The Rule of Twenty

I was listening to one of the RWA workshops on CD yesterday and I heard Irene Goodman’s talk “An Agent’s Views from the Front Lines.” It was a great workshop, and one of her more interesting tips came from Debbie Macomber. It was about a way of getting your imagination out of a rut.

Sometimes when you’re in the middle of a book, you hit a stalling point. It could be that your conflict isn’t as strong as you thought it was (Oh, me! Pick me!), or possibly you can’t think of a way to solve that particular problem. Debbie Macomber suggests the rule of 20.

You take out a sheet of paper and number it from one to twenty. At the top of the paper, you list your problem. For me, I listed the problem of my marriage of convenience. It wasn’t the heroine’s motivation for getting married…the question was–why HIM? Why the hero? Why couldn’t it be any Joe Schmoe? So I started listing the reasons, as many as I could. This is where the 20 reasons comes in handy.

Once you get past reasons eight and nine, you start getting silly. You start making up the craziest reasons you can think of. :mallet: By the time you’re at reasons fifteen and sixteen, your brain is thinking in a new direction. And by the time you finish the list, your answer is on it. By forcing yourself to think outside of the box (and believe me, you just want that list done!), you’ll find that one of your wackier answers might actually work. :crazyjumping:

Good luck!