Since I spent an entire post last week detailing the tools I use in the actual composition of my writing, I thought I'd make you all familiar with one of the conceptual tools I like to use. This acronym—mentioned in the title of this post—is probably familiar to most of you, and if so, I apologize for taking your time. For those of you who aren't familiar with SCAMPER and its component ideas, please continue reading. I really think you'll get something useful out of it.
So why would you need to SCAMPER? Have you ever felt like your idea battery has just been drained? Like every concept you want to work into your new writing project has been iterated into mediocrity by everyone else? It happens to me quite often. I come up with an idea, and then I look around at the media I've been consuming around that time. More often than not, I see facets and slivers of the ideas I thought were so brilliant reflected back at me, and my fascination with my own ingenuity fades. And when that fades, it takes with it any luster my formerly-wonderful story concept had. At the very least, using SCAMPER has helped me realize that it's not a bad thing if someone else has the same ideas you do. As Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." And SCAMPER helps you do that with remarkable ease.
Before I dive into the specifics of each area, let me break the acronym down for you:
Substitute
Combine
Adapt
Modify, Magnify, Minify
Put to other uses
Eliminate
Rearrange
Substitute - The first facet of this strategy is to substitute something in a current concept with some other idea. What if the Force in Star Wars was really black magic? Or what if automobiles ran on heavy water? The point of this exercise is to change the equation and then see how things fall out on the other end. With the car example, what kind of pollution would a water-burning car produce? Would gas tanks be bigger or smaller? How much heavy water is on the planet, and how rare is this substance? What kind of effect would this have on an economy?
Combine - The point of this aspect is to take two ideas and mash them together. Say you need a unique creature for your latest fantasy work. How about mixing a giraffe and a vampire bat? Or a mole and an orangutan? And it doesn't stop there. You can use this to create plot ideas (What would a romance horror plot be like?), characters (police detective plus part-time housekeeper), settings (cemetery with a hidden research lab beneath it), and nearly anything else you would need for a story.
Adapt - This entry in the acronym is one that comes dangerously close to stealing, but it can still serve as a launchpad for ideas of your own. What pieces of other people's stories can you blatantly rip off? Do you want your main character to be like Scarlet O'Hara from Gone With the Wind? Or do you want to have dragons eat ash and only have one male like in Reign of Fire? Inspiration can come from anywhere. The writer's job is to take that inspiration and reskin it to work in our own fiction. I'm not condoning plagiarism here; stealing another person's intellectual property is still a crime. But if you can take bits and pieces of what other people have made and mold it into your own work, you're actually synthesizing something new from what's come before.
Modify, Magnify, Minify - You can modify how something in your particular world works. Is gravity lighter than Earth-norm? Do people in this particular area produce their own light via bioluminescence rather than relying on electricity or fire? Are cats really demonic messengers who only act like they enjoy being petted? Tweaking just a few insignificant details can open up whole new vistas of possibility.
You can also put the magnifying glass to a particular aspect of something in your writing. For example, people always say that money is power, but what if it really were power? That the health of character's bank account determines her health or the absolute value of her importance in society? What if plants pulled too much carbon dioxide out of the air? What would that do to life on Earth, or on other planets?
There's also the possibility of reducing something's significance in your setting. What if money was completely unimportant in your setting, if every resource were common property (and not in the government-administrated way communism tries to do it)? What would happen if love wasn't a factor in dating or marrying someone, that emotional attachment was actually frowned upon?
Put to other uses - One of my favorite Web sites is There, I Fixed It!, and it's a perfect example of this part of SCAMPER. So many of those "repairs" include using something against its designated use (and against common sense, all too often), and that is something you can do with your writing. What if flowers were given on blind dates as a way of showing the other person that you have no interest in them at all, a warning sign that their companion for the evening was just "going through the motions"? What if plain cotton string could cure cancer? What if sports cars were used as ambulances? This doesn't even have to be a pandemic kind of change; it could just be for one or two scenes in your book.
Eliminate - What would happen if you take something necessary away from your setting? What if Earth's oceans suddenly dried up? Or if a plague of moths swept through a city and ate every shred of fabric? If you can think about something your characters couldn't live without and then take that away from them, they have to deal with it in creative ways. And when you think about the creative ways they have to deal with that situation, it can help propel your story along.
Rearrange - The last item in the acronym refers to changing the order in which certain events occur. What if buildings had to be furnished before they could be built? What if you needed to "prime the pump" of an electrical cable to make it so that power would flow through it? What if you had to be fired from a job before you could be hired for it? These are kind of nonsensical ideas, I know, but taking events out of the established order can help you come up with some interesting processes that will help you kickstart your imagination.
I probably haven't done this activity justice, and I don't know how many of you will find it useful as anything more than something to work your way past writer's block. But I've gotten a couple of ideas on things I could do just trying to come up with examples for this post, and I call that a win. Now, I'm off to write my story about a moneyless world where vampire giraffes plague the wilderness. :)
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