In a previous posting a few years back I offered up some thoughts about storytelling. Having published a few short stories with the magazine Into The Ruins, I am in the process of writing another but find myself detoured by a magical realism novel wanting to get written.
This is not something I planned. It just happened. Anyone who’s a writer often gets asked the question ‘how do you come up with your ideas?’ by someone curious about the creative process. The answer that’s given often frustrates the questioner but it’s the only one we can come up with and it kind of goes like this:
“I dunno. They just come.”
And it’s true. Writing a story, drawing a picture, sculpting, dancing, any activity involving human creativity is not something methodically planned out like building a house. It’s an organic process spontaneously emerging from somewhere deep inside the creator. Like Topsy, it just grows. The magical realism novel (currently not yet named) began as idle daydreams, that grew more complex until I realized it was time to write them down.
You can’t force ideas to come. Anyone who gardens knows when you plant seeds, you need to wait for them to sprout. They don’t do it on demand, no matter how much you beg and plead and stamp your feet. If the seeds are not viable, nothing will ever come but if they are, then one day without any warning the sprout breaks the surface of the soil and grows of its own accord.
When it comes to creativity, everything is grist for the mill. Watching people interact, reading folklore, mythology, history, biographies, any snippet of conversation overheard, traveling around looking at different things. All this gets absorbed by your unconscious to be processed, stirred around, incubated, fermented and eventually regurgitated when you start writing (or drawing or sculpting or whatever). Images from dreams can provide inspiration since that all comes from the unconscious.
When you start creating, don’t let your inner critic get in the way. You know, that little voice that keeps saying ‘that’s dumb’, ‘that’s been done before’, ‘that’s not perfect enough’. Just sit down and start doing your thing without worrying if it’s any good or not. The time for editing is after you’ve written down or drawn stuff. Don’t let so-called writer’s block get in the way. There’s really no such animal.
Just sit down and write/draw/compose/sculpt or whatever.
And if anyone asks you how you came up with your ideas, you know what to say.