A few years back, Kelly Link dropped an interesting writing exercise during the promo tour for Pretty Monsters (it’s old, and the formatting is gone, so I’m repeating the relevant parts below).
Link refers to this exercise as collaborating with your subconscious, and it basically consists of making a list of all the things you enjoy in other people’s fiction, whether it’s themes, characters, tropes, or just a general vibe.
Link’s list is fascinating if you’re familiar with their work, as there’s a definite relationship between the things she enjoys and the stories she manifests as an author.
Here’s the list:
theme parks
cults
haunted houses
funny!
subterranean lakes
book within a book, also made up tv shows — any kind of invented narrative
dog walkers
pet tragedies
twins
old mysteries — bad things that have happened in the past
people who know they are doing stupid things, but keep on doing them
people who are blamed for doing things they didn’t do
people who make things
people who stage amateur plays / make amateur movies
ghost stories
governesses & parole officers — people with power who can make you miserable, or make you do pointless tasks in order to demonstrate their power
electrical outages
imaginary friends
Cat in the Hat-types
characters/antagonists/allies
poltergeists
owls or infestations of wild animals
demolition
ne’er-do-well relations
the octopus
the color green
pet named “the unsub” b/c mother loves forensic mysteries
mocking celebrities
metafiction
fraught family dynamics
weird sexual dynamics
plague
zombies
attics or basements full of things
girls who kick ass, not necessarily for a good reason
The point of the list is simple: sometimes, Link peruses it for story ideas, kind of like window shopping.
An interesting thing I’ve noticed about writing vignettes to post here: they’re often broadly different from the kinds of stories I’d pursue if I sat down to write a full story. Not always — Sweltering Fruit is close to a story I’d pursue, and Four Mohocks Sent Abroad leans into my love of distinctive and untrustworthy narrators — but the vast majority of the vignettes that sit in my “edit and post” folder are a departure in tone, in subject matter, and in voice.
Often, when I go to post them, I find myself noting the ways they stem from my love of a particular SF trope or concept. Often, particularly cheesy tropes or concepts, straight out of the spec fic TV I grew up watching in the eighties and nineties. Yesterday’s story, On The Corner of Caxton and Petrie, 12:04 AM, is basically fanfic for a a cheap Sliders-meets-Herculese knock-off that never actually exists; Knock, Knock owes a debt to childhood exposure to Star Trek and Doctor Who.
They could all be longer works, but that’s unlikely to happen because there’s writing is constrained by available time and publishing opportunites. Just because I could make Heathcliff the protagonist of a longer story, figuring out who sent the vikings through the time portal, doesn’t mean I should. The reward for doing so is unlikely to match the effort required to make that story, but the vignette pins it down so I’ve got the option to go back and expand if circumstances change.
In a lot of ways, the vignettes are my verson of Kelly Link’s list: quick sketches that lock down things I enjoy in fiction, and somethig I can revisit and draw upon if I ever find myself stuck on a larger project.
