If there’s one question that seems inexorably linked to the art of writing, it’s probably this: “Where do you get your ideas?”
As with so many other questions, there isn’t one single answer, not even if you ask the same person twice. Maybe some people have an idea box that they can reach into at will and pull out fantastic, fully formed ideas. I, unfortunately, am not one of those people.
At least, not all of the time. But once in a while, if everything falls in to place just right, it’s another story entirely.
Ultimately what I’m really talking about here is inspiration, that initial spark that lights off your story. No two are alike. Whether you spend all day rubbing two sticks together to build even the smallest campfire, or strike a single match and set off a raging inferno, it all starts with that first spark, and your story is exactly the same.
One of my most wacky and funny short stories was written in about 30 minutes between classes, all in a rush, with no prior planning or preparation. I literally wrote it almost as fast as I thought it up, typing as quickly as I could so that I could get it all down before walking back out the door and probably losing the rhythm and feel of the story for good.
The sequel, on the other hand, took something like three years to write. Not because I didn’t know how I wanted it to end, because I knew exactly. I just didn’t know how to get there. It’s all well and good if you know, say, that in the end the ring will be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom where it was forged. But if you don’t have the slightest idea how in the world to get Frodo from Bag End to Mordor in the first place, then you’re not going to make much overall progress.
So just how to you get really well inspirated* in the first place, then?
Well, everyone is different, and since I’m not you, all I can really tell you here is what works for me. Luckily, for me that’s an easy question to answer, because I have absolutely no idea how I get inspired.
But one big thing in my favor is the fact that I tend to have a very wandering mind. I don’t mean that I’m never paying attention to what I’m doing, because that’s not true at all. But somewhere in the back of my mind, even—and sometimes most importantly—when I don’t want it, there’s some nugget of awareness that’s casting randomly about from one thought to another, just looking for something to latch on to.
I suspect that it’s something that developed over quite a few years in school as a child. It was never especially straining for me to do the homework and follow along. It wasn’t until taking calculus or physics classes that things started requiring some more determined focus, and by then I’d grown quite an active and detailed imagination. Not only that, but it was quite happy running along on its own while the rest of my brain kept working.
Which is why, threeish years after I wrote The Story of Aug in one frantic break between classes, I was sitting in a meeting at work and suddenly struck by exactly the right way to tie together the sequel that I’d been poking at off and on ever since. So, on a page of graph paper in the almost unreadable scrawl of a terrible office-supply-cabinet pen (pro tip: find a pen that you like using, and then always always have one around) I scribbled down a few paragraphs that encapsulated how I would finish the story. That evening, after only a little extra pondering, The Rest of the Story of Aug was finally on paper.
So let’s say you’ve got a corner of your brain set aside for random ideas. Just how do you go about actually getting something useful out of it?
The only thing that I’ve come to learn is that trying to force something out will almost never result in anything I like. The best way to counter that, I’ve found, is deceptively simple: just don’t think about it so hard. Granted, that isn’t easy, especially when you’re actually trying to write something. But sometimes there’s just no way around it, you’ve got to step away and let things percolate. If you’re lucky, something will bubble up in a few hours or days (or years) that will get you back on track again.
How do you do that, then? Most simply, I’d say to find something that takes your mind mostly off what you want to be thinking about. Not completely, just enough that you’re not obsessing over it any more. For example, in the summer I bike every day, and the resulting 90 minutes of idle brain time has been a great way to come up with new ideas. Oftentimes I’ll get back with entire plots in my head, and spend the rest of the evening writing them down.
Or you could try music. I’ve found that the right piece of music can crank the random inspirator into overdrive. Example? In my senior year in college I had an interesting thought for a space epic type of story, and after sketching out a couple of pages I put it on the shelf for future reference. Every now and then I’d scribble a few more notes or a random idea to include, but for the most part I didn’t do much with it. A full six years later, I was listening to a recent movie’s soundtrack while driving and, during one impressive track from near the end, I stopped picturing the film in my head and instead saw the trailer for my own story. Two, almost three minutes worth of music played as images and dialogue and narration unspooled in my head, almost like I was watching it already put to screen.
After that, the entire story was right there, perhaps a little fuzzy in spots but better than any outline or storyboard I could ever come up with. Since then I’ve been fleshing out the story as a 10-part miniseries. Will it ever be filmed? Who knows. But if so, no matter what else, I know exactly how the trailer will look and sound.
But I have to be careful. Music conjurs up interesting ideas, but for me those ideas then become permanently merged to that music. I can’t listen to that particular soundtrack any more without seeing that specifc idea, and the same is true for lots of other music I like. More than anything else, that’s why I don’t listen to music while I’m writing. It’s thought provoking all right, but it’s almost too good.
So after all of that, are there any, you know, useful bits here to take away? Maybe.
The most important thing is probably to remember that there’s no one way to get ideas. You’ve read a few things that work for me, maybe they’ll give you a new thought for something to try yourself. Or, maybe you inspirate more effectively under a more structured approach, setting aside the time or doing idea-generating exercises. Regardless, if you find some combination that works, go for it. There’s no one, generic, ultimate way to get good ideas, and no single place to go to find them.
Just remember, even if it feels like you’re doing nothing but rubbing sticks together, sooner or later you do get those sparks. Even better, the more you try, the better you’ll get at it, until eventually you can find the right combination of distraction, concentration, or just plain idle thoughts that can give you that inferno of ideas you’re looking for.
Jason
(*No other word is as appropriate, so thanks to Syn for this one. Feel free to enbiggen your blog any time with words I made up.)
Friday, March 25, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Rain that ever-loving stuff down on me.
It is becoming increasingly apparent to me that once someone has decided to consider themselves a writer—whether or not they're any good, whether or not they have any faith in their talent—their life as a casual observer is over.
When I was in early elementary school, I read books by the truckload. I've never been a quick reader, but at least when I was a kid, enjoying books came easy—all a book had to do to make me happy was have characters, a plot, and a puppy on the front cover. I don't remember most of the books I read before sixth grade, probably because they were all about the same, both in my mind, and on the page.
But I do remember the fateful day in sixth grade, during free-reading hour, when I took my book (some nameless member of that series with the adventurous alliteration…Dolphins after Daybreak, or whatever) up to my teacher and pointed to line about halfway down the page.
"Mrs. Rydquist," I said (yeah…that was a mouthful for a kid with a lisp and remedial rubber bands in her mouth) "what does this word mean?"
She picked her glasses up off her chest where they had been resting on her considerable bosom and slid them up the bridge of her nose. "Connectio…Oh, oh, that's just a typo, Mary. The word is supposed to be 'connection,' but you see, they've accidentally left the 'n' off." She smiled at me and let her glasses fall back onto their king-sized bed before going back to stapling things to the bulletin board.
In that moment, the core of my very humanity was rocked. Books could have mistakes?
Very soon after that, I began seeing the mistakes everywhere; it started, of course, with spelling and grammar, simple things that irked me, but didn't necessarily deter me from continuing to read the book. But then, in the summer after seventh grade when I started writing my first book, things began to go downhill.
Once I started to get a taste of the sort of choices authors have when writing books or short stories or poems or what have you, I started noticing every choice that an author made that I didn't like. This character should have been a boy, this bit of dialogue is about three chapters too early, this expository paragraph is totally contrived and I hate it! I hate it all!
Alright, so "hate" is a strong word. Nevertheless, after I became a writer, enjoying stories became a chore. I entered in to every reading wary of the potential monsters of mediocrity that I might face there, knowing that any second, the author would make a glaring mistake that would render the story impassible to my perfectionist brain. Gone were the days when I could sit down with a book and plow through it, not noticing the places where the story deviated from my ideals.
Thankfully, my "ideals" are not perched so high in the clouds as to keep me from reading anything but Encyclopedias for the rest of my life. But there have been whole series I've had to stop reading halfway through because of a crippling frustration that the author should have written some key element differently. The Halfblood Chronicles by Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey, for one. The Dune Saga, for another. Books that I wanted to enjoy, stories I found fascinating, but enjoyment and fascination that was cut short…simply because I am a writer. It's not a hat I can put on and take off on a whim. It's something I always am, for better or worse.
The loss of my ability to casually read of book and stories (and watch movies, for that matter) was not all that my life as a writer took away from me either. Since taking up the bardic pen, I've had to give up the peace and quiet of good old American individualism, as well. Suddenly every person I meet is a character, every bit of odd rubbish I see on the ground has an epic behind it, and every crazy dream I have I have after eating too much pork for dinner needs to be written down before it's lost to the ages, because dammit, it was inspiring, and that shit doesn't grow on trees.
Has this ever happened to you: Your friend (probably only kind of your friend…no one really close) is going through a messy break-up, or maybe there's an illness in the family, or maybe they're looking for a new job. You know there are questions you shouldn't ask—"Do you know how many times he's had sex with her, or is it just a ballpark estimate?" or "Will your aunt have to sell drugs to pay the medical bills?" or "Are you quitting because you're a racist and your old boss was Mexican?"—but a huge part of you is dying to ask so bad, because you're sure there's a good story there.
Or even more awkward, something bad is happening to you—your ex boyfriend from high school tells you he still loves you, even though you're already dating someone, and you realize you have feelings for both of them, or maybe you find out your brother really was adopted, just like you'd been teasing him for twenty years—and, in order to sort out your thoughts or just because you're a venter, you write about it. But the thing you write develops from a static memoir into exciting fiction, and you can't let go of the story, even though you know you're offending all of your friends and family by writing it.
Maybe I'm alone in this. My [non-writer] friends have often told me that I get too involved in movies and books and in the stuff I write, that it doesn't get this messy for anyone else they know. And the funny thing is that I really wouldn't want it any other way. I love how much energy I can get from watching a good film, or how fired up I get after a really bad one. I love how, when I go back and read those really long venting stories, I get excited and confused all over again, like I can relive parts of my life. I've always thought that the times I've most felt like a writer were the times I've most felt alive.
What about you?
When has being a writer really sucked for you?
If you could snag the copyrights to any story—book, movie, short story, poem, etc.—what would it be, and what would you do to it?
Do you have any journal entries that turned into stories you couldn't put down? What are you doing with those stories now?
Have a great week!
Mary (PKsDancingGIrl)
PKsDancingGirl
When I was in early elementary school, I read books by the truckload. I've never been a quick reader, but at least when I was a kid, enjoying books came easy—all a book had to do to make me happy was have characters, a plot, and a puppy on the front cover. I don't remember most of the books I read before sixth grade, probably because they were all about the same, both in my mind, and on the page.
But I do remember the fateful day in sixth grade, during free-reading hour, when I took my book (some nameless member of that series with the adventurous alliteration…Dolphins after Daybreak, or whatever) up to my teacher and pointed to line about halfway down the page.
"Mrs. Rydquist," I said (yeah…that was a mouthful for a kid with a lisp and remedial rubber bands in her mouth) "what does this word mean?"
She picked her glasses up off her chest where they had been resting on her considerable bosom and slid them up the bridge of her nose. "Connectio…Oh, oh, that's just a typo, Mary. The word is supposed to be 'connection,' but you see, they've accidentally left the 'n' off." She smiled at me and let her glasses fall back onto their king-sized bed before going back to stapling things to the bulletin board.
In that moment, the core of my very humanity was rocked. Books could have mistakes?
Very soon after that, I began seeing the mistakes everywhere; it started, of course, with spelling and grammar, simple things that irked me, but didn't necessarily deter me from continuing to read the book. But then, in the summer after seventh grade when I started writing my first book, things began to go downhill.
Once I started to get a taste of the sort of choices authors have when writing books or short stories or poems or what have you, I started noticing every choice that an author made that I didn't like. This character should have been a boy, this bit of dialogue is about three chapters too early, this expository paragraph is totally contrived and I hate it! I hate it all!
Alright, so "hate" is a strong word. Nevertheless, after I became a writer, enjoying stories became a chore. I entered in to every reading wary of the potential monsters of mediocrity that I might face there, knowing that any second, the author would make a glaring mistake that would render the story impassible to my perfectionist brain. Gone were the days when I could sit down with a book and plow through it, not noticing the places where the story deviated from my ideals.
Thankfully, my "ideals" are not perched so high in the clouds as to keep me from reading anything but Encyclopedias for the rest of my life. But there have been whole series I've had to stop reading halfway through because of a crippling frustration that the author should have written some key element differently. The Halfblood Chronicles by Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey, for one. The Dune Saga, for another. Books that I wanted to enjoy, stories I found fascinating, but enjoyment and fascination that was cut short…simply because I am a writer. It's not a hat I can put on and take off on a whim. It's something I always am, for better or worse.
The loss of my ability to casually read of book and stories (and watch movies, for that matter) was not all that my life as a writer took away from me either. Since taking up the bardic pen, I've had to give up the peace and quiet of good old American individualism, as well. Suddenly every person I meet is a character, every bit of odd rubbish I see on the ground has an epic behind it, and every crazy dream I have I have after eating too much pork for dinner needs to be written down before it's lost to the ages, because dammit, it was inspiring, and that shit doesn't grow on trees.
Has this ever happened to you: Your friend (probably only kind of your friend…no one really close) is going through a messy break-up, or maybe there's an illness in the family, or maybe they're looking for a new job. You know there are questions you shouldn't ask—"Do you know how many times he's had sex with her, or is it just a ballpark estimate?" or "Will your aunt have to sell drugs to pay the medical bills?" or "Are you quitting because you're a racist and your old boss was Mexican?"—but a huge part of you is dying to ask so bad, because you're sure there's a good story there.
Or even more awkward, something bad is happening to you—your ex boyfriend from high school tells you he still loves you, even though you're already dating someone, and you realize you have feelings for both of them, or maybe you find out your brother really was adopted, just like you'd been teasing him for twenty years—and, in order to sort out your thoughts or just because you're a venter, you write about it. But the thing you write develops from a static memoir into exciting fiction, and you can't let go of the story, even though you know you're offending all of your friends and family by writing it.
Maybe I'm alone in this. My [non-writer] friends have often told me that I get too involved in movies and books and in the stuff I write, that it doesn't get this messy for anyone else they know. And the funny thing is that I really wouldn't want it any other way. I love how much energy I can get from watching a good film, or how fired up I get after a really bad one. I love how, when I go back and read those really long venting stories, I get excited and confused all over again, like I can relive parts of my life. I've always thought that the times I've most felt like a writer were the times I've most felt alive.
What about you?
When has being a writer really sucked for you?
If you could snag the copyrights to any story—book, movie, short story, poem, etc.—what would it be, and what would you do to it?
Do you have any journal entries that turned into stories you couldn't put down? What are you doing with those stories now?
Have a great week!
Mary (PKsDancingGIrl)
PKsDancingGirl
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Write Stuff Down
Some people that I admire love to outline and world-build. They'll break a novel down into component pieces, working each scene out ahead of time, building the story bit by bit until the finished work just sort of falls into their hands.
Okay, so it's probably never quite that easy. Some methods make themselves out to be--the Snowflake Method, for one, claims you can almost write a novel by accident, just by building out from the central concept or "elevator pitch." The concept is that you just bolt on more and more material, taking the sentence to a paragraph, the paragraph to a page, but instead of doing that in the normal linear fashion--starting at the beginning and bolting on sentences until you get to the end--you build the story out from its core. So by the third or fourth pass through, you've essentially written a beginning, middle, and end. From there, so they say, you just flesh it out.
And, like almost all writing advice ever spewed forth, this works for someone. Maybe even more than one person, maybe a whole lot.
I'm just pretty sure it doesn't work for me. Virtually none of these things do, since they require you to write down things that are within the narrative flow, things that, for me, arise organically in the writing process. More to the point, it doesn't work since, when I write things down, I tend to forget them.
Someday, I might have to develop another writing process--and I think I might, since the way I do things right now is rather slow and dependent on letting my subconscious grind away at a problem for a while until it pops out the answer into the conscious fore. But, that has been my process for a while now--I keep mulling over scenes and settings and characters, building plot elements over a long period of time. The novel I'm writing now has been germinating for five years, at least, and survived two failed attempts to start it, including a stalled outlining. And, that does make this one challenging since it's a mystery, and mysteries to some degree require rather tight plotting in order to get all the elements in from the beginning. Extensive revisions may well by my friend on this one.
Another novel, one I wrote in 2008, got its start in scenes I thought of in 1999--and these were fantasy elements at a time when I didn't want to write fantasy, when I was neck-deep in science fiction and didn't think I'd ever tell all the stories I had to tell in that futuristic setting. And almost all of the development of those ideas occurred in my head, only meeting paper when it came time to actually write the darn thing. Most of the ideas I have that I write down, or try to outline, end up dying on me. If I don't take them back into my head, they'll languish there on paper or in dusty computer files, until I happen upon them again--at which point they'll be rather surprising, vaguely familiar and, sometimes, kind of stale.
That being said, I'm also coming around to the idea that every story, every novel, may have its own unique method, that what worked for this won't work for that. But maybe I'll explore that next time.
Dave
Okay, so it's probably never quite that easy. Some methods make themselves out to be--the Snowflake Method, for one, claims you can almost write a novel by accident, just by building out from the central concept or "elevator pitch." The concept is that you just bolt on more and more material, taking the sentence to a paragraph, the paragraph to a page, but instead of doing that in the normal linear fashion--starting at the beginning and bolting on sentences until you get to the end--you build the story out from its core. So by the third or fourth pass through, you've essentially written a beginning, middle, and end. From there, so they say, you just flesh it out.
And, like almost all writing advice ever spewed forth, this works for someone. Maybe even more than one person, maybe a whole lot.
I'm just pretty sure it doesn't work for me. Virtually none of these things do, since they require you to write down things that are within the narrative flow, things that, for me, arise organically in the writing process. More to the point, it doesn't work since, when I write things down, I tend to forget them.
Someday, I might have to develop another writing process--and I think I might, since the way I do things right now is rather slow and dependent on letting my subconscious grind away at a problem for a while until it pops out the answer into the conscious fore. But, that has been my process for a while now--I keep mulling over scenes and settings and characters, building plot elements over a long period of time. The novel I'm writing now has been germinating for five years, at least, and survived two failed attempts to start it, including a stalled outlining. And, that does make this one challenging since it's a mystery, and mysteries to some degree require rather tight plotting in order to get all the elements in from the beginning. Extensive revisions may well by my friend on this one.
Another novel, one I wrote in 2008, got its start in scenes I thought of in 1999--and these were fantasy elements at a time when I didn't want to write fantasy, when I was neck-deep in science fiction and didn't think I'd ever tell all the stories I had to tell in that futuristic setting. And almost all of the development of those ideas occurred in my head, only meeting paper when it came time to actually write the darn thing. Most of the ideas I have that I write down, or try to outline, end up dying on me. If I don't take them back into my head, they'll languish there on paper or in dusty computer files, until I happen upon them again--at which point they'll be rather surprising, vaguely familiar and, sometimes, kind of stale.
That being said, I'm also coming around to the idea that every story, every novel, may have its own unique method, that what worked for this won't work for that. But maybe I'll explore that next time.
Dave
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