Finished up a structural revision yesterday on book 3–it wasn’t like one of my usual full revision passes, but the structural element I decided to fix had far-reaching consequences, so rewriting still took a bit. Next up, a short story for an anthology, and then back for a proper deep revision pass.
This new short story got me thinking about my brainstorming process, particularly the part where I use someone as a sounding board, rather than doing it all on my own. For this story, I used the sister, who is the best brainstormer ever, partly because we are on a mental wavelength, and partly for reasons explored below. It struck me how for my writing process, brainstorming with a quality sounding board was like moving house with a friend. Leaving aside big furniture, you can move all on your own, either through a marathon effort or chipping away at it load by load, but having someone to help and encourage and keep you focused and carry heavy things with makes it so much smoother and faster.
In the way of things popping at the same time that relate to each other, I was linked to this recently:
This is a (hilariously) BAD sounding board, obviously. It got me thinking about what makes a good sounding board, though. Obviously, one needs someone at least familiar with the genre you’re working in, but not necessarily someone else who creates in that genre. Someone who reads/watches in it can work just as well. The sister is not a writer, after all. All you need is for them to have a sense of “in [genre] A can cause B”, so when you need B, they can suggest A. That’s the key part for the best sounding boards, is the suggestions: it’s less than they need wild ideas, it’s that they need to have a mind that looks for solutions. At least in my process, by the time I get to the sounding board part, I have plenty of ideas, but a bunch of problems and contradictions they’ve created amongst themselves. The new perspective helps straighten that out.
Of course, the best sounding boards aren’t always around when you need them, so I’ve figured out some strategies for coaxing whoever is around and willing. The first step is recognizing when someone (however nice a person) is not constitutionally suited for sounding boarding. Sometimes people don’t think in terms of solutions, or only in poking holes in possible solutions you present to them, never offering any of their own. This’ll wear you down like nobody’s business, though it gives a sense of forward movement for a while, because you’re ruling things out. There’s no fresh perspective being added, though.
So you have a good candidate. What next? What I do at writing workshops with new people is present the problem they pointed out, paired with a solution I just thought of myself. It’s amazing how many people are able to say “Yes, that would solve it!” or “Wouldn’t that have unintended consequence X? What about Y?” The other strategy is to poll people’s reactions. “My character does X, does that make her more sympathetic?” Then, even if your sounding board isn’t sure about what might make a character sympathetic in abstract, they can react how they would as a reader and you gain that data. And once again, I’m surprised how often, when you set them up that way, people will come up with some different solution for you.
And when all your problems are solved, your story is ready to go!
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