Diary of a Novel - Week 3

This is one of the more exhausting and scary periods. For the next week or so, I'm using a method I learned from a friend who used to design rides for Disneyland. I grab a legal pad. In the center I write one of the lead character's names and what they're going through. Then I write down anything that comes to mind that might be of interest regarding that character or their aspect of the story. Anything, it doesn't have to make sense, it doesn't have to fit. I'll draw spokes around the first idea and come up with four more. Then four more around each of those four. And on and on until the page is full. I only do one or two of these a day as it can get pretty exhausting. Sometimes I'll put on some mood music to kick in the last couple hours -- romantic stuff for the romance, action stuff for action, etc. (That's why God invented soundtracks to be downloaded from i-tunes). By the end of the week I'll have five or six pages full of nothing but ideas. Many of them are unusable, but at this stage it doesn't matter. The trick is not to listen to the little voice saying, "That's stupid...you got to be kidding me...you call yourself a writer." Instead, I just slam the ideas down.
Next week I'll go back and highlight the best. But for now this was the week I brainstormed without any filters or self criticism.
bill
www.Billmyers.com