A Twist of Noir

If you’ve ever wanted to try “The Writer’s Toolbox” by Jamie Cat Callan, I can offer proof that it really works. The prompts from the toolbox were used in a workshop I was in last summer at Stonecoast, and the resulting scene, which I thought was a throwaway, was reworked into a short-short noir piece that was published on “A Twist of Noir” online.

Typically, I have a really hard time writing in workshops. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I’m running up a brick wall while everyone else is madly scribbling away. For whatever reason, using the toolbox, I was able to dash off a fairly amusing scene, which remained in one of my many spiral-bound notebooks full of ideas and notes that I keep forever (and here’s a bit of trivia: Lyn Lifshin said she saves every draft of every poem she’s ever written in boxes she keeps in her basement on shelves that run floor to ceiling).

In this workshop, each of us blindly picked story elements from a pile of sticks, a stack of cards and a spinning wheel. Mine were:

The Protagonist: Joy from the rock band

Goal: To save Mother

Action: Learns to foresee the future

Obstacle: That idiot from corporate

I’m not new to crime or noir writing, though it isn’t my niche, but somehow, this draft seemed to steer in that direction on its own. Joy became Jodie from the rock band and she still wants to save Mother, and while on stage she has a vision of her mother in trouble, not with that idiot from corporate, but with a snake from the mob. You can read the story HERE.

So Callan’s “Writer’s Toolbox” comes highly recommended. Sometimes writers need to jump-start creative thinking, and often the best way is to step outside yourself into something wacky or absurd. What happens when you use these prompts is the analytical left brain (which tells us “this is stupid”) recedes to allow the free-wheeling right brain to link what seems disparate in a cohesive story.