Saying them out loud helps me work through any issues, and she’s the perfect sounding board. I have an amazing crit partner who will let me tell her the same plot points over and over again. However, once the idea is solid, I recap very neatly. I have to use a spiral notebook, and I have to write across the page diagonally as I’m working through the idea.

I’ve come to discover over the years that my brainstorming techniques are very closely related to my learning styles – which are reading/writing and auditory.ġ. “What if?” and “what if?” always equals a brainstorm. The mess is most often caused by one simple question. Once I realized and accepted that my first drafts would never be clean, I learned to open myself up to the possibilities of the mess. In some ways this is frustrating, because I tend to produce a lot of words that don’t make it into the final story. The correct plot order comes to me after the first draft is written (or after the seventh). Sometimes even when I’m done! (Who tweaked names and places the day before her book went to press? That’d be me.) She’s chosen, instead, to channel her “mad word skills” into creating stories infused with her love of music.īrainstorming fuels my storytelling, and happens at every level of a story’s creation for me.

Myra McEntire knows the words to every R&B hit of the last decade, but since she lives in Nashville, the country music capital of America, her lyrical talents go sadly unappreciated. Myra’s young adult novel, Hourglass, debuts next week on June 14th, so mark your calendars, folks. She has a few tricks that I use myself (the shower thing? Totally works) and a bunch of others that I might try. JH: Toady I’d like to welcome Myra McEntire to the blog and get down and dirty with a little brainstorming.

Myra mcentire