Marshalling Your Puppets with Tex Thompson

So I was just thinking, NaNo-wise – you know who feels your pain?

Kermit the Frog.

Think about it.  That poor guy is always having to scrape together a show on a shoestring and ten minutes’ notice (and if you’ve got a better metaphor for your creative process than trying to corral a mad menagerie of pigs and chickens and an English-limited axe-wielding chef and arrange them into something resembling a coherent presentation, I’m not sure I could handle hearing it.)

And you KNOW Mr. The Frog second-guesses himself.  There’s no way he watches Bunsen Honeydew being terrorized by the three dozen cloned Beakers running around the set without wondering if it’s not too late to score a cush gig on Sesame Street.

But one problem he never has is mojo.  No matter how crunched things get, there is always some googly-eyed closet anarchist ready to kick out a musical number or kidnap a celebrity or juggle trout to keep the show going.  So as you wade further and deeper into your self-inflicted storytelling tar-wallow this month, it’s worth pausing occasionally to check: what raw, unconnected, randomly fantastic ideas do you have bouncing around backstage?

For example, you might have an especial affinity for:

–19th-century medicine – consumption, hysteria, and laudanum for everyone!

–X-Men-style mutant powers

–French desserts

–devastating alien diseases

–redneck colloquialisms (“Hotter’n two mice humping in a wool sock”)

–funny animal names (Sugarlips, Prudence, Geech)

–the Devil as a charming, dapper fellow

–tiny mishaps that accumulate to cause massive disaster

–colorful idioms from other languages (“they get along like a fingernail and its dirt”)

–a fearsome, almost legendary character who is never seen

The things on your list might not look like they could ever share page space together, but if you let yourself write them all down, freely and without any pre-pruning, you will have a fantastic inventory of what tickles your storytelling brain.  (And you might be surprised at what can work – who would have thought you could tell a story about an old man, Argentina, balloons, a Boy Scout, a talking dog, and dirigibles until Pixar went and did it?)  More importantly, you will have a whole toybox full of potent notions to refer to whenever your energy flags or your plot stalls – for this project and every one thereafter.

And let’s be honest: this first draft is not going to be some golden, untouchable thing.  There will be plenty of drafts later where you enrich and connect and perfect the acts that work and cull the ones that don’t.  But this one, the first one, where everything after the blinking cursor is endless white space, is your single best opportunity to put something weird and brave and borderline ridiculous on the page, not because the narrative arc and the three-act structure demands it, but because it’s fun and interesting and you feel like it.

So the next time you start running short on any of the above, give serious consideration to brainstorming via the Muppet method.  There are a limited and specific number of problems that can be solved by launching a furry felt creature from a metaphorical cannon – and your book might just be one of them.

~~~

Tex Thompson is an aspiring writer of fantasy Westerns, currently represented by Jennie Goloboy at Red Sofa Literary.  Her first novel, One Night in Sixes, has the improbable distinction of including every item on the above list.  In her spare time, she enjoys prolonged Wikipedia binges, expensive HBO dramas, and waxing pedantic about fiction at www.tex-books.com.