Monthly Archives: October 2020

Rediscover Your Stifled Creativity

Why you aren’t writing fiction? Think you’re not creative enough?

You once were.

You may not remember it, but when you were between three and five, you weren’t afraid to try anything. You were bold, unconstrained, inquisitive. You overflowed with all kinds of ideas, fantasies, and stories. That young version of you wasn’t afraid to talk about them, either.

How do I know this? Most kids that age are like that.

What happened to all that creativity? It got stifled. Someone, or maybe many people, told you your ideas were no good. Or they laughed at you. It could have been your parents, a teacher, your playmates, or anyone you respected. But someone stifled the creativity in you, and convinced you you’re not creative.

How do I know this? Because it happened, and is happening, to everybody.

You can get much of that creativity back. Not all of it, though. No technique can restore the complete freedom, the unchecked abandon, of a five-year-old. Your older brain has too many well-worn grooves for that.

But it’s possible to regain a good portion of that creative spirit. Moreover, that creativity will be coupled with sufficient adult patience to write a novel, and the adult life experiences to make such a novel believable and interesting. Those are two things you didn’t have when you were five.

Before we get to the creativity restoration secret, I must give credit to author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss for this blogpost. His personal experiment to increase his creativity caused me to think about my own creativity quest.

Through trial and error, Ferriss found he could be most creative by knowing when to write, what to drink, and what to listen to. He tried writing at various times a day. He tried drinking different teas while writing. He worked while listening to different types of music. He settled on the right combination of these that worked for him. He stressed that the right combination for you would likely be different.

Ferris didn’t discuss how he measured his creativity for these experiments, but I suspect it was subjective. You just sorta know when you’re in the creative zone.

Most writers can’t easily experiment with different times of the day to write. The rest of your life may dictate the few available time slots, and you’ll have to do the best you can within those.

I haven’t tried various drinks. With the exception of a single mug of coffee in the morning, I avoid having any food or drink near my computer. That’s partly for sanitary reasons, but mostly to avoid weight gain.

As for music, I’ve just gotten used to silence. If I did listen to music, I’d go with instrumentals, because it’s hard for me to avoid paying attention to sung lyrics.

Now for my own prescription to restore much of your childhood creativity:

  1. Avoid settling on any fixed pattern. If possible, write at different times, in different places, by different methods, with different music, and different scents. A part of your brain will love the changes, and respond by thinking in new ways.
  2. Make a place for private, uncritical play. Write in a journal with a lock, or type in a password-protected file. Here, in this place, you can let yourself loose and explore anything, try out ideas, let your imagination soar with silly notions that will never be shared. (Some you might share once the ideas mature.)
  3. Try the ’20 Answers Method’ of solving a problem. Got a writing problem? Go to your private place and think of 20 answers to that problem. Don’t stop until you get to 20. Even stupid answers count, since they sometimes spark good ones.
  4. Hand over problems to your subconscious. I’ve found myself coming up with creative answers while doing mundane activities—showering, mowing the lawn, riding a bus or subway, cleaning, gardening, etc.
  5. Try mind mapping. How I wish a teacher had taught me this technique in elementary school! It’s a marvelous method for quickly collecting creative ideas.

I believe you can restore much of your long-lost creativity. Give my ideas a try. Also conduct some experiments like Tim Ferriss did. Soon you’ll be twice as creative as—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 25, 2020Permalink

Is Science Ruining SciFi?

Fantasy fiction writers have an advantage over science fiction writers—no scientist will come along and say the fantasy writer depicted her dragons incorrectly or that she botched a description of werewolves.

But scifi relies on facts about a field that’s frequently upending previous conclusions, so new scientific discoveries can invalidate your fiction at any time.

Still, do those discoveries render the affected novel unreadable? That is, just because your story, written before 2006, discusses the ‘planet’ Pluto, does the body’s new designation as a ‘dwarf planet’ make your novel passé, or so retro as to be unworthy of reading?

The pair writing under the name James S.A. Corey wrote an open letter to NASA about such an occurrence. Their novel Leviathan Wakes portrayed a human population on the asteroid Ceres as being so desperate for water that they obtained it from Saturn’s rings.

In 2015, a NASA mission to Ceres showed that it has plenty of water, easily enough for the millions of people living there in the novel.

Oops.

Does that mean nobody should read Leviathan Wakes or watch The Expanse?

In my opinion, it doesn’t mean that at all. As Corey points out in their letter, there’s a supportive feedback mechanism at work, a mutual admiration society. SciFi writers respect scientists, follow every discovery, and cheer them on. For their part, many scientists were inspired to pursue their passion by science fiction writers.

Many scifi short stories and novels will not endure; their fate will be to gather dust and remain unread. But, that’s not because scientific discoveries rendered them obsolete. It’s because those stories aren’t good fiction.

In other words, classic scifi becomes classic because of its high quality, not because it anticipates new advances in knowledge.

To take my favorite novel as an example, Jules Verne strove to keep Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as accurate as the known science of 1870 would permit. Today, however, we know:

  • A riveted steel submarine could not safely dive as deeply as the Nautilus;
  • A sodium/mercury battery would not propel a submarine at fifty knots (without taking up its entire internal volume);
  • No spot in the ocean is 16,000 meters deep;
  • Sharks do not need to turn upside down just prior to attacking;

…among many other errors. Does that mean you can’t read and enjoy the novel today? Of course you can.

Editors should do their best to provide footnotes or forwards that state where subsequent discoveries have made parts of a fictional work implausible. However, even if they don’t, most readers don’t turn to fiction for the latest scientific facts. Readers understand that scifi authors use the best-known science of their time…and then sometimes stretch that for the sake of a great story.

Science doesn’t ruin scifi. If anything, they reciprocally support each other. In that conclusion, I think James S.A. Corey would agree with—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 18, 2020Permalink

You Don’t Need a Mission Statement

Many organizations have mission statements. Some people have their own personal mission statement. A few writers have an ‘author mission statement.’ I don’t think you need one, and I’ll explain why.

According to most definitions of mission statements, their purpose is to serve as a goal or agenda, to communicate the organization’s (or person’s) purpose to all stakeholders, and to create a sense of unity and identity.

To those purposes, I would add this: a mission statement can maintain focus and motivation.

Several authors have their own mission statement. Robert J. Sawyer’s is “to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic.” Dr. Randy Ingermanson’s is “to write excellent novels and non-fiction; to market my work like a mad genius; and to teach other writers to do the same.” Leanne Sowul’s is rather long, but begins this way: “My mission is to write fiction that tells stories from multiple perspectives about a significant moment in time.” Joanne Phillips’ is also long, and starts as follows: “I write stories to entertain and offer a temporary escape into another life.”

If all these authors have mission statements, and many have explained their reasons for having one, why am I suggesting you don’t need one? Who am I to go against the accumulated genius of more successful writers?

I’m not disparaging anyone’s mission statement. If other writers receive some benefit from theirs, more power to them. If you’re determined to come up with one for yourself, I’m not here to talk you out of it.

Also, I’m not against mission statements in general. They’re great for organizations. Even personal mission statements, of the sort advocated by Stephen R. Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, have significant value.

I’m just suggesting, before you invest the time to craft an author mission statement, you might ask yourself why you’re doing it. Do you believe you’ll write better after you have one? Do you occasionally forget why you’re writing and need a reminder? Do you really need the prodding of words on a brass plaque above your desk?

It’s not like you’re leading a team where members will stray off on tangents or act counter to the goal. For your fiction writing endeavors, it’s just you.

Think of other significant roles you have in life, possibly spouse, parent, employee, etc. Do you have written mission statements for any of those individual roles? If not, what makes your writer role different?

Most likely you started your hobby because an inner voice kept screaming “Write!” during your waking hours, and it’s never let up. Do you need more prompting than that?

Remember, time spent honing your mission statement is time not spent writing fiction.

Obviously, you’re free to do your own thing, in your own way. No matter your reason, you might want a written author mission statement, and might glean some benefit from having one.

Please leave a comment if you disagree with me. I’m especially interested in why you crafted your author mission statement, and how you think it has helped you.

For now, writing without any mission statement whatsoever, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 11, 2020Permalink

The Swooper/Basher Dichotomy

While reading Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Timequake recently, I noted he classified writers into two groups: Swoopers and Bashers. He said women tend to be swoopers and men tend to be bashers, adding, “Someone should look into this.” Let’s look into it.

Most writers are familiar with another grouping: plotters and pantzers, but that’s not what Vonnegut was driving at. He wasn’t distinguishing between those who outline and those who don’t. His alternatives focused on the speed of writing a first draft and the number of subsequent drafts.

Swooper

He said swoopers “…write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work.”

Basher

By contrast, bashers “…go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done, they’re done.”

Several bloggers have interesting things to say about the swooper/basher contrast, including Shannon Alberta, Philip Martin, Edmund Schubert, Paula Marais, and David Duhr.

Vonnegut himself claimed to be a basher. Why he chose the terms ‘swooper’ and ‘basher’ is a mystery to me. I can see how writing first drafts quickly might suggest swooping, but writing each sentence carefully doesn’t bring the verb bashing to my mind.

Note that neither method relieves you of the need for meticulous, word-by-word editing. It’s just that bashers do that up front, in the first draft, while swoopers edit in later drafts.

In any case, I doubt there is any gender distinction between the two. I suspect the real dividing point has to do with experience. My guess is that beginning writers tend to be swoopers and many of them become bashers later on.

Early on, a writer has no reputation to lose, and thus feels great freedom to experiment and play with words. Such a writer might have a tenuous grasp of the vision for the story, and therefore must write the first draft at breakneck speed to capture that idea in words before it flies away.

Later in life, after having many stories published and developing a readership, that same writer must be more careful. Readers have come to expect a certain style from the author and deviations aren’t appreciated. There is no longer a need to experiment and play to find out what will work in the marketplace. Moreover, such an author has learned, through experience, how to keep the entire story in mind while crafting each sentence in order.

My theory that beginners tend to be swoopers and veterans to be bashers is, itself, an over-generalization. In the end, it’s a matter of style, of finding what works for you. Among famous authors, I suspect you’ll find both swoopers and bashers. You’re free to experiment with both methods to discover which is better for you.

If you somehow separated swoopers from bashers, and then examined your collection of swoopers carefully, somewhere in that group you’d find—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 4, 2020Permalink