Under the instructor of our fiction teacher, Christian Wilburn, we have been doing generation exercises in preparation for our final short story project. The goal is to create many different, unfiltered story ideas and let our minds roam, hopefully unearthing a few golden ideas from the rubble. Christian told us to ask questions about preconceived ideas, genres, and overused character tropes and write about “what if” scenarios, leading to the most unusual rabbit holes. Some of my ideas included, “What if a sword screamed at you if you could not wield it correctly,” “What if Santa Claus got drunk on milk during Christmas Eve,” or “What if Heaven was set alight once you walked through the brimming gates?” Some of the rabbit holes consisted of explosive oranges and the logistics of resurrection. The entire process is entertaining yet unusual. 

One of the most difficult aspects of this assignment that my peers and I encountered was we could not listen to our internal editors as we wrote. We must place every idea we create on the page, including lots of random words strewn together. I’ll be honest, I felt uncomfortable being told that I couldn’t edit as I wrote. My writing style thrives on spitting out a multitude of words and constantly revising my ideas as I continue to write. My process allows me to streamline my otherwise incoherent ramblings into a consistent story. However, being told that you are unable to write in a way that has worked for so long is a bit jarring. I can feel the viscous, sloshing nature of my insides, and the constant desire to correct my work looms over me like a miasma, especially when I know the words I am producing are subpar at best. Regardless, I tried to make it work, and somehow the process yielded some fruitful results.

Although my Google Doc is littered with a heap of unappealing ideas, there are a few with promise. I love to write about superpowers, and I spend some of my free time reading about the different abilities of fictional characters. My brain cruised through ideas I had already written, and I manifested a superpower. Christian told us that if we had any ideas disconnected from the specific exercises we did in class, we should place them in a designated section of our Google Docs. These ideas were “ideas interruptus,” which is Latin for “interrupted ideas.” Reading that label gave me an idea: an ability to trigger random thoughts in people’s heads at will. I thought about the logistics behind that idea and its possible applications, the limits, triggers, and repercussions of such an ability. I love to theorize about random ideas, and I enjoyed generating ideas once they all revolved around the same one.

After a couple of days of pouring my brain into a Google Doc, I finally found an idea that I was happy with. These generative exercises remind me that sometimes I must break out of my comfort zone to obtain inspiration.