When we think stories, we usually only ever think finished product, because that is what we consume. The truth is, of course, that the finished story that gets printed, recorded or encoded as an ebook is at the end of a very long process that begins with a crucial step that is often misunderstood: inspiration, and the cause of writer’s block.
“Inspiration” by Cornelia Kopp
The internet is changing the lack of access to this process slowly, with crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo often allowing supporters to get updates on and insights into a story’s process. While these two both have categories dedicated to publishing and writing, other services such as Pubslush are specifically geared towards writers, and Unbound even has access to writing drafts and chats with the author built right into the design.
Creativity is Work
But what exactly is inspiration? It is, against popular opinion, seldom a eureka moment, and more often than not hard work. (Disclaimer: we won’t talk about paracosm, which we realise is different, but too complex a subject for the purposes of this article.) As American photorealist painter Chuck Close put it in Wisdom: “I always thought that inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain you’re not going to make an awful lot of work.”
The first stage of an idea for a story needs a trigger: a concept, a character, an opening line that allows the writer to use as a starting point to develop their story.
The trigger can be provoked by various means: sometimes it is a walk in the woods (you must be comfortable being alone with your own thoughts and letting them float freely); occasionally it is listening to a stranger (one of a writer’s most important skills is to be able to listen in on other people’s conversations inconspicuously: you need to understand how and what people talk about to be able to write convincing dialogue); other times it is coffee, tea, alcohol or another substance (we would never condone substance abuse, but it would be dishonest of us to claim that no writer has ever done this and in fact it was incredibly popular with many from Ernest Hemingway to the authors of the Beat Generation).
“Coffee is a mental cue for me. It tells my brain it’s time to write. I also have to have music playing when I write. During those times, I usually sign up for Pandora One.” – Aaron Crocco
Eureka!
The trigger can also be spontaneous – the spontaneous trigger usually being what people consider inspiration. But that spontaneity is deceiving, it doesn’t just come out of nowhere, even though it will feel that way. A spontaneous trigger isn’t purely an external stimulation, it is an opportunistic assimilation: you are highly receptive to these external stimulations because at the back of your head all those thoughts were already brewing and all that was missing was something to bring them all together and to the front of your mind.
This is identical to the process of problem-solving, where stepping away – or going to sleep – is often the best course of action after having worked on a solution for a while. This can be anything from proving a mathematical function to figuring out how to convincingly resolve a conflict between two characters in a story.
Archimedes only had his eureka moment after obsessing over the problem for a long time and then taking a bath. In psychology, this is known as the prepared-mind perspective. Creativity needs preparation and, importantly, also a self-imposed or given constraint: complete free range is detrimental more often than not.
Herein also lies one of the major reasons for writer’s block: because we often misunderstand inspiration as something that happens suddenly and without cause, we don’t prepare. Writing is a muscle that needs constant training – and much of it will feel pointless, and many pages will be re-drafted, completely rewritten or crossed out (you should never actually delete passages, because your brain might be incubating another story). Entire stories might be thrown away because they’re not going anywhere (again: always make sure you keep a copy around for everything).
“It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s alive!” – Mark Chatterley, The One in Charge*
The next time you get stuck, force yourself to write for fifteen minutes straight. It can literally be anything (even five hundred “I don’t know”s) but you must not stop or let yourself get distracted by anything else. Don’t worry about grammar either, editing happens later. Your brain will kickstart and come up with something – it might be usable, it might be silly, it might have an opening line for a story in there. This technique is called free writing.
Creativity is Not Work
As Harvey MacKay once put it, you should “find something you love to do, and you’ll never work a day in your life”. Creative writing is (usually) a work of love, as is any art form. If you don’t have a constant innate desire to put words on a page, or indeed a screen, chances are you never will again after you leave school and teachers stop making you write those pesky “what I did over the summer holidays” essays.
The mantra of doing what you love so it won’t feel like work is true on an entirely different level for creativity, too: psychologists refer to the specific state of mind where you forget time and your surroundings and become wholly immersed in your writing the ‘flow’. It is a state closely related to joy and the opposite of depression: it’s colloquially known as being “in the zone” and it isn’t limited to creative work: for example, Formula 1 racing driver Ayrton Senna explained in 1988 how “suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously, I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. Suddenly, it frightened me, because I realised I was well beyond my conscious understanding.”
It’s during the flow that inspiration truly takes over a writer’s mind, and the story comes pouring out without consciously controlling the characters or the plot. It’s the crucial midway point between the initial idea and the long, arduous process of conscious re-drafting and editing.
Inspired?
What are your sources of inspiration? Do you have a particular trigger that keeps working for you or do you find inspiration everywhere around you?
If you’re as addicted to the flow as us and have already written a science-fiction story, why not get in touch with us for possible inclusion in our upcoming scifi anthology? We’ll happily record stories already published elsewhere, as long as you hold the audio rights (we accept .doc(x), .rtf, .otd, .pdf, .mobi or .epub). Please also include a list of your previously published works (it can just be your own blog).
If you want to know what it would be like to be part of an anthology, just have a look at our already published horror anthology, Exquisite Death.
*This may not be an actual quote by Mark Chatterley.
