.”

3)  KILLER TOMATO

One person names an animal, person, or object. The other has to figure out what that thing/person wants. The goal is to come up with a desire that suggests tension or action of some kind.

Examples:

What: Tomato

Wants:     “I want to grow bite-sized human heads in a garden and put them in my salad.”

Who: Starbucks barista

Wants:     “I want the lady who orders the venti cappuccino every day to notice I always make a heart shape in the foam.”

4)  WHAT IF?

One of the oldest and best tools for finding a plot. Take an event from your own life or someone else’s (or the news), and ask “What if it had turned out differently?”

Examples:

Event 1: Violent father tries to talk daughter into letting him in the house. Mother calls police. Father arrested.

What If: Daughter lets father in the house. Father kills the mother, but the daughter escapes.

Event 2: Nurses mix up babies in maternity ward. Mistake is discovered, babies returned to their mothers.

What If: Mistake is not discovered for 10 years. One child is living with average suburban family. Other is in abusive religious cult.

5)  SEE THAT GUY?

Pick out a stranger, and construct a plot around him/her.

Examples:

On Ferry: Tall bearded man w/ glasses and bloodshot eyes, clutching heavy bag.

Plot: Has just murdered his landlady. Is going to drop bag w/ murder weapon overboard.

In Taxi: Talkative female cabbie driving like madwoman.

Plot: Escapee from local psychiatric hospital. Kidnaps passengers and drives them to abandoned school-building, where she relives her glory days as a high school teacher.

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"Elementary, my dear Watson: We want to pump you up!"

So you’re good at coming up with interesting characters. Or maybe you can describe a freshly mowed lawn right down to the chopped up tennis balls and cut-grass-mixed-with-dog-poop smell. But if all your writing mojo turns to Jello as soon as someone mentions the word “plot,” here’s a little something that might help: the 6 most important vital signs for a healthy plot.

Use this list if you’re struggling to come up with a plot and don’t have a clue where to start. Or use it to double-check an idea for a plot, see if it’s likely to go the distance or leave you stranded.

6 Vital Signs of A Healthy Plot

1. WANT / DESIRE: This is the lifeblood of plot. If you can’t identify what your character wants, you have no plot. If you know intellectually what your character wants, but don’t necessarily feel it, then you might have a plot—but probably not the strongest one.

What you want is to feel in your gut the ache or hunger or desire your character has for a particular person, thing, or course of action. Then you’ve got the beginnings of a great plot.

2. OBSTACLES: Figure out who or what stands in the way of what your character wants. If she/he can get what they want easily, you have no plot. If he/she cannot get it easily, but you’re not quite sure what the obstacle is, then you have a plot, but it’s still too vague. Sharpen and refine until you know exactly what the “wall” is.

3. TENSION: Want + Obstacles = Tension. If you can’t feel the tension, then you haven’t fully identified what your characters want or what the obstacles are. Go back and work on Vital Signs 1 and 2.

4. OPPORTUNITY: Your characters have to believe they can get what they want (even if it’s impossible). Otherwise, they have no reason to act. Make sure you give them some chance (real or imagined) to succeed, even if you snatch it away from them in the end.

5. SURPRISES / CHANGES: Only two types of plots are allowed to unfold in a straight line: boring ones and new ones. Since there are no new plots, and you probably don’t want your story to be boring, you should always be looking for twists and turns, unexpected challenges and surprises as you write. These are the touches that differentiate a simple plot from a complex one, and turn an ordinary novel into a page-turner. (Plus, they can make a story or novel a lot more fun to write.)

6. RESOLUTION: You don’t have to know exactly how your story’s going to end before you write it. And you can have whatever resolution you think is best: positive, negative, neutral, ambiguous, etc. But if you don’t have some kind of feeling for where the character’s want is going to lead him/her, what kinds of futures are possible for that character given his/her desires and the obstacles presented, your plot is going to lose direction.  “Starts out strong, but loses steam”—that’s the epitaph for novels written with no resolution in mind.

NEXT WEEK:  Pumping Up the Plot (Part 2) — 5 Exercises to Boost Your Plot-Writing Mojo

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Grub Street South Writer’s Workshop
Jan. 26, 2009 7:00 – 8:00pm
Buttonwood Books, Cohasset, MA

I’ll be leading a one hour writing workshop sponsored by the Boston area writers’ collective, Grub Street. The focus will be on plot: elements, concepts and various exercises that can help the plot-challenged build up their murder, mayhem and madness muscles. A good time will be had by all as we discuss ways to raise heart-rates, induce anxiety and desperation, and torment our characters and readers.

Call Buttonwood Books at 1-781-383-2665 for more information and reservations.

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Another blog?! OMG, aren’t there like more blogs in the world than there are people in China? And what happens when all those people in China start their blogs?

Well, let’s face it: we can never have too many blogs. At least, good ones. And since I’m one of the main contributors for this new one, it’s got to be good, right?

Okay, there’s the whole “When are you going to actually update your blog” issue.  But this new blog is a group project, with 11 other writers. So no matter how stale my ideas get, there will be 11 other people making sure fresh material gets posted every day.

Beyond The Margins is the name of the new blog, and instead of trying to describe what it’s about, I’ll just reproduce its “About” section here:

Beyond The Margins is the on-line sounding board for a group of writers who met, taught, workshopped or otherwise communicated through Grub Street Inc., a nonprofit creative writing center in Boston. We have published novels, short fiction, poetry, newspaper and magazine articles, and our backgrounds and careers run the gamut from social work and medicine to journalism, law, graphic design, and metalwork.

Beyond The Margins offers inside information on publishing and tips on creating memorable scenes and great dialogue. We debunk the myths of freelance writing, deliver book reviews and interviews with authors and editors and agents, and take humorous looks at the craft, the industry and ourselves.

We hope the diversity of our voices, experiences and interests will inject energy and insight into all our posts. And we hope readers will feel free to join in the discussion. Because even if we’re passionate about what we write, the best material always comes from out there, beyond the margins.

Sounds great, huh?  At least, if you’re interested in publishing or have writerly aspirations.  Which it seems like 99.9999% of the world does. (Except for my dad, who’s always thought it would make far more sense for everyone else to write about him.  But that’s for another blog.  Or therapy.  Or a novel. Whichever comes first.)

Anyway, enjoy Beyond The Margins!

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