Where does this nonsense come from?

life gives you dirt…

There’s downtime when you work freelance so you have to do other things.

I did house renovations and that meant lots of tidying up before, during and after the actual work. So I was spending a lot of time in and amongst dirt, detritus and debris. Having unconsciously digested the ways of dirt, I never expected it would turn into brain food.

A brainfart, perfectly formed.

I didn’t want to have an idea about dust bunnies. It came unbidden when I was sweeping out behind a wall in a basement. Zot! There it was, the whole daft story and all I had to do was record it.

The idea existed in non-linear form. I didn’t have to pan my mind’s eye POV along a narrative scene by scene, I could see the whole story as if from above. The writing of the story was simply recording what I saw.

Nothing else I’ve written came as willingly as the dust bunnies. I often didn’t know what I was going to happen until I wrote it.

So when life gives you dirt I’m taking it and running as far as possible with it.

Dirt was my Muse and I’m grateful to it.

The Muse vs Applying nose to grindstone

I used to be an ‘ideas guy’ in the ad business. We were expected to be able to churn out ideas in their hundreds. We’d paper the walls with ideas for headlines and visuals. 99.9999% of them ended up in the garbage. Some of those that survived proved to be quite valuable though.

So that was our ‘product’ – ideas. And you have to be able to produce ideas on demand. There’s no point on waiting for your Muse to rock up and bail you out; you can’t rely on inspiration, it’s fickle.

A technique for producing ideas

In 1936 an ad guy called James Webb Young recognized the commercial value of ideas and proposed a technique to encourage their production. He called his book A Technique for Producing Ideas. (link below)

Focussed learning

Bathe in your topic. Total immersion. Read the small print, look behind the curtain. Take notes, take pictures. Study. This will hurt because learning lays down new neural pathways and the construction work is demanding.

Diffuse thinking

Then leave it alone. Walk away. Let it simmer gently on the backburner of your brain. It’s a way of recruiting your unconscious or pre-conscience to your cause. Young stresses the importance of this incubation period, the way of not doing.

This technique works but here’s the issue; it takes time. Six to eight weeks maybe before the good ad ideas start to sprout. More if you’re sciencing or mathing, then years maybe.

“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” John Cleese.

Creativity might be the act of banging two ideas together that had never been banged together before - but you need ideas to bang together. Nothing in, nothing out.

A wide ranging curiosity seems to help; explore art galleries, read books, see odd films, listen to music you don’t understand, go outside, trawl the parts of the internet that aren’t too polluted, read about science, read comics in foreign languages just to look at the pictures. Stash away anything but the usual.

Don’t go deep, go wide.

Did you know jellyfish stir the ocean?

I didn’t but then this factoid from 20,000 fathoms made me think about how air currents from odd sources might stir up some dramatic dust bunny jeopardy.

You don’t have to memorise every idea you meet, you just have to know where to look for it. People more mentally disciplined than myself might fashion a memory palace where all their factoids are nicely ordered and accessible.

I maintain a mental construct more akin to a memory scrap yard. I have to wander about for a while to find anything useful. But that’s ok because sometimes I find things I’d forgotten about.

When you’re ripe

You don’t always get lucky. Sometimes all you can conjour up is a wee germ of an idea to get things started but then it has to be coaxed into being.

But at least you’re loaded to explore the associations between ideas.

What does my idea resemble?

What’s it’s opposite?

What are the logical consequences of this daft idea?

The Flintstones is what happens when you bang the Stone Age and Industrial America together. I liked the consequences of the conceit more than the stories – the dinosaur crane, stone wheels, bones as hair wear, the clothes were right – all the little things.

When you’ve finally created a bouncing baby idea, then it’s writing as hard labour – 1% fun, 99% perspiration. Time for focused thinking; nose to the grindstone time, like I’m doing now.

As with any form of labour, good tools help. I use the Snowflake Method for planning stories out. Scrivener for mapping it and writing. I use Word too.

Get a good chair and practice good ergonomics.

The hard work of writing is made yet harder by having to fight the procrastination fight as well. But that’s a story for another day.

References

A Technique for Producing Ideas.
Available in pdf format if you practice your Google-Fu patiently

Jellyfish Have Big Mixing Effect on the Oceans
Live Science

The Snowflake Method
America's Mad Professor of Fiction Writing

Scrivener