The tools of the brainstorming trade.

I ended the last post by promising to get into the nuts and bolts of story telling. So as not to make myself a liar, we'll dive right in today.

I often start piecing together a story with a lot of brainstorming on an idea that I already have, a kernel of some kind that I am sure will grow into a marvelous tree if it is nurtured with the proper quantities of imagination and hard work. If you don't have an idea to start working from then I don't know what to tell you. Go read a book.

Spend more time thinking.

But if you have that glorious kernel then you have a starting point from which you can create a brainstorm of hurricane force, rivaling even Katrina. I personally enjoy fueling this electrode typhoon with scraps of cheap paper and Bic pens. Cheap disposables serve a function for the cautious, focused, personality. Someone who might define him or her self as "neat." There is less pressure, psychologically, when you work with low grade instruments. With quality instruments the pressure to perform is on, and that can easily crush the tender creative sprouts that are so necessary to telling a good story.

I have developed a taste for Bic pens over the years to the extent that they have become a bizarre fetish property that I am very particular about. I find using a Bic frees me from the constraints of perfectionism when I need to brainstorm or sketch ideas. Bics also embody other characteristics that I like, however, and all disposable pens are not the same. You can still go wrong with the wrong Bic. I prefer the opaque white plastic pens over their harder clear plastic counterparts. The plastic is flexible enough to bend as you make marks, thus leveraging the character that those marks have on the page. I find black ink is better for increasing the contrast you can get with the page as well, although other colors certainly can have their uses. The retractable tip pens are more convenient also, and they don't have caps that can be lost. Another unexpected benefit is that the ink is cheap, almost sticky, enough so that you can use them to sketch with lighter lines almost like you might use a pencil. Varying pressure gives a darker line as desired.

Before I get swept away in my raptures about Bic pens, let's got back on subject and talk about paper.

Your choice of paper affects your brainstorming ethos as well. I bought some three-ring binders, a three-hole punch, and a ream of computer paper a while ago for just this reason. The computer paper is cheap and I feel no guilt about marring it's surface with bad lines. The three ring binder also takes away the pressure of wasting space in one of my precious sketchbooks. I trust you can figure out the subsequent benefits of the three-hole punch yourselves.

Over time the binder becomes a creative journal that chronicles the progress of a story in the making in its entirety. Anything can be three-hole-punched and my binders quickly accrue all sorts of things in them from penciled panels, to tracing paper, to ink blot sheets with interesting patterns. Anything that had anything to do with the creation of a story finds its way into the binder until it bulges like some scrapbook gone obscenely wrong. As it ages it takes on the look of some arcane tome of knowledge. Before I die I will bury it in a cave to be found thousands of years later as some sort of future dead sea scroll.

Peoples will war over the meaning of its contents and I shall be revered as a god.

Tomorrow we'll talk about how to use cryogenics to freeze yourself so that you will live to see a future where the howling masses worship your graven image. We'll also talk about how to start turning your brainstorm into a story.