Growing the Seeds of Stories through Word Lists
I don’t like to observe the phrase “writer’s block” — and I’m not even sure I believe such a state exists. I think it’s too easy to end up building a twisted shrine to writer’s block — to proclaim the affliction, and then festoon your writing life with it by saying, “I’m blocked,” over and over again, as if waiting for magical bolts of inspiration to come down from the sky and unstopper it all (which only happens in the movies, right?).
My policy is that if I feel “blocked,” then I have to take responsibility for unblocking myself. I recently discovered a fun way to jumpstart my imagination when one of these creative impasses occurs: Ray Bradbury’s list-making method. It’s a simple technique to generate new story ideas, go deeper into an existing idea, and just have fun.
When Bradbury first became a writer, he made long lists of nouns to trigger ideas. He said that each person possesses a “fabulous mulch” of experiences in their minds, but you have to find a way to draw out the threads of memories stowed away deep in your subconscious. He did this by making lists of nouns — quickly, without over-thinking things. “Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness … speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page,” he wrote in Zen in the Art of Writing.
For example, here’s the list of nouns that sparked one of Bradbury’s more notable books:
THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. THE TRAPDOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON.
This might look like a random list of words, but it offered Bradbury a window into his mind. Once he’d written a list, Bradbury began to word-associate around it by writing what he called pensées, tiny prose poems or descriptive paragraphs of approximately 200 words that helped him examine each noun and dredge his subconscious for meaning.
Concerning the list of nouns above, he said, “Glancing over the list, I discovered my old love and fright having to do with circuses and carnivals. I remembered, and then forgot, and then remembered again, how terrified I had been when my mother took me for my first ride on a merry-go-round. With the calliope screaming and the world spinning and the terrible horses leaping, I added my shrieks to the din. I did not go near the carousel again for years.”
From Bradbury’s pensée, characters emerged and carried the story forward, and he ended up returning to that terrifying carousel from his youth when he wrote the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Bradbury says this exercise operated as a provocation that helped his “better stuff to surface” as he felt his way toward something “honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.” The exercise might look whimsical on the surface, but it is all about finding the essence of the story you want to write.
“You can’t write for other people,” says Bradbury. “You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.”
And here I am, writing noun lists as a way to warm up before writing. I hope you’ll give it a whirl. Writer’s block be gone!
Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. His stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, The Southwest Review, PANK, Gargoyle, eclectica, and Puerto del Sol, among dozens of others. His collection of one hundred 100-word stories, Fissures, has just been released.
Find out more at grantfaulkner.com or follow him on Twitter at @grantfaulkner.
