finalrain
S.R.Osuna
Who can come up with a contest that isn't based on character portrayal.
Well, we could always do my "Neil Gaiman Writing Inspiration Contest." Now, I suppose I'll have to explain what that is.
sweatdrop Give me a few minutes.Or a few days. Yeah, that would be good.
The basid idea comes from Neil Gaiman's essay on '
Where do you get your Ideas?' With apologies to Gaiman, I'll be quoting that essay a bit here.
Neil Gaiman
Every profession has its pitfalls. Doctors, for example, are always being asked for free medical advice, lawyers are asked for legal information, morticians are told how interesting a profession that must be and then people change the subject fast. And writers are asked where we get our ideas from. (...) I got tired of the not very funny answers, and these days I tell people the truth:
'I make them up,' I tell them. 'Out of my head.'
People don't like this answer. I don't know why not. They look unhappy, as if I'm trying to slip a fast one past them. As if there's a huge secret, and, for reasons of my own, I'm not telling them how it's done. (...)
You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.
You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if...?
The basic idea of the contest is that we provide some starting point. An image, preferably, since the web isn't so good for audio. It should probably be abstract, or a vague city scene with nothing terribly obvious happening in it. The contestants are told to stare at the picture, let their mind go blank, and try to get a story/poem/whatever idea out of the picture.
Once they have the idea, they explain it to us, and how they got the idea from the picture. It doesn't have to be too detailed, just enough so that we know they're not just fitting an idea they already had to the image we've chosen.
That's the first part of the contest.
Neil Gaiman
(...) the ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series. (...)
The Ideas aren't the hard bit. They're a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you're trying to build: making it interesting, making it new. (...)
And when you've an idea - which is, after all, merely something to hold on to as you begin - what then?
Well, then you write. You put one word after another until it's finished - whatever it is.
The second part of the contest will be to write whatever the idea is that you've had. It won't be necessary to win the first part of the contest in order to win the second part of the contest.
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