Writing.Com General Discussion

I talk to myself all the time. I live alone, so I've got nobody quietly whispering down the 'phone to the GP asking if I need to get committed. I'm not hearing voices (at least none other than my own), so I don't care.

When it comes to writing and developing stories, it helps to 'sound it out', but my lack of a sounding board is a bit of a hindrance there. However, I'm a writer. I turn to my tools.

I create some characters. One is like myself, but also has characteristics of the story I want to tell. I call her Erin, a character from one of my stories who had a talking cat AI assistant only she could see.

The second I drag from my toolkit. He's kind of like a genie, full of wisdom but very cynical with it. He listens to Erin's ideas, then pulls them apart, exposing plot-holes, inconsistencies and where this might drive the story to. He also tosses in new ideas, like any good sounding board does. He doesn't have a name, but goes by the moniker 'The Darkness', because he will put a dark twist onto anything he can.

Of course, Erin's AI cat sometimes butts in. She's the incredibly sensible one, and she's good at deconstructing ideas to get to the heart of them and figure out why - if at all - they are important. Strangely, the genie can converse with the cat.

Writing down their conversations helps develop the ideas they generate, and I have a section in my project for recording ideas that fall out of them. Pushing ideas through the lens of defined characters seems to work well, and writing them down helps me to formulate and generate ideas. Being able to read them back helps me to pick out issues I missed the first time round.