My New Writing Partner
“Now Harry, you must know all about Muggles. Tell me, what exactly is the function of a rubber duck?”
– Arthur Weasley, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (film)
This is my new writing partner Quackserker. He sits on my desk and helps me overcome various challenges. How? Well, dear reader, let me introduce you to the “Rubber Ducky Method”.
As the story goes, a sequestered programmer would often bump into problems with his code that he could not figure out by himself. This is common for programmers, because their jobs are really fricken’ hard. While attempting to debug a problem he would articulate said problem to a rubber duck on his desk. Speaking it aloud, as simply as he could, he often came up with solutions that lead to breakthroughs in his code.
In case you’re interested, the book this story comes from is called The Pragmatic Programmer.
After hearing about this concept I found a rubber duck and put it on my desk. Mostly it was for giggles, but when I came to a problem in my story that I could not figure out I glanced down at my duck and said ‘What the hell’. I then proceeded to walk my duck through the plot and the problem at hand. About five minutes later I came up with a solution. For some reason, articulating the problem out loud to myself (or my duck) got my brain to make the leaps it needed to make to continue writing.
Here’s an example monologue: “Ok Quackserker, my protagonist is stuck in the trunk of a car with her hands bound and the car is about to go over a cliff and into the ocean. She never took swimming lessons and she can’t telepathically speak with fish to come save her. The driver is planning to bail out before reaching the cliff so he doesn’t die too. I have no idea how my protagonist would get out of this unless the driver was a passionate lover of squirrels and one happened to run in front of him before he approached the edge of the cliff which causes him to spin out and flip the car to avoid hitting the squirrel and somehow the trunk opens up in the process… let’s run with that for now, thanks Quackserker.”
Since then I’ve used my desk ducky to solve numerous other problems, so many that I sought to upgrade to Quackserker above.
Ridiculous? Yes. Black magic? Quite possibly. Useful? I’d say so.
Buy yourself a duck and give it a try. Amazon has tons of different styles ranging from Batman Duck to Zombie Duck to a good ‘ol fashioned Regular Duck. You can even buy your own Quackserker here.
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