ideas – 2squarewriting

the moment of ignition as a match is lit — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Jack London

Can you create your best work without inspiration?

Some prolific and successful writers such as Stephen King and Nora Roberts have no time for inspiration, dismissing the search for it as an excuse for failure to produce.

Others swear by the eureka moment that hits while showering, compelling them to run to their keyboard still dripping so as to capture their brilliant insight before it fades.

Do you have to choose between 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, or can you have both?

Stealing Fire

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
Pablo Picasso

Creativity and inspiration are not the same. They can exist separately or together. We’re all creative, but we’re not always inspired. You can make a cake or write a story by gathering your materials and starting. The result will be serviceable if you know what you’re doing.

Inspiration turns good into great, and great into sublime.

Think about the last time you were truly struck by an idea. It seemed to come from nowhere. Perhaps you were waiting in line or thinking about something else entirely. Perhaps you were half-way through your piece and suddenly you went off in a different direction like you were possessed to change the story.

It’s hard to explain. You might say your characters told you what they wanted, the essay unfolded or that you had a hunch, or you shrug your shoulders and say it just felt right.

The Ancient Greeks would say your muse had whispered in your ear. Science says your brain used near-miraculous processing to bring forth genius.

Neuroscience has shown that the creative act involves higher level brain activity. Ordinary pattern recognition steps up to a level where the brain can make new connections. That’s creativity – connecting things.

You can make a fire with two sticks rubbed together and oxygen. Both are essential and together they are sufficient, with enough effort.

Add a spark, and you shorten the process. The spark is neither necessary nor sufficient on its own. But allied to enough kindling and skill, your efforts can go into making a bigger, brighter flame.

Fire = kindling + oxygen + skill

Creation = spark of inspiration + kindling of ideas + skill

Now you need to make sure that inspiration can find you ready and waiting.

The Unsexy Path to Unlimited Inspiration

Whether it’s a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory, the routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.
Twyla Tharp

Every act of creation has process at its heart. Every marvellous work you admire is rooted in skills which are hard won and honed by repetition. So before you think about being inspired, you have to do the work of being able to do the work. Always.

In the beginning, forget about inspiration and work on your craft daily. You need to level up before you can take advantage of it. Check your progress with whatever measure you like, just be sure that you’re doing better work, not just more of the same.

The rules of writing (painting, photography, or anything you like) are boring to learn. Learn the rules anyway, so that when inspiration strikes you know which to break and which to follow. Put in the practice time so that when spark meets kindling, you’re ready.

Breathing Space

Inspiration is there all the time. For everyone whose mind is not clouded over with thoughts whether they realize it or not.
Agnes Martin

Just as a flame needs oxygen, inspiration thrives in open space. An open mind is unusually receptive to new patterns. Meditation may be useful but it’s not absolutely necessary.

Daydreaming, naming clouds, or watching a raindrop crawl down a window can all quiet the mind and allow new ideas to surface.

Some people get their breakthroughs while doing dishes or laundry. It’s a time to let our brains idle. For others, free-writing nudges thinking into a less directed state, like doing morning pages for The Artist’s Way.

Others find mental stillness on the move. Walking, running, swimming or even sweeping a floor might work for you.

Everything Is Material

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Henry David Thoreau

If creativity is connecting things, make sure you have plenty of material to work from. You’ll have to sift through a lot of rocks to find that nugget of gold.

Get out from your routine and search out something new. Read something outside your comfort zone, outside your genre. Read non-fiction, look at architecture or a photography magazine. Read a novel you think is trashy and one you think is classic. Re-read the books you loved when you were twelve, or twenty-one.

Visit a museum and spend thirty minutes with a single exhibit. Examine it from all angles. Think about the materials and techniques that made it. Imagine it in your sitting room. Take a picture for later. Print the picture and sleep with it under your pillow.

Talk to people properly, by which I mean ask them about themselves and listen to the answers. We all have a tale to tell and some of them are fascinating.

Visit an unfamiliar place. This could be a new town or part of your hometown where you never go. If you live in a city, take the tourist bus tour and learn something new. Examine buildings, notice carvings and old facades. Sometimes all you need to do is raise your eyes to see much more.

A Marriage of Opposites

It’s a dull, grey world without inspiration. And without perspiration and effort, nothing would be finished. We need both.

When you feel like you’re just plodding along and you’re missing something, make room for inspiration. Build your skillset so that you can realise new, bigger ideas.

Be curious, give your brain space to spark new connections, and always be seeking out new materials to feed it. If anyone can make this marriage of opposites work, it’s a creative person like you.

Go to it.

blog, writing process

Mapping your route to the big dream

13th January 201715th January 2017 pataitcheson22

treasure-map_pexels — pexels via pixabay

Last time was all about releasing fear and dreaming on a grand scale. I’m giving us all permission to chase great big audacious goals, because why limit yourself? Dreams occupy the infinite space of imagination. There are quite enough people telling us we can’t do the thing. Don’t add your own internal voice to that dreary chorus.

So, you have a goal in mind. Our goals differ in the details, even if they seem superficially the same, and that is definitely okay. This works for any dream, not just writing. Let’s look at one dream; “I want to go to a bookstore and see my book for sale”.

The goal is physical book in major bookstore.
This is true North, where the compass points. You need to plot a route from your current position to that goal. You may be a long way away, you may even think you’re on the wrong path, but fear not. If you plant your flag, you can always make your way towards it by degrees. You might say the goal is write a book, but this is usually an intermediate goal. A big one, sure, and one to celebrate, but not the end of the journey.

The principles of mapping a route apply equally to any goal, whether intermediate or ultimate, smaller or bigger. The process differs only in the number of steps required.

So you’ve written a book, and that’s great. You plan to follow the traditional publishing route. Before you can pick it up in Waterstones or Barnes and Noble, some more things need to happen.

1. write book
2. find agent
3. land publishing deal
4. sell book in stores

That’s four steps. Each of those steps can be broken down further, but the first one is the biggest. It is also entirely under your control. It’s all down to you. Now, we’ll take the first step and look at it closely. How do you write a book, and can it be any book? Writing 80-120K words (typical, for novels) is no mean feat.

you must decide what kind of book- what genre or subject
you must find the motivation to finish
you must write the best book you can

Three more steps. Let’s take the first, and break it down again.

What kind of book should you write?

For non-fiction you need authority; that is, the reason people should listen to you. That may be personal experience (I lived this), or it may be academic status (I studied and researched this), or it may be achievement (I succeeded at this). Typically, you will need to demonstrate that you have a platform from which to drive sales, in order to interest an agent. That is your potential audience, which may be smaller, particularly for technical works. For books with a smaller niche, perhaps self-publishing might be better. Another question to answer.

Building that platform and demonstrating your authority is outside my scope, but you can find information by Jane Friedman here .

For fiction, consider your interests. You could start with brainstorming or mindmapping.

Favourite books, films, poetry, artistic pursuits
core principles; love conquers all, the world is cruel, good always triumphs in the end
genre; romance, mystery, science fiction, adventure, horror, fairy tale, literary, etc
any characters or situations that pop up ( I have a space pirate in my head, waiting to be written)

From your list or map, start to pull out themes. For example, I love speculative fiction and adventure, good vs. bad but in all shades between black and white, I believe love comes in many forms, and that women and men have equal agency. Those ideas colour my fiction.

Where can I find inspiration?

lightbulb_unsplash — unsplash via pixabay

Some people seem to brim and bubble with ideas. Others, not so much. I talked here about being one of those people who don’t have fifty ideas jostling for space in their head. My ideas come from pictures, song videos, snatches of conversation, or just out of thin air, when my unconscious mind throws something into the real world. (Sometimes they don’t come until after I start work, which is a good reason why you must keep writing. Don’t think about it. Just do it.)

The really useful question for fiction is, “what if?”. Keep asking that question, and stories will come. Somebody wants something, encounters obstacles, is forced to change, and in the process attains their goal. That’s story, in a nutshell.

Looking at finding the motivation to finish, let’s break that down. You could set a word count goal, find a writing buddy, join a writers group, find a mentor and so on. Writing the best book you can will involve editing, feedback, rewriting, working on your craft to name a few.

Each of these steps can be broken down further, in a process sometimes called ‘chunking down’. Eventually you’ll reach the smallest possible step, the first step on the journey. A big dream is built from a million tiny pieces, consistently and mindfully assembled. See how small a Lego brick is, yet you can build the whole world, if you have sufficient.

legoland-malaysia_fonthipward — Legoland Malaysia, image by FonthipWard via pixabay

Big dream ahead, only 37465 miles to go

Your flag is planted so far away, you can hardly see it for all the obstacles and turns in the road. But it is there, and now and again you’ll check that you’re still headed towards it. You can ask yourself a simple question, when considering an activity; does this move me towards my goal? In life, saying yes to a thing means saying no to something else. Make sure you’re saying yes to what’s important for you.

So now, dreamer who wants to make their dream a reality, write down your specific goal. Break it into smaller goals, and break those into their smallest constituent parts. Write it all down in a form of your choosing. That could be a spreadsheet, bulleted list, mindmap, post it notes, or whatever.

Now, pick a tiny step, one that you’re certain to accomplish. For example, make a list of your favourite films. Or Google local writers’ groups. That’s pretty easy, right? Tick it off your list.

Congratulate yourself, and resolve to make another tiny step tomorrow. Celebrate reaching your intermediate goals, and enjoy the journey. You know where you’re going.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Lao Tzu

blog, writing process

How much is too much?

10th June 201614th November 2016 pataitcheson22

How many ideas do you have at any given time?

I read somewhere that most writers have more ideas than they know what to do with. I imagine their heads crammed with story seeds and baby notions, all crying out to be fed and developed and watered. They would look something like the path by my back door used to be, overflowing with impulse buys and supermarket bargains, waiting for a permanent home. Then I’d be going away and all those little pots, too small to sustain themselves, would be crammed into a shady corner or plunged into the ground, in a frantic last minute rush to save them.

That’s how I ended up with a towering bay tree, all of twelve feet or more, rather too close to a bamboo. I had no idea it would get that big… and need so much pruning. But I digress.

I don’t have so many ideas.

If I read writing prompts, just one or two might interest me. But when an idea does take root in my mind, it grows. It demands attention. It gets bigger and stronger and it has to be followed to the bitter end. That is how I found my novel, that rose from a one hundred word seed of an idea. Rather like Jack’s beanstalk.

My forest of little pots sometimes suffered because I couldn’t tend them all. If I have more ideas than I can handle, I write them down. That’s like putting pots in a holding bed. [God bless the notes feature on my phone.] But in general, I look around and let things settle until one strong shoot appears. I nurture it, until it can look after itself for a while. Only then will I look around for another smaller thing to keep me going.

It’s more important to do a few things well, than to do a lot of things badly.

It is also vital to finish properly. Half done is not pretty. Some things work better than others. You try things out and you learn from success and failure.

Writing is a kind of gardening. Different timescales, and different spaces, and different care schedules are needed for all the projects. But put together, they make a wonderful variety.

Whether you want to collect all of one species, or one of all species, a garden grows in stages. Over time, a writer collects a body of work that reflects them, just as every garden reflects its gardener.

Tag: ideas