Hunting down inspiration
“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” - Jack London
“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”
Linus Pauling
Linus Pauling was one of the rare people to have won two Nobel Prizes in different fields – one for Chemistry, and one for Peace. Clearly he knew what he was talking about when it comes to having lots of ideas. Perhaps he was a little less clear on how to identify a good idea, given his fixation on the beneficial effects of vast doses of Vitamin C. But still, the principle stands.
Generating many ideas and then whittling them down is the best way to find a good idea - one which can sustain you through writing a whole novel.
I guess I’ve now given you due warning about my ability to go off at a tangent, even before I’ve begun – there’s my flibbertigibbet mind at work. But that kind of mind is really useful at the early stages of a creative project, when the point is to be open to everything and not to narrow focus too soon.
There are very many people who have written about creativity, so here I’m just singling out a couple of my favourites. There’s no one way to do any of this, so it’s all about experimenting with different approaches until you find out what works for you.
I’m currently working on an outline for my fourth novel – the outline for my third is taking a temporary break from my interfering ways, before we commit to the long slog of the first full draft.
For me, this is the most enjoyable stage of the process. Ideas relevant to my project are leaping out at me every day. I rush back home from my walks, repeating a phrase under my breath all the way so I don’t forget it. I leap out of bed moments after I have found a comfortable position and should be nodding off – because a new character or a new motive has turned up. I pause a TV programme or a podcast because – aha – the solution to a plot problem has hijacked my mind.
The stage before this, however, can be anything but joyful. I have in the past spent weeks and months unsure what to write about. I’ve started several novels and given up on them because they were dull, or I simply lost momentum. But now I have resources which are invaluable when I am casting around from ideas about what to write next.
That is, I think, why I now have three novel ideas simmering away somewhere in the back of my mind, most of the time.
I’ve kept notebooks and journals for as long as I can remember – there were two heavy boxes of them when we moved house earlier this year. They have all kinds of scribbling in them – notes on what I’d been reading or a film or TV programme which interested me. Odd bits of diary. Occasionally an idea for a story or novel. And I have trawled through them occasionally and too often found them cold and inert. I think this was because I was altogether too serious and grown up about it all.
Also, it has to be confessed, I am not the most sensible note-taker. I wrote in detail about one film which fascinated me and never once said what the film was - and I still have no idea. So don’t let me put you off keeping a journal - I still scribble in notebooks all the time. It just helps me more to think of them as Rough Books where I can play with ideas.
Developing your own creative habits
Then I discovered choreographer Twyla Tharp’s book, The Creative Habit. She described what she does at the beginning of a project.
“Everyone has his or her own organizational system. Mine is a box, the kind you can buy at Office Depot for transferring files. I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me.”
Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit
This worked so much better, even when I didn’t have an actual project. I started collecting bits and pieces of articles and news stories and just my own scribbled ideas that seemed to belong together. Although they were still all filed under miscellaneous I discovered I was always coming back to the same themes.
As a writer, I didn’t use an actual box – usually it was a collection of links and notes on the desktop computer, filed in something like OneNote or Evernote. I do actually like to have something a bit more physical when I make a proper start on a project so I scribble in my old fashioned paper notebook, and print off the most relevant articles and cram them into a cardboard folder, along with postcards or printed images that maybe evoke a character or place, anything which seems at all relevant. Then when I get stuck I can tip these all out on the dining table, and flip through my notebook, and see if there’s something there that will unstick me.
Neil Gaiman’s Approach
A couple of years ago I found a process that was even better - at least for me - courtesy of Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass. He talks about the Creative Compost Heap.
“I think it’s really important for a writer to have a compost heap. Everything you read, things that you write, things that you listen to, people you encounter, they can all go on the compost heap. And they will rot down. And out of them grow beautiful stories”
Neil Gaiman, Sources of Inspiration, Masterclass
There’s something more active in this approach, I feel. You’re not just collecting random bits and pieces that come your way – you are hunting them down and most importantly, you are planning to transform them in some way.
Compost needs to rot. It’s a chemical transformation which brings new life – perhaps we could even lay claim to alchemical, as there’s a kind of magic in it. It takes time, and it needs nourishment and to be properly layered, and built and contained in a (metaphorical) alembic, from which your ideas will eventually be distilled.
Gaiman suggests looking to your favourite books as sources of inspiration. He specifically mentions myths, fairy tales and folk tales – and so do Atwood and Rushdie. But he also suggests that you might be inspired by say, a song, an artwork of any kind, or a particular person. Anything, in fact, which grabs your attention. Always he suggests being playful with the sources – changing and subverting elements of the story, modernising, but most of all making it somehow your own.
Once you’ve been keeping your own Creative Compost Heap for a while, you may start to notice that certain ideas and themes which interest you keep coming up. Sometimes two or more ideas seem to go together in your imagination, and you have the seed of a new project.
“You get ideas from two things coming together. You get ideas from things that you have seen and thought and known about and then something else that you’ve seen and thought and known about, and the realization that you can just collide those things.”
Neil Gaiman, Sources of Inspiration, Masterclass
When you’re ready to start a specific project, you can then create a specialised compost heap which works very much in the same way as Twyla Tharp’s box system – in other words it’s a more focused process.
For me these strategies make setting off on a new project a lot more fun than it was.
Once you’ve been building that creative compost heap for a while, there’s never a blank start. There’s always a treasure trove, a collection of lots of the ideas and sources that excite you, that had a part to play in making you who you are – someone who wants to write, to create something new. Rummaging around in that compost heap, adding new items, seeing what lights up your imagination – it’s more like play than work.
That playfulness matters because if you’re going to write a novel it’s going to take a long time You really need to be sure it’s something that is going to interest you, to the point of obsession, over the long term.
Apparently this approach doesn’t work only for writers and novelists. My husband is a system designer and programmer and he says this is very much the way he works at the beginning of a new creative project. The difference is that he does all this in his head. The monster.
I haven’t answered the key question - Where do stories come from?
You may have noticed I missed out that difficult bit. I haven’t exactly described where these ideas come from, or why particular things inspire us. There sadly isn’t, as Neil Gaiman is known to have claimed – a little ideas shop in Bognor Regis. These are simply a few strategies for attracting ideas, a way to create an environment where they might show up, like bees in a flower garden.
This whole process, of finding ideas and characters and creating stories, is so difficult precisely because it’s not under our conscious control – consulting sources, ordering our thoughts with bullet points, using those highlighter pens as we put an essay together. It’s much more mysterious than that.
It’s an unconscious process and it comes more easily to some than to others. I’m very much a pedestrian, rational and logical thinker and it is very hard for me to let go and just let this creative stuff happen. Part of why the compost heap and the box full of sources helps is because it keeps my logical brain busy traversing the right kind of terrain, and out of the way of the unconscious mind where the real work is going on.
The closest way I have of describing it is that it’s like dreaming while being awake.
I think that’s why some people work well in the mornings, before they are properly awake. For me, it’s more likely after I’ve gone to bed and relaxed. Maybe it happens when walking, or embroidering – there’s something about rhythmic activity which seems to be conducive. Sometimes images bubble up like a kind of waking dream in the moments before falling asleep (hypnogogic visions) – and when I’ve spent enough time focusing on an idea or a theme, those images will be useful and apt enough for me to leap out of bed and write it all down.
Even a person like me, who finds it difficult, has learned methods for getting out of my own way.
If we do the work, tend our compost heap, plant our inner gardens, the ideas will come. If our stories matter, we will do the work.
That’s just the beginning of the beginning….
Ann
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Let The Dog See The Rabbit
A collection of thoughts and links which all focus on inspiration and where to find it
Masterclass Courses.
Masterclass is very much up to you what you make of it. For me, it’s a pleasure to listen to an expert talking about their field. I have a slight suspicion that many of who want to write have a secret hope that one day a brilliant writer will let slip a clue - something perhaps about their writing routine - which will enable us to bypass the slog of working out what our own path looks like, and doing the actual work.
So far, that’s not happened. But all the same I do find the videos inspiring - especially Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie as well as Neil Gaiman.
Each famous tutor provides a series of videos in which they discuss aspects of the craft, and there’s usually a workbook which goes with these, which may add an extra layer of detail, or provide writing exercises. I am currently enjoying Madhur Jaffrey teaching me to cook Indian food, and I confess, I am doing many more of the practical exercises on this course – and very delicious they are too.
So there’s the inspirational aspect, and there’s certainly some good practical writing advice that I’ve picked up. Neil Gaiman’s compost heap, for instance, has proved to be a very useful concept for me.
But these are not really participative courses – which is what is really required in a writing course. There are discussion forums, but I didn’t find them to be either easy to navigate, or lively enough to be worth the effort.
Here’s a how-to exercise from Masterclass : How To Find Story Ideas for Your Novel - and though there’s nothing actually WRONG with it, it’s just a little impersonal and pedestrian.
Neil Gaiman’s blog post - Where Do You Get Your Ideas?
Psychology Today – Where Do Writers Get Their Ideas
Bookfox – How 50 Famous Authors Find Writing Inspiration
People Still Ask: How Do Writers Get Their Ideas by Lore Segal
Be open! You never know where you might find inspiration. Damian Hirst and Blue Peter