Solitare Brainstorming Technique

for Character Situations

By Eugene Orlando

Many times we reach a point in the story where we must make a choice how are characters are going to react to a situation. Never … Never … go with the first thing you think of. It will be the most common and predictable turning off your reader. The method for finding a more exotic solution is to make a list of as many reactions as you can think of and write them down … no matter how bizarre they may seem. Then look at the most bizarre ones first and see if you can make them work. Below are three examples from my own writing. In each case I used the last and most bizarre, making them work for my stories—and in each case, at first I didn’t think they would every work. Now, they act as a plausible element of surprise.

Situation: A girl stumbles across several boys skinny-dipping in a creek. What can the girl do?

1. Very Typical: Take their clothes and run.

2. Typical: Tease them and run away.

3. Typical: Sit and wait for them to come get them.

4. Typical: Throw their clothes in the water and leave.

5. Exotic: Take off her clothes and join them.

Situation: How do twins get separated as babies (for historical fiction having taken place in 1785 America)?

1. Typical: One was stolen and kept by the kidnappers.

2. Typical: One was stolen, sold, and later adopted out for profit.

3. Typical: One was given up [or both to separate individuals] due to destitution.

4. Used: After a divorce, each parent takes one [The Parent Trap].

5. Mildly Exotic: One was thought dead in a deliver emergency situation, but lived.

6. Mildly Exotic: Both were stolen to be killed because they were heirs to a royal position someone else wanted for their own offspring.

7. Very Exotic: One was lost in a gambling bet.

Situation: How does Charlotte find out what is happening with the coffin ships (ships filled to overcapacity with Irish immigrants to America during the potato famine of the late 1840s)?

1. Typical: Interviews the ship captains.

2. Typical: Interviews a local newspaper.

3. Typical: Goes to the Irish government and demands the information.

4. Mildly Exotic: Sneak aboard a coffin ship and steal their records.

5. Very Exotic: Enlists the aid of an Irish male reporter who poses as an immigrant agent. She poses as his dumb wife. Together they see a captain trying to sell him immigrant passages.

Many times it depends on the characters and what precedes the scene?