Noncommittal Allbingo Square
Wednesday, 27 July 2016 11:27![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lea_hazelMy ideas for stories lately have been overly abstract and difficult to realize, and also I keep forgetting to keep a notebook on me at all times. As a desperation maneuver I generated a square from ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
allbingo's legendary bingo square generator to try and force the issue using the old "double line" refinement procedure. It's worked for me before, but now I'm trying for original fiction (at least some of it), so the additional narrowing parameter of "what fandom is this right for" won't be on my side.
The square:
My ideas:
Wow. The entire southeastern corner is fabulous. I could cut it either direction and it would form a solid story. Witch + The Magic Comes Back = Tradition vs. Change. Or! Witch + You Can Keep Her = recovery of a lost one. Butterfly of transformation + the magic comes back = healer. In fact, you can keep her + never win the lottery presents intriguing possibilities.
Golden Age of Piracy is also interesting, but would require more work. Displacement from the known is... a little too general? Especially when coupled with either "fairytale" or "dreamer" since they all three seem to lead in the same general direction. The prompt then lacks twists and turns to give it intrigue.
Razor grass I don't really know what to do with.
Development of character + The Quest + visionary produces a pretty vague result, unless we're talking about something like someone going on a quest to retrieve their lost personality. Which reminds me a little of a story I'd been working on about a woman who tries to buy back her lost soul, but obviously with a very different core component. I feel like this probably has potential, but needs a lot of brainstorming and probably won't be easy to develop into a full-length short story. More like flash fiction.
When it comes to a tradition vs. change story, I think it might be more interesting to resist setting it in a modern, urban fantasy context. It's interesting to look at it as an enduring theme and have the context of "change" be different from our modern sensibilities. Despite the temptations of a sassy cyber-witch and so forth.
"Never win the lottery" is a mundane setting prompt that can be adapted infinitely. I was thinking of *The Lottery* of course because that's just how my mind works. There is a whole subset of plots where a seemingly positive event is built up towards and eventually discovered to be horrifying. I feel like that could be adapted when you take in the context -- a knight winning the hand of a princess who turns out to be cursed, or something like that. A kind of fairy tale structure I suppose, although the setting can be tweaked to, again, provide more intrigue.
...A lot of my writing process amounts to tricks to get myself to stay interested long enough to see the story through to its conclusion.
Phoenixes are thematic, allegorical. I suppose you could in theory give them the fantasy humanizing treatment, the kind that formalizes the rules in such a way that fantastical characters begin to act more human. But I think that takes away a lot of the appeal of the idea. When you're writing about phoenixes you're writing about death and immortality. The "butterfly of transformation" also seems to lead in to the same kind of thematic, the life cycle, the death-like state, and a rebirth in another form. But I have been toying with an idea of people living through complex life-cycles, and now might be a good time to dig into that.
There are a lot of ideas locked in this card and I'm so glad I generated it. I don't know if I'll manage a strict double row for a bingo, but the goal is to write, and for that I hope it will suffice. Just have to jump the next hurdle, which is the threat of the blank page staring at you from the computer screen. But that's a perennial problem and not going to go away any time soon. I failed to write first thing in the morning today so I don't know if I'll manage any new words, but otherwise I feel like this is shaping up to be a pretty productive writing day. And the morning's not gone yet.
allbingo's legendary bingo square generator to try and force the issue using the old "double line" refinement procedure. It's worked for me before, but now I'm trying for original fiction (at least some of it), so the additional narrowing parameter of "what fandom is this right for" won't be on my side. The square:
| Forbidden Zone | Race Against the Clock | Development of Character | The Quest | Visionary |
| Craftsperson | Elemental Rivalry | Golden Age of Piracy | Lover | Avenger |
| Razor Grass | Paranormal | Recovery of a lost one | The Phoenix | Butterfly of Transformation |
| Displacement from the Known | Fairytale | You Can Keep Her | Never Win the Lottery | Healer |
| Dreamer | Optimism Carries On | Witch | Tradition vs. Change | The Magic Comes Back |
My ideas:
Wow. The entire southeastern corner is fabulous. I could cut it either direction and it would form a solid story. Witch + The Magic Comes Back = Tradition vs. Change. Or! Witch + You Can Keep Her = recovery of a lost one. Butterfly of transformation + the magic comes back = healer. In fact, you can keep her + never win the lottery presents intriguing possibilities.
Golden Age of Piracy is also interesting, but would require more work. Displacement from the known is... a little too general? Especially when coupled with either "fairytale" or "dreamer" since they all three seem to lead in the same general direction. The prompt then lacks twists and turns to give it intrigue.
Razor grass I don't really know what to do with.
Development of character + The Quest + visionary produces a pretty vague result, unless we're talking about something like someone going on a quest to retrieve their lost personality. Which reminds me a little of a story I'd been working on about a woman who tries to buy back her lost soul, but obviously with a very different core component. I feel like this probably has potential, but needs a lot of brainstorming and probably won't be easy to develop into a full-length short story. More like flash fiction.
When it comes to a tradition vs. change story, I think it might be more interesting to resist setting it in a modern, urban fantasy context. It's interesting to look at it as an enduring theme and have the context of "change" be different from our modern sensibilities. Despite the temptations of a sassy cyber-witch and so forth.
"Never win the lottery" is a mundane setting prompt that can be adapted infinitely. I was thinking of *The Lottery* of course because that's just how my mind works. There is a whole subset of plots where a seemingly positive event is built up towards and eventually discovered to be horrifying. I feel like that could be adapted when you take in the context -- a knight winning the hand of a princess who turns out to be cursed, or something like that. A kind of fairy tale structure I suppose, although the setting can be tweaked to, again, provide more intrigue.
...A lot of my writing process amounts to tricks to get myself to stay interested long enough to see the story through to its conclusion.
Phoenixes are thematic, allegorical. I suppose you could in theory give them the fantasy humanizing treatment, the kind that formalizes the rules in such a way that fantastical characters begin to act more human. But I think that takes away a lot of the appeal of the idea. When you're writing about phoenixes you're writing about death and immortality. The "butterfly of transformation" also seems to lead in to the same kind of thematic, the life cycle, the death-like state, and a rebirth in another form. But I have been toying with an idea of people living through complex life-cycles, and now might be a good time to dig into that.
There are a lot of ideas locked in this card and I'm so glad I generated it. I don't know if I'll manage a strict double row for a bingo, but the goal is to write, and for that I hope it will suffice. Just have to jump the next hurdle, which is the threat of the blank page staring at you from the computer screen. But that's a perennial problem and not going to go away any time soon. I failed to write first thing in the morning today so I don't know if I'll manage any new words, but otherwise I feel like this is shaping up to be a pretty productive writing day. And the morning's not gone yet.
