Forced relationships

 This week I’ve been working on short stories, and I’ve been remembering an idea from my old work days.  Back when I was in the day job companies used to try to create new ideas by using formal processes.  One of these methods was the idea of forced relationships.

What you did was to create two lists of things, either ideas for new features, or for new products, etc.  Then you picked one idea from each list at random, and tried to force the two ideas to work together.  Often you’d end up with two things which just didn’t seem to mesh together at all.  The creative bit came in thinking around ways you could make them fit.

And that’s what I’ve been doing this week with my short stories.  I’ve submitted a story for an anthology titled ‘Derelict’.  The brief was to think of a way to re-purpose something derelict.  They wanted unusual ideas, so I decided to repurpose a derelict space warship as the complete opposite.  This ship is in a neutral zone of space, between the territories of five species.  I decided that the ship would house four gardens, each for one of the alien species which live alongside humans.  These gardens would be planted with native plants from each species’ gardens.  The ship would be used as a diplomatic centre.

I then decided to add centenarian human diplomats to negotiate a tense situation and prevent a war with one of the aliens.  I’m pretty happy with the result, but we’ll see if the editor likes it in due course.

This week I wrote a new story for a magazine which wanted positive environmental messages.  I took as one of my forced relationships the proposal to build a high-speed maglev line right though Dartmoor and Exmoor National Parks.  The other thread was the head of a conservation trust who was determined to stop the scene .  We know that simple protests often don’t work to stop these, so she needed something new.

I’d come across a statistic that four out of five young people in London are totally disconnected from the natural world.  How could I flip that to get these youngsters to protest against this environmental destruction?  Enter the old fertility symbol of the Green Man.  I had my character create a game, based on the Pokemon idea of collecting monsters.  In my game I had them collecting dryads, tree spirits.  The idea was they’d lead players to the Green Man, who’d give them environmental messages and turn them into activists.  I’ve sent the story off, so we’ll see whether that editor likes that idea.

I’ve also used forced relationships to combine big cats, racing, and a virus, as a way to resist alien occupation.  That too has been sent out on submission. I’m hoping one of my forced relationships comes up trumps.