Fun for Friday: Rethinking the Real World
I’ve had a project keeping me busy at work recently that involves searching through abstracts for papers that were given at a conference over the past 70 years. It’s been fascinating to me as a historian in seeing what trends and themes appeared throughout the years, but it’s also intrigued my writer brain, because I see the titles, or bits of the descriptions, and think of the ways that these papers could have spec fic leanings. (Never mind the fact that this journal had a RUN of Sasquatch articles in the late 1960s.)
I suspect that this is something that a writer could do with any sort of magazine or academic journal. Just pick one up and look through the table of contents to see if anything jumps out at you as a title or a topic for a story or poem you want to write. If nothing jumps out from the table of contents, flip through the pages and see if any phrases jump out at you. You could also jumble up some of the titles, or pair a quote from one article with the title of another. Any way you decide to do it, it’s a great source of REALLY random inspiration that could turn into something brilliant!
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