Spooktober is a project to help people break out of the belief that, in writing, ideas are everything – that you have to mine your brain for the most perfect and original idea ever, commit to it with a blood oath, and guard it like an IP dragon. Ideas are, comparatively, the easy part of writing. Yeah, you may or may not ever come up with an amazing one, but if you drop that requirement, you can come up with thousands. If you come up with thousands, there’s bound to be something halfway good in the list. And halfway is all you need, because writing is about writing, not about clever gimmicks. The best idea in the world ain’t shit if it ain’t writ.
So coming up with an idea a day every day for a month. Weekdays smoke my life like a cigarette, not much left in the tank at ten PM. Makes me feel like on the weekend, I should make up for that lost time and get ahead. Feeling that more than usual at the moment for some reason. However, I don’t know what the prompt is going to be until the day of, so how can I make use of the time I have today?
In the rap tradition of freestyling, one is supposed to compose your rhymes to the beat as it’s playing, to impress the audience with the speed of your thought. That is as hard as it sounds. I might be able freestyle to a modest tempo with an established formula, like adding verses to “American Pie,” but that fast shit? Impossible. Well, the rappers aren’t usually doing it 100% spontaneously either. They come up with a bunch of rhymes that they can flex to match whatever music they’re presented with. It’s still impressive, but less like sorcery.
Remembering this, what kind of idea elements could I come up with in advance, to copy-paste into future challenges? We’re letting the group pull tarot cards to use as optional themes, but a lot of them are using non-standard decks, so even if I came up with an idea related to every card in the Rider-Waite standard, it wouldn’t help me every day. Still, might be better than nothing.
I acquired a list purporting to be all those cards plus their most common interpretations, in very brief…
lol, no. Turns out that was way too ambitious. Weekend almost over. Defeat!
Bleh, I’ll just keep freestylin’ jackass style for now. Maybe next weekend.
If you draw the ten of swords
Sliced and diced to a pile of gore
Cartomancy should be ignored
The day the music died
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Are you familiar with the 10th century poetic tradition in Arabic countries of Maqāmah? I came across it a few years ago when I was researching al-Andalusian culture. It was expected that an educated man could extemporize poetic verses on demand. I suspect that many people memorized a bunch of rhymes and made them fit to a lot of situations. According to Google’s AI, there area still active traditions in the form of Zajal and al-Taghrooda, but I haven’t come across them before.
Years ago one of my friends was in an improv comedy group. One night I happened to sit through two consecutive shows. It was interesting to see that while the shows are supposed to be improvised, the jokes/themes were re-used between the two shows. It was clear that most of the performers had certain topics they were prepared to bring up. They worked hard to do so as that would give them something to riff on, something they had already thought about what would be funny.
As you say, the ideas are the easiest part of writing. There is a reason why so many authors started as newspaper men back in the days when newspapers existed; they learned how to write, how to edit, and how to proofread. Like many skills, writing gets better with practice.
i’ve probably heard some of that stuff before, but not the kind of thing that sticks to my mind easily, thanks for letting me know about it. very interestin!