Category Archives: Creativity

Revive Your Open, Creative Mind

How often do you read a book, watch a TV show, or see a movie, and think, “How clever! I wish I could come up with ideas like that.” You can. I’ll tell you how.

Seeing the World a New Way

Creative people share a trait. Their brain neurons connect in a different manner than those of other people. When you sense the world around you, it is what it is. Creative people sense what the world could be.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Psychologists talk of ‘trait theory’ and the ‘Big Five’ personality traits. (For information, those are: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.) Of those, creatives seem loaded with an excess of Openness to Experience.

In this post, Luke Smillie and Anna Antinori explain how we all form mental models of the world. The closer our mental model matches the real world, the better we can deal with things.

Creatives play with their mental models. They think about unusual connections between unlike things. They imagine different possible worlds. They see in a way most don’t.

Binocular Rivalry

As one example, psychologists showed a group of test subjects a different image to their right and left eyes. The subjects tried to make sense of what they saw as one image rivaled the other.

The test revealed the more creative test subjects ended up ‘seeing’ a combined picture, one sharing attributes of both images to a greater extent than less creative subjects did.

Inattentional Blindness

In another test, psychologists gave test subjects a task requiring focus. They showed the subjects a video of six young people passing two basketballs around. The task—count the number of times people wearing white pass the ball.

Half of the test subjects concentrated so much on the task that they missed a bizarre event occurring in plain sight during the video. Those with more ‘openness to experience’ saw the event. Creatives saw what others screened out.

The Openness of Writers

The best fiction writers see what the rest of us see, but combine unlike things. Micheal Crichton merged his children’s interest in dinosaurs, then-current genetic engineering research, and mathematical chaos theory when writing Jurassic Park.

Suzanne Collins had been flipping TV channels between a reality show and coverage of a war when she combined the ideas and wrote The Hunger Games.

The ideas lie out there waiting for all of us, but fiction writers join and twist things and ask ‘what if…?’

Opening Your Mind

Can you train yourself to think like that, to see the story ideas others miss? I think so. In fact, I believe we’re born with the ability, and most of us lose it over time.

Most five-year-old children teem with creative ideas. They see animals in clouds, monsters under the bed, imaginative uses for sticks and stones and acorns. For some, that ability never fades, but most grow out of it, abandoning their magic dragons.

By increasing your creativity, you’re not learning a new skill, you’re re-learning a forsaken one.

Travel, especially foreign travel, can expose you to different ways of thinking that might spark creative ideas.

I like another technique, one much cheaper than flying overseas. Psychologists call it the ‘divergent thinking task’ but I call it ‘brainstorming twenty ideas.’ Take a common object and write down twenty alternative uses for it. Your ideas need not make practical sense, but don’t stop until you reach twenty. You can do this for any problem you face, not just imagining uses for things. By churning through the absurd and crazy ideas, you might hit on a brilliant one you wouldn’t have considered otherwise.

But That’s Not All

Disclaimer—writing a book requires more than just creativity. If you’re able to bolster your imaginative ability, you’ll generate good story ideas. But you still have to buckle down and write the novel or TV/movie script. Many writers consider that the hard part. Still, if the techniques in this blogpost help you over the first hurdle, that’s a win for you and for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 5, 2024Permalink Leave a comment

Has it Been 10,000 Hours Yet?

After Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, the Story of Success showed 10,000 hours of practice equaled genius, I felt good. After all, I’d been writing almost that long, so genius and success should lie just over the next rise. A few more hours to go. 

Then along came Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, author of this article in Scientific American, saying the 10,000-hour rule doesn’t apply to creative fields like fiction writing.

Now you tell me, Doc.

His rationale makes sense, dang it. To become a genius at an activity requiring repetitive motions—oboe playing, bricklaying, pizza-making, etc.—the 10,000 hours seems logical. Some of that is creative play, but much is building muscle memory and learning more advanced techniques.

But purely creative endeavors—music composition, art, and writing—aren’t like that. Muscle memory won’t help. Spend 10,000 hours typing and retyping Sense and Sensibility, and you’ll end up a fast typist. But your skills as a novelist won’t have changed.

The article counts 10,000 hours of practice (also called the 10-Year Rule) as one factor in creativity, but gives that number a wide error band.

The author cites several other factors of importance to creativity. Unfortunately, a writer lacks control over some of these factors, such as talent, personality, genes, and socio-economic environment.

Lucky for us, the article provides some aspects of creativity lying within our control. For example, Dr. Kaufman states that creative people often use messy processes. If you’re the neat and organized type, you’ll have to work on correcting that.

The author says creative people take interest in a broad array of things. If you write fiction, consider writing stories outside your normal genre.

Too much specialized expertise, says Dr. Kaufman, detracts from creativity. Often, he says, people outside a field contribute the fresh insights and creative solutions. As writers, we can take care not to become overly specialized, and each of us can claim outsider status in something.

I give the doctor credit for identifying personal attributes that influence creativity, but I don’t believe you’re stuck with whatever creativity you were born with. (Nor did he imply that in his article.)

You can increase your creativity. I believe you, and all of us, were born overflowing with creativity. However, society’s pressures to conform squeezed much of that creativity out.

You can get it back through regular exercise. Here’s the exercise to try. Think of a problem. If it’s a fiction-writing problem, maybe you’re stuck for an idea, or fell into a plot hole, or need a character motivation, or seek a setting description. The problem could be anything.

Now start writing solutions as they occur to you. Include stupid ideas, impractical ideas, zany and magic ideas. It doesn’t matter—no one will see your list. Often very good ideas only emerge after thinking of dozens of bad ones first.

Yes, you may call it brainstorming. Unlike normal brainstorming, though, you’re doing this alone. Also, unlike normal brainstorming, you’re seeking more than just a good answer to your problem. You’re trying to stretch your creativity muscles. You’re retraining your mind to free it from a cage built long ago to hold it.

Maybe you’ll run dry after ten listed solutions, but I encourage you to push on. It might help to consider this–back when you were five years old, you could rattle off fifty ideas without slowing down. That’s the childlike creativity you’re looking to recapture.

If you aim to be a writer, forget about the 10,000 hours, the 10-Year Rule. That’s for others. You need creativity, and no clock or calendar can give you that. Let your inner kid loose again, this time to skip around in the infinite playground of your mind where milliseconds equal millennia and a pace is as good as a parsec.

And, there he goes, the five-year-old version of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 20, 2023Permalink

Born Too Late to Write Something New

You’d like to write a fictional story, but don’t know what to write about. As you cast around for ideas, you realize everything’s been written by someone else before you. There’s nothing new under the sun.

The French writer Alfred de Musset expressed your precise feeling in his poem “Rolla,” when he wrote, “I came too late into a world too old.”

Author Robert Glancy said “All the stories in the world have already been told.”

Another author, Anna Quindlen, put it this way: “Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel.”

Library shelves and bookstores teem with books you could have written, but didn’t. Now it’s too late. All plots used. All characters portrayed. All settings explored. All stories written.

Obvious conclusion—you might as well give up. You can’t write anything new, anything original. The infinite number of monkeys clattering on infinite typewriters now rest their arms. Having typed everything, they’re done.

If it’s true for you, it’s true for everyone. Not only have the monkeys finished, all human writers must also be done. The last novels, the last short stories, novellas, and flash fiction pieces must even now be rolling off the printing presses. This year, 2022, must mark the end of fiction. All writers must retire. All publishers must shift to reprinting old stuff.

Any day now, we’ll hear the news about the death of new fiction. It had a good run. We remember it like it was yesterday. Rest in Peace.

Any day now…

Wait a minute. I’m not sensing a slowing of writer output yet. Publishers somehow keep cranking out new titles. Writers somehow keep submitting fresh manuscripts.

Don’t they know it’s over? Haven’t they read the obituary? What’s going on? If everything’s been written already, why are writers still writing? Why are publishers still publishing?

Looking back, we see no error in our logic, no flaw in our reasoning. And yet.

Upon further examination, we missed the end of the Glancy and Quindlen quotes. Robert Glancy went on to say, “…but our stories have not been told from every angle.” Anna Quindlen continued in her speech, “…except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.”

Maybe there’s hope for you after all. Maybe all plots, characters, and settings have been exhausted…but not in every combination. Not from every perspective. Not using every mood, tone, or style. Not with every apt metaphor, every well-worded simile. Not with your experiences and passions woven in.

Call the monkeys back to their typewriters. They have more work to do. Much more.

Come to think of it, forget about the monkeys. They’re not the ones with stories to write. You are. An infinite number of stories remain. They’re out there. Your muse whispers them to you and you must obey.

De Musset had it backward. You didn’t come too late into a world too old. You came just in time for the world to read your story.

Your story may well resemble, in certain aspects, others that came before. But since it’s yours, that gives it freshness and originality. Something new under the sun after all.

So write it. Let the world read it. Back to the keyboard you go. And so, also, goes—

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 8, 2022Permalink

The 1000-Idea Mind

Do you, or does someone you know, have a 1000-Idea Mind?

For years, I worked for a boss who had 1000 creative ideas a week. About 100 of them were good ideas. About 10 might be practical, given enough time and money. If I worked hard all week, I might make good progress on 1 of those ideas. Then a new week would roll around and my boss had 1000 new ideas.

Such people overflow with ideas. They come up with far more creative thoughts about tasks and projects than they could ever accomplish by themselves. In the working world, they tend to get promoted to positions of authority where they have employees to execute some of their plans.

But there are never enough employees, or hours in the week, or other resources, to come close to realizing more than a small fraction of the notions of a 1000-Idea Mind.

People with 1000-Idea Minds look at the world differently. They see things as they could become. They see possibilities, how the world would be better if this were moved there, or that had a hole in it, etc. That a task might be too complicated, or unprecedented, or need resources far beyond what’s available, that rarely bothers them. Those constraints are, at best, details to be worked out by others, or, at worst, excuses for avoiding work.

Visit the home of someone with a 1000-Idea Mind, and you’ll see it’s filled with partially-completed projects all strewn about in haphazard order. They’re big on starting, not on finishing.

Often such people don’t seem upset about the low accomplishment rate for their ideas. They believe other people exist for the purpose of implementing their notions, and they understand those people aren’t miracle workers. Those other people are doing the best they can with their limited minds, so one must learn to tolerate the low fruition rate.

I suspect 1000-Idea Minds are rare within the population, but I believe they’re valuable to society. Leonardo da Vinci probably had such a mind. He sketched a lot of inventions and left the actual construction to others. He knew all his notes needed to get organized, and he intended to do that someday, but never got around to it.  That’s something he should have delegated.

Some writers have 1000-Idea Minds, and I feel sorry for them. Writers don’t have a staff of employees to turn their story ideas into finished prose, to submit them for publication, to assist with marketing. They work alone. A writer with such a mind gets 1000 story ideas a week, but finishes few stories, if any.

Perhaps you find it frustrating to work for a boss with a 1000-Idea Mind. Imagine how frustrating it must be to have such a mind. Still, the world is much better for having such people in it. I suspect every daring project ever undertaken in human history started out as an idea within a 1000-Idea Mind.

I salute people with 1000-Idea Minds. However, when you’re getting your next idea and you’re casting about for someone to do the actual work, don’t look at—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 28, 2021Permalink

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

10 Traits Writers Need Most

What traits do you need to become a successful fiction writer? Of those, which are most important?

Author Anne R. Allen wrote a blogpost some years ago that inspired this line of thinking for me. She had encountered people who thought talent was necessary, and sufficient. They’d send her their written excerpts and ask, “Do you think I’ve got the talent?”

Anne Allen argued, persuasively, that natural talent might aim you in your life’s direction, but is far less important than skill, or several other traits she cited.

I decided to carry the argument in a different direction. Given the traits she mentioned, could I come up with an ordered list from most important to least important?

Using a technique called pair-wise comparison, I used a matrix to compare each trait against each of the others and added up the scores.

First, let’s define each one in alphabetical order:

  • Creativity, or Imagination. This wasn’t on Anne R. Allen’s list, but I consider it important. Basically, it’s the ability to come up with new ideas, to invent characters, plots, scene descriptions, etc.
  • Drive. This is the inner motivation or impulse to write. It’s that determination, that self-discipline, that pushes you to create fictional worlds.
Gratitude symbol
  • Gratitude. By this, Anne meant the willingness to accept help in the form of negative criticism, particularly comments on your manuscript from beta readers and editors. I would have called it Toughness, or Thick Skin, but we’ll keep with Anne’s term.
  • Learning. This is the willingness to acquire new writing skills by educating yourself. There are numerous methods, including studying the classics, taking classes, participating in critique groups, and reading books about writing. Choose the method that works for you.
  • Marketing. This trait measures how well you understand what your readership wants and how well you expose potential readers to your writing. These days, you have to know the market and be willing to advertise yourself.
  • Observation. Anne called this trait “Listening Skills,” but I sought a one-word description. Writers must watch and listen to people, how they behave, what they say, what facial expressions and gestures they use, what verbal expressions and dialect they employ, etc. Such knowledge will make your characters seem more realistic.
  • Passion. This describes your love of writing. Although related to Drive, this is more about the pleasure you derive from the act of writing itself.
Tabono Symbol
  • Persistence. It’s a measure of your willingness and ability to overcome setbacks, to solve problems and move forward, to rise after falling.
  • Skill. This trait describes the quality of your writing. Anne had much to say about skill, but didn’t include it specifically in her list of traits. She defined ‘talent’ as inborn skill, but believed few people had talent, but most could develop skill. Her post suggested that ‘skill’ was an umbrella term that included all the other traits. I believe skill is independent of all of them, and merely addresses how well you write.
  • Solitude. Anne called this ‘The Ability to be Alone’ and made it clear that writing is not just for introverts. It’s just that extroverts must leave their comfort zone for a while, since writing is an individual effort.

Obviously, there are inter-relationships and overlaps among these traits. Still, they’re distinct enough that I was able to rate each one in importance against all the others. Below is my subjective list from most important to least:

  1. Creativity
  2. Drive
  3. Passion
  4. Observation
  5. Learning
  6. Skill
  7. Persistence
  8. Gratitude
  9. Marketing
  10. Solitude

As a general pattern, you can see my most important ones are traits that get you started, and the least important (with the exception of Solitude) are traits you develop as a result of having written and submitted your work.

That list may not seem right to you, but it works for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 2, 2020Permalink

Better Writing through Exhaustion?

Are you more creative when sleepy? Is that the best time for writing rough drafts?

Some research suggests people may perform slightly better on “insight”-type tasks when they’re tired. Writing that first draft of your story might be an insight-type task. Perhaps, when fatigue sets in, you’re more willing to take a chance, to perform a mental leap, to connect disparate thoughts in a novel way.

This study, by Associate Professor Mareike Wieth of Albion College, examined the performance of over 400 students on both analytic and insight tasks. Analytic tasks were straightforward math and logic problems. Insight tasks were problems that seemed, at first, to lack sufficient information, but required a flash of intuitive thought to solve.

According to this article in The Atlantic, the students performed better on analytic tasks at their optimum time of day when properly rested. No surprise there.

However, in the insight tasks, they did 20% better at their non-optimal time of day.

As I understand it, the subjects for the study were college students, not a random sample of people. Also, the insight tasks did not include writing first drafts of fictional stories. I don’t want to infer too much from this study. As all scientists conclude after every study, “more research is required.”

But you’re not interested in research. You’re interested in becoming a better writer, the best writer you can be. When it comes to writing while tired, I suspect your mileage may vary.

It might be worth a few experiments. You could stay up past your normal bedtime and write some first drafts then. Or you could wake up early and scribble out a first draft before starting your morning routine.

Here I’ll add a cautionary note. Suppose experimentation reveals you do write better when tired. There is a long list of physiological effects of sleep deprivation, including depression, obesity, and increased risk of diabetes. Writing while fatigued is one thing, but be sure to get enough sleep.

Maybe you’ll find a different way to take advantage of those creative sparks you get while exhausted. Rather than sitting hunched over a keyboard, all you need is a notepad to jot down the insights as they flash by. I’ve blogged before about the tendency for a writer’s mind to solve problems while engaged in other activities, particularly mundane tasks. The notepad technique works then, too.

Well, <yawn> it’s getting late. It’s first-draft-writing time for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 11, 2019Permalink

Writing Sideways

You have a problem. Perhaps you’ve written your main character into a plot trap. Or you’re trying to create an irresistibly likable character. Or you need a good motivation for the antagonist. Or you don’t even know what to write about. I don’t know what your problem is. Still, let me help you solve it.

By writing sideways.

No, that’s not what I mean by writing sideways

Well, it’s really called ‘lateral thinking’ but I like to think of it as writing sideways. I’m indebted to Shane Snow for the ideas in this post. He discussed problem solving in general, but my post is about solving problems while writing fiction.

His article starts with a clever problem to illustrate his method, but I’ll choose a different one. Your character is in a new house wired by a crazy electrician. The character sees three switches in the basement and knows each switch controls a different incandescent lamp on the first floor, but doesn’t know which switch controls which lamp. How can she find out, by making only one trip upstairs?

Shane Snow’s method has five steps, but you might not need all five for every problem. I’ll rephrase his steps in my own words:

  1. Examine the assumptions. All problems have assumptions, but some are so obvious most people ignore them. List all the assumptions you can think of, and examine each one. Is it really true? Are there other options? For our Switch-and-Lamp problem, the assumptions might include:
    • You need to know which switch controls which lamp.
    • Each switch controls a different lamp.
    • You can only make one trip up the stairs.
    • You can’t see the lamps from the basement.
    • You can determine a switch-to-lamp connection by flipping the switch on and looking at the lamp.
  2. Question the direct approach. Think about the way most people would solve the problem. Then ask, “what if I couldn’t do it that way?” For the Switch-and-Lamp problem, most people would flip a switch or two, then go upstairs and find they’ve only identified one of the three connections. They’re stymied by the limitation of being allowed only one trip upstairs.
  3. Re-write the Question. Often by examining the question, ingenious new answers emerge. Why is it so vital to know which switch controls which lamp? Why am I only allowed one trip upstairs? Does it matter that they’re ‘incandescent’ light bulbs?
  4. Approach the Problem Backwards. This is a common method used with mathematical problems. Imagine you’ve already solved the problem and think about what form that solution took and what route you must have taken to get there. In our character’s case, her solved problem consists of going upstairs and finding the three lamps in three different states, so she can know which switch controlled which lamp. That seems impossible, since lamps have only two states—on or off, right?
  5. Get a fresh perspective. Look at the problem from different angles and sides. In a problem involving fictional characters, think about how each of them see it. In our switch-and-lamp problem, look back and notice how we’ve constrained our thought by thinking of lamps as binary—either on or off, but we need some third state of a light bulb to know, in one trip, which switch controls each lamp. Is there a third state of a light bulb other than on or off?

Readers love books that break molds, defy conventions, and explore new ideas. They enjoy characters that are out of the ordinary, or who solve bedeviling problems in ingenious ways. Perhaps these techniques of writing sideways will help you.

Oh, yeah. I forgot about the lamps. By now, you know one answer: your character must turn the first switch on and wait a few minutes, then turn that one off, turn the second switch on, and go upstairs. Your character will find one light bulb off but warm (switch 1), one lamp on (switch 2), and one lamp off but just room temperature (switch 3).

That’s the problem’s classic solution, but what if the problem permitted no trips up the stairs? Then our character could drill a hole in the basement ceiling and construct a periscope so she could see at a glance which lamp comes on as she operates each switch.

If you apply the sideways writing techniques, you’ll come up with even more solutions to this problem and many others, solutions far beyond the imagination of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 7, 2019Permalink

Writing Inside the Box

The problem with life is there are too many constraints. There are too many limits, too little money, too few resources, and never enough time. And that’s the good news.

Good news? Lest you think me crazy, I’ll explain.

A wonderful blog post by James Clear inspired this post, and I encourage you to read Clear’s article, too.

If Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) could constrain himself to write a children’s book using only fifty different words and come up with Green Eggs and Ham, then constraints may help you as well.

As discussed in Clear’s post, constraints (whether self-imposed or not) force you to think creatively, to find unusual ways to get things done within the limits.

As a fiction writer, you’re always imposing constraints on your characters, particularly the hero of your stories. Your protagonist is always racing against the clock, striving to get out of some trap, fighting to get free of a bad relationship, or otherwise burdened by severe limitations. With the usual options denied, your hero must become inventive in coming up with ways to resolve problems.

What about you? While writing your story, do you face constraints? Yes. I’m sure you have a word limit, even if only a vague one.

Other constraints include the tone of the narrative (once you’ve chosen that, you shouldn’t deviate), genre norms, a desire to stay away from stereotypical characters, character speaking style, the story’s Point of View, etc. Other constraints you might choose for yourself include vocabulary limits like Dr. Seuss’ story, an upper limit on readability index, a dislike of certain words or phrases, and thousands of other possibilities.

Perhaps the most constraining limit of all for any writer is time. You never know how much time you really have and you can’t buy more of it. You can’t take an infinite number of years to finish your story.

As one extreme example, consider the way Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451. With two small children at home, he sought a quiet place to write. At the library, he could rent a typewriter, but had to feed it a dime every half-hour. That would be a dollar every half-hour today. They say ‘time is money’ but imagine feeding money into your laptop all the time. No wonder Fahrenheit 451 is a rather short novel.

Constraints, whether imposed by the universe or by you, force you to optimize, maximize, and prioritize. They force you to choose some things and forego others. They force you to think beyond the normal, to consider bizarre alternatives, and to invent new methods.

Perhaps there’s no use complaining about constraints, then. We all face them. Just maybe, they’re bringing out your most creative impulses. Instead of complaining, accept them. Face them. Figure out ways to deal with them.

I’ve accepted the box I’m writing in, but it’s uncomfortable and my joints stiffened up. Now I’m stuck. I hope someone can reach in and help—

                                                Poseidon’s Scribe

January 27, 2019Permalink

The Inspiration/Perspiration Ratio

One of inventor Thomas Edison’s most famous quotes is, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” There may be a similar ratio involved with writing fiction, too. Let’s find out what it is.

I got the idea for this post while reading a wonderful guest post by author Anthony St. Clair on Joanna Penn’s website. St. Clair takes the extreme view that a writer should forget the muse and just show up for work and produce prose.

For discussion’s sake, let’s postulate two possible aspects of writing fiction called Creativity and Productivity. Here are the attributes for each:

Creativity Productivity
·         Wait for the muse ·         No waiting—get to work
·         Muse whispers in your ear ·         Invisible boss yells at you
·         Book idea is fully formed ·         Book emerges from long process
·         Words flow like water ·         Words extracted with pliers
·         Pleasantry ·         Drudgery
·         1st draft = final draft ·         1st draft = crap
·         Mind to universe ·         Nose to grindstone
·         Work late at night ·         Work efficiently
·         Write in binges to exhaustion ·         Write on schedule to completion
·         Guided by insight and instinct ·         Guided by plan and outline
·         Lying on couch, thinking ·         Sitting at desk, working
·         Great ideas per lifetime ·         Words per day

If fiction writing consists of some amalgamation of those two aspects, what is the ratio between the two? St. Clair’s post advocates a ratio of 0% creativity and 100% productivity.

Creativity

Productivity

I can’t go quite that far. I agree it’s necessary to dispel the myth some beginning writers have about writing being all Creativity. Sadly, it’s not. If you wish to write, steel yourself to suffer through the items on the Productivity list. Most writing consists of enduring the attributes in the right column.

Most, but not all. There is, and has to be, some amount of stuff from the Creativity side of the ledger.

For me, the two aspects occur at different times and in different settings. Productivity occurs when I’m sitting at the desk typing, or when I have a pad handy and I’m writing by hand.

Creativity occurs when I’m doing some other activity that doesn’t require full brain engagement, such as yardwork, showering, or exercising. In other words, the Creativity part of writing happens when I’m not writing. Apparently, idle neurons spark best at those times. That’s when I conjure up new story ideas, work out plot problems, flesh out characters, imagine settings, etc.

The ideas ignited during those non-writing creative times remain with me and guide me when I sit down to do actual writing. They either form my plan or modify an existing plan.

To muddy things a bit, there are elements of Creativity within the Productivity sessions and vice versa. There are times, at the keyboard, when I get stuck and must summon my creative side for help. Likewise, my Creative moments often involve a measure of directed thought, not just waiting for muse whisperings.

Moreover, the Creativity/Productivity ratio changes during the development of a story. Early on, it’s nearly all Creativity. In the editing and polishing stages, the work shifts almost wholly to Productivity.

Given all that, what is my answer to the original question—the creativity/productivity ratio? In terms of importance or value to the process, I’d say it’s 50-50. Both parts are necessary. However, in the amount of time spent, I’d estimate fiction writing is one part Creativity and nine parts Productivity. At least, that’s the ratio for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 25, 2018Permalink