MAKING YOUR BOOK IDEAS WORK: The Play-Doh Theory

Play-Doh delights the senses and takes a very, very long to harden. It's designed to for radical experimentation. If you don't like what you've made of it, there's lots of opportunity for even drastic change.

Plaster of Paris is gritty, clammy and dull. It sets quite quickly. Once it hardens, you can't change its shape without breaking it.

Too many of us develop our book ideas in plaster of paris. We forget how endlessly and inventively malleable ideas are. Our book concepts get set in stone, so to speak, long before we've pushed them around to see where they need to go. We can' make the alterations needed to reflect our research on competitors, expert critique, or even our own instinct when it tells us something must change.

Thanks to this premature finalization, we end up with books that aren't as good as they could be.

Keep your book ideas in the "play" state long enough to develop them fully, imaginatively, openly.

I keep a small container of Play-Doh on my office credenza to remind me of this. (And occasionally, to open as a micro-vacation. That smell: to me, it's pure childhood.)

STORY STARTERS: Why did the rubber chicken cross the road?

Sometimes getting yourself out of a dreary writing rut (block, lull, coma, quagmire, blackout, hiatus, respite, suspension, layoff, tantrum: call it what you will) requires a bit of playfulness. Therefore: write a five hundred word short short story based on this image. For extra credit, consider having not just the mo-pedding chicken but also the bus play a role. For immediate induction into the Writers' Hall of Fame, post your short short below as a comment. (I was going to end that line by telling you not to be a chicken. But even for someone with my dopey sense of humor, that joke's a rotten egg.)

FIVE MINUTE FICTIONS: open arms, closed door

Set some kind of timer for five minutes. Use that five minutes to write a little sketch or story that includes, and connects, these two images.

If you're still game when you've finished, set the timer for another five minutes. This time, your assignment is to alter the mood of the piece. If your first sketch or story was tragic, rethink and rewrite it in comic or satirical terms. If your first piece was playful or lighthearted, write a new one that uses the same images but has a more somber or serious mood. You may have to change some of your characters or plot elements, but doing so isn't required.

Images are interesting writing-starters because good ones are so often both evocative, and so mysterious. It would be possible to write an entire novel inspired by these two photographs. But luckily, you don't have to.