Blowing your own mind

Let’s call this Blow Your Mind Monday and look at ways to approach your Work In Progress from mind-bending perspectives. Keep in mind that the more creative you are with brainstorming, the more time and daydreaming and investment you put into knowing your characters and what happens to them both inside and outside your manuscript, the more unique and interesting your novel will be. When agents say, “Send us something fresh!” this is what they mean.

Here are two terrific adaptations from Hamlet’s transcendental suicide speech, still a classic after five hundred years:

Patrick Stewart asks, “A B, or not a B?” for Sesame Street, in full Elizabethan gear.

A Klingon on a dark street delivers the same soliquoy with passion and sincerity.

Study these with care. How do the different adaptations emphasize different aspects of the speech? What do you get out of these versions that you haven’t gotten out of previous versions? How does each unusual angle highlight something in Hamlet’s situation and character that standard interpretations don’t? Finally, can you make a character discuss their doom with this kind of insightful clarity? (Of course not. But you can get a lot better if you pay close attention to how it’s done.) Note how Shakespeare keeps the entire discussion firmly rooted in vivid details!

Here’s a fascinating look at extrapolating a new story from an old favorite. Notice the tie-ins to the old plot and surprising but inevitable perspective on known plot elements. Can you approach your story from a completely different angle? From the angle of a minor character with their own story going on? Remember Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Note how giving other characters their own storylines adds to the wealth of subtle, telling detail in your protagonist’s story.

And from a recommendation by Maud Newton, here’s a study of metaphor showing we actually do think in imagistic association. If you translate all the common cliches and metaphors you can think of into vivid, concrete terms, how can you apply what you discover to your characters and their behavior?

Blow your own mind like a wad of bubble gum. (If you wind up scraping it off your nose, you went too far.)