This week I’m going to do one of my favourite idea generating exercises. 

My favourite movies all have a point of difference - something about them that makes them stand out. Something we’ve never seen on screen before. The hook.

When something has a great hook, I want to drop whatever sandwich I’m eating and go watch it immediately. Aging rockstar hunts Nazis? Sold. Dinosaurs on a spaceship? YES. NOW PLEASE.

So, as a general rule, unusual character doing unusual thing = something we haven’t seen before.

So this week, I’m going to come up with ten unusual protagonists doing ten things you wouldn’t expect to see that character doing.

EXERCISE THREE: POINT OF DIFFERENCE

CHARACTER: Travelling family band a la Partridges    
THING: Serial killing. 


CHARACTER: High School Janitor                                   
THING: Replacing students with robot clones. 


CHARACTER: Kiwi summer orchard worker        
THING: Discovers colony of Mole People.


CHARACTER: Aging failed Shortland St (soap) actress   
THING: Creates porn parody of the soap she was fired from.


CHARACTER: Alien worshipping cult escapee 
THING: Finally escapes just as aliens DO invade earth as the cult predicted.


CHARACTER: Unmotivated beneficiary 
THING: Accidentally given $220,000,000 instead of $220 dole money one week, goes on philanthropist spree helping the poor while on the run from the cops.


CHARACTER: Kiwi back shed scientist  
THING: Operates on himself and becomes the first human with working fleshy wings.


CHARACTER: Female ex gang member trying to get back on the right path
THING: Discovers literal Hell-Pit causing her to do bad things in backyard of her new state house.


CHARACTER: Sex workers
THING: Are invited to compete to be the first prostitute astronaut in space. SEXTRONAUT.


CHARACTER: A crust punk, a grandmother, and a law student
THING: Are abducted by aliens and find themselves trapped in an alien supermarket where they are for sale as a live delicacy. 


I do this sort of idea generation every couple of weeks. I find it the easiest way to come up with ideas from scratch. But who knows, maybe your easiest way is to think while you’re playing Fruit Ninjas on the toilet.

Either way, give this a shot and comment back here with any unexpectedly awesome results. Plus let me know if any of mine are ones you'd drop a sammich for!

For this weeks exercise, I want to focus on something that I always seem to forget to include: A really kick ass villain.

Same rules apply as last week: These need to be things I have never seen before that feel fresh and original. They can range from comic book type villains to monsters to classic crime lords witha  twist. Anything goes as long as it's a formidable foe.

And now, while I digest this ridiculously massive Newtown cafe breakfast, I'll try not to look awkward as I stay here and write.

EXERCISE TWO:
TEN ANTAGONISTS YOU WOULDN'T WANT TO BE UP AGAINST.

MAGNIFRIER:
As a baby, Alexi lost his most of vision from looking at the sun for too long when his mother was ignoring him.
His eyesight was so bad he had to use two magnifying glass lenses in his spectacles that made his eyes the size of teacups.
He looked ridiculous and hated the world as people laughed at him. But they didn't laugh long. Alexi harnessed the power of the sun with his magnifying glasses and used them to burn people to death with the heat of the light.
Alexi became: THE MAGNIFRIER.

GRANDPA IN NAM:
Everything is going swimmingly at Grandpa's 90th birthday until he has a sudden flashback to his time in Vietnam. Thinking the house has been invaded, Grandpa arms himself with guns and grenades, barricades the doors, and turns on his family. Grandpa's family must escape a mad war hero with skills as sharp as a faeces covered bamboo spear.

BATTY VAMPIRE:
A scientist obsessed with horror stories creates a vampire the way he believes they're supposed to be - a LITERAL man/vampire bat hybrid. With leathery wings and a taste for blood, this vampire does not sparkle.

BABY ALIVE:
During a night fill at a local department store, a defective batch of Baby Alive dolls come alive. The staff must escape fifty babies so desperate for a "new Mummy" they'll smother you alive.

CATWERE:
'WERE' means man. 'CAT' means cat. You can probably guess what Werecats are. But what about Catweres?
Catwere are ordinary cats who have been bitten by humans who carry the catwere gene.  At every full moon, they turn from cats into mysterious, extremely attractive, intelligent, sly and selfish human beings. The Catwere council meets every full moon with leaders of their country, and secretly pull the strings from the inside. The thing is, the Catwere have a huge army. Millions of cats in millions of homes all over the world.
The Catwere have scientists working round the clock to create an antidote to keep them human. And when they do... they will strike, tooth and claw.

DOCTOR RAWSKIN:
You have been kidnapped by a doctor who has created a super strong synthetic skin. He wants to graft it to you, and perform a series of torturous tests to establish the pain threshold and improve the skin. (Note: This is what I thought THE SKIN I LIVE IN was going to be about)

DRYSPELL:
You're a policeman in a steampunk world where all gadgets and machines run by intricate cog systems. The Dryspell hits - suddenly nothing is working. The culprits are a gang of ruffians looking to take over the city. They've created a machine that dries up oil with a single zap. In a world where gadgets have taken over, you must learn to fight by hand to defeat the gang and win back the city.

HYPNOKILLER:
You've been arrested for committing a brutal murder. Your prints and DNA are all over the place, and there's video footage of you committing the crime.
The thing is, you're an upstanding member of society. And you don't remember doing it. AND three other people have been arrested for committing murders in the EXACT same fashion this month. None of them remember it either.
Then you discover the truth.  You have been framed by a serial killer you dub HYPNOKILLER. A mad woman capable of hypnotising anyone she likes to kill for her. But how will you find her?

TEENAGE MEDUSA:
Stephan's just cheated on his new girlfriend, which wouldn't be so bad if he hadn't just found out she's cursed to be TEENAGE MEDUSA and wants to turn him to stone.

MONSTER:
You are the monster under the bed. You're trapped by an evil child bent on flushing you out and killing you. Although evil is not in your nature, you must destroy the child before it destroys you.

So some of these ended up not strictly antagonists, but never mind: I got a bunch of bad guys out of it.

Do your own!

Writing is about making choices. Every movement of your character, every piece of dialogue and every plot point is a choice you make. It’s really tempting to take the easy choice, which is often the first idea you come up with. That’s also the shit choice.

Unless you’re an utter genius, the first idea you have is probably one of the first ideas everyone else writing a similar story has had too. Same with the next five or ten.

I have no qualms admitting that at times I am pretty damn guilty of this. Sometimes you just want to finish the damn thing, and the obvious but overused option is all you can muster the strength to write. But it’s not good writing.

Good writing has fresh and original choices. They’re exciting because you’ve never seen them before. You want to keep reading or watching. You’re HOOKED.

That’s how I want my writing to be, so I’ve set myself a challenge.

Once a week or so, I’m going to start creating scenarios that require story choices, and coming up with ten options I’ve never seen or read before. This necessarily doesn’t mean they haven’t been used, but if you’ve never seen them yourself, you’re at least off to a good start on creating something fresh and original.

I think it will help to come up with a least twenty options per exercise, so I can narrow it down to the good ones. Also, if this exercise is done enough times, I’ll soon have a big backlog of scene ideas/story points that I can draw on if similar scenarios ever arise while I’m writing. Handy!

I’ll post the exercises here before I do it myself, so if you’re reading this and it sounds interesting, you can join in and comment with what you come up with.

So I’ll start with something nice and broad:


EXERCISE ONE:
10 WAYS TO DIE IN YOUR OWN HOME (ACCIDENT OR OTHERWISE)

- Kristy and her boyfriend Josh died together in a freak scrapbooking accident. The details are fuzzy, but from what the police could gather, the flour they used to make paste to glue in the pictures from their Panama holiday was in fact cocaine hidden by a flatmate. When Kristy tripped on a packet of decorative feathers, the cocaine bag was flung into the air, and both she and Josh inhaled a large enough amount in that moment to overdose. A memorial scrapbook has been laid at their graves.

- Rudolph died at home when he got so distracted live tweeting during The Ridges new reality show that he forgot he was frying frozen fish fingers. The resulting fire burned him alive. His family later considered suing the Ridge family, but no charges were ever laid.

- Martin died after finally succumbing to his lifelong Pink Batts nibbling addiction.

- Maria died while in the shower. Her cat likes to sit on the toilet and watch her wash, and when Maria farted, Mr Whiskerson got such a shock he jumped up onto the shower curtain. Maria whipped around, slipped, and cracked her head on the side of the toilet. The bathroom door was locked, and she lived alone. She wasn’t found until three weeks later, by which point Mr Whiskerson has eaten a significant portion of her thigh.

- Adriana died after a group of Japanese female kung fu assassins got the wrong address. They later sent flowers and suffered from emotional disorders at the mix up.

- Carla died when her unborn child turned out to be a tentacle monster a la PROMETHEUS. However, the tentacle monster was innocent. Carla killed herself when she realised she’d have to tell her boyfriend she cheated on him with a charming humanoid squid.

- Valerie was very hungover and mistook meths for Powerade Blue.

- Adam was a regular on Chat Roulette. He never wanted to do filthy things, he just wanted to meet interesting people and chat to them. When Claudia spotted him, it was love at first sight for them both... But their internet connection crapped out before they could exchange details. With no way to find Claudia ever again, Adam became obsessed with Chat Roulette, flicking from person to person, hoping he’d find Claudia again. Unfortunately he did not remember to eat, and perished in front of a party of sixteen year olds in Prague.

- Brutus had been locked in his bedroom for six weeks to avoid the plague outside. He didn’t know much about what was going on, only that Daddy Long Legs had finally evolved, and their bites were now fatal to humans. Brutus had taped up all of the door and window cracks in his room except one, which he left open for air. When Brutus fell asleep guarding the vent, a Daddy Long Legs slipped in. Brutus awoke it find it crawling up his arm. He could have flicked it off, but... he didn’t. The world was no longer worth living in.

- Mrs. Gladstone didn’t want the neighbours to know about her secret visitor Master Charles. Since Mr. Gladstone had died last month after fifty-five years of marriage, Mrs. Gladstone had finally felt free to explore the urges she had been harbouring for as long as she could remember. She looked in the Personals of the Otago Daily Times until she found what she was after - Master Charles, Dominator. Mrs. Gladstone sneaked Master Charles in and out the backdoor and paid him in cash to let her be his submissive sex slave. So when Mrs. Gladstone had chest pains during one of their raunchier sessions, Charles was able to slip away into the night, so no one would herself know her secret. However, he forgot to remove her gimp mask before leaving. Luckily the first police officer on the scene (a closet S&M fan himself) removed it before the neighbours could see, and Mrs. Gladstone’s secret was taken to the grave.


Okay, that'll do, pig. Add your own ten in the comments!