I need creative help...

[Inhuman Bot]

Well, I'am in trouble.
I'am uncreative when I'am told to write something, rather then decide to do it, so I'am asking for some help.

A good 30%+ of my english mark this term (or at least, I think that's the term...) is based on writing a mystery play, and I'am low on ideas.

Does anyone have a suggestion of ways to get inspiration, or part of an idea of what I could write?

[reorith]

the penguin is a vengeful mistress
a play byslaanesh

act 1.
scene 1

So ur with ur honey and yur making out wen the phone rigns. U anser it n the vioce is "wut r u doing wit my daughter?" U tell ur girl n she say "my dad is ded". THEN WHO WAS PHONE?

end.
there you go, no need to thank me

what mysteries have you had to solve in your real life? do you have any experience to draw from?

[Player_Zero]

Get back to 4chan. :smallannoyed:

I suggest ripping things off.

Or rather, it is much easier to come up with ideas when you've recently seen something similar.

[InaVegt]

You could first look at your core assumptions.

Would you like a Holmes style story (Smart private detective, clueless aide, clueless police), a CSI style story (Huge on tech, mostly police, less logic than other styles), a Miss Marple style story (Old, charming, bright person who gets dragged into stuff in the usually so nice village [nevermind that as a series goes on, the village turns into a place high on crime]), or some other style?

[silent shade]

Does play mean it should be performable?
Not in a creative mood right now - but maybe little help with some receipt for generic mysterie stories:
-setting (everyday world best)
-somebody who has to solve the mysteries: main hero (journalist, detective or maybe best just random average humanoid)
-way to get involved (weird phone call/meeting, smb. disappears, learns some secret information, ...)
-weirdness: hero get's strange tasks (observing average person for no reason, reading every exemplar of certain magazine, getting highscore in an online game, ...), people are weird (having twins running around, hiding in dark to transform optical brain zones into different abilities, some religious cultists, disappearings, usage of same/similar names, crazy hobbies, magic),...
-mystery: things happened that you later find out couldn't have happened (people dead long ago - reorith's post above about father, witnesses saw different things, object in possession of somebody else,...), reoccuring events (dejavuhs), supernormal incidents, ...
-mystery resolved: logical explanation ("dead" father just dialed the wrong number, confused similar names/dates/phone numbers, just a dream, personality disorder, ...)
-final doubt: still paradox left ("dead" father just dialed the wrong number BUT the phone should have been disconnected the whole time / the father mentioned something only he could know, ...)

...probably not really helping

[Maxymiuk]

Were you ever in an improv theatre class?

There's a game called "Murder at the Hotel del Gato" (probably has many name variants though). Half of the students play out a completely improvised scene of guests arriving - one by one - at a remote hotel in the middle of a stormy night. There's no one at the reception. No one in the whole hotel, in fact, except for the people arriving. And all they find in the reception is a note reading "You're all going to die".

One of the "guests" is, secretly, the murderer. The audience doesn't know their identity, and neither do the other participants (the class instructor tells the murderer in secret beforehand, of course). What the participants do know is the predetermined - subtle - signal for "keel over in about 10 seconds from now".

The scene begins, guests begin arriving. They talk, interact, yell for the management. One by one, they find the note. One by one, they begin to die. The audience's task is to identify the murderer (or start yelling "DIE ALREADY!" if the game drags on for too long). But ideally, the scene should play out until there's two people left standing, and one, with dawning realization, points and says "It's you!"

***

Only this time, the game played out a bit differently.

Someone died for real.

[Setra]

I suggest ripping things off.
I second this. Just do it in a way that makes it look like you're not.

[Kuma Da]

Inspiration is ridiculously hard to force. It usually doesn't show up until you're well and truly distracted doing something different and then it swoops down upon you with furious talons of plot.

At least, that's been my experience.

If you're stuck on something you're trying to write, the best advice I can give is that you should charge on ahead and start writing with no idea at all what you're doing. Eventually, if you get absorbed enough in doing that, inspiration will creep up behind you and strike.

The second-best advice I can give is read/listen to music a lot. Seek out stuff you haven't been exposed to before. Chat with your friends about mysteries, both in personal experience and stuff they've read about. Eventually you'll turn something up.

If you're really stuck and want specifics on a plot or whatever, go ahead and PM me. I write a fair bit, and I'm also the writer's-block-iest person I know, so I've got a handful of strategies for dealing with that.

Good luck, man.

[InaVegt]

I second this. Just do it in a way that makes it look like you're not.

There's ripping off and ripping off.

Some types of ripping of are generally accepted, (All tropes are essentially ripoffs.) while others are looked down upon heavily. (Like plagiarism.)

[Jorkens]

Rip off a famous story that isn't a mystery but does involve a killing or other crime, by retelling it as a mystery. (There's a Thurber story about having a conversation while on holiday with a woman who assumed Macbeth was a detective story and that obviously Lady Macbeth was the red herring thrown in to conceal who actually killed Duncan...) For bonus points, make it so that it only becomes clear what the original that it's based on is at the same point that the answer is revealed.

Alternatively, use a classic crime setup, like the locked room mystery or the country house mystery, which takes a lot of the decision making out of your hands and lets you focus on working out the details of how the crime worked and how the detective figures it out.

[Felixaar]

Try watching some documentarys or flicking through the news. That always sparks my creativity.

Also, sounds like you go to a cool school based on the subject.

[Uncle Festy]

Get back to 4chan. :smallannoyed:

You're saying that a lot today, arent'cha.
Oh, and Slaanesh? You're up for autolynch in Ravnica.

[Deathslayer7]

Were you ever in an improv theatre class?

There's a game called "Murder at the Hotel del Gato" (probably has many name variants though). Half of the students play out a completely improvised scene of guests arriving - one by one - at a remote hotel in the middle of a stormy night. There's no one at the reception. No one in the whole hotel, in fact, except for the people arriving. And all they find in the reception is a note reading "You're all going to die".

One of the "guests" is, secretly, the murderer. The audience doesn't know their identity, and neither do the other participants (the class instructor tells the murderer in secret beforehand, of course). What the participants do know is the predetermined - subtle - signal for "keel over in about 10 seconds from now".

The scene begins, guests begin arriving. They talk, interact, yell for the management. One by one, they find the note. One by one, they begin to die. The audience's task is to identify the murderer (or start yelling "DIE ALREADY!" if the game drags on for too long). But ideally, the scene should play out until there's two people left standing, and one, with dawning realization, points and says "It's you!"

***

Only this time, the game played out a bit differently.

Someone died for real.

kind of sound like 10 Little Indians. :smallbiggrin: