Where do ideas come from? It’s the question that you’re not meant to ask writers and other creative people, because the mythology of creativity is so fucking bizarre that providing a real answer is seen as a diminishment of the art produced. Or it’s disregarded because people assume the idea is the important part, rather than the work to flesh it out and build it into something.
One of the best answers I’ve ever seen to the question actually comes from the perennially underrated Neil Gaiman novellette The Goldfish Pool & Other Stories, available in his first short story collection Smoke & Mirrors. In it, Gaiman’s novelist-turned-screenwriter protagonist reaches for an answer as he grapples with art and storytelling and the weirdness of Hollywood:
People talk about books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more works than you’d believe.
Except for Sons of Man, and that one pretty much wrote itself.
The irritating question they ask — us being writers — is: ‘where do you get your ideas?’
And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!
Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman, pg 87
(An aside for those who’ve never read Smoke and Mirrors: it’s worth it for this one story. It’s like the early seeds of an approach to narrative that eventually bloomed into Gaiman’s acclaimed novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, but its infinitely stranger and touched with a stronger sense of the uncanny).
That particular quote about ideas has been living in the back of my brain forever, and it always bubbles up to the fore when I find myself stuck on something. Case in point: one of my tasks last week was producing a scene for a short story.
The scene involved a weary, long-retired swordsman returning to an arena where he’d been forced to fight as gladiator for an alien ruling class in the city where he lived, ostensibly as a favour to his old mentor as the next great gladiator refused. My goals for the scene were ambitious, because there were a lot of moving pieces in play:
- I wanted to render a familiar space and the strangeness that had seeped in now that he encountered in a new context
- I wanted to give the reader a sense of how far the protagonist is from the crowd of people around him, and the realisation that he’d once been complicit in the thing that horrifies him
- At the same time, I wanted a sense of nostalgia for the fighter he used to be, as well as a sense of envy as he sees the new generation take his spot.
- I wanted to use the scene to mark a sense of transition–the protagonist has spent the first few scenes in cramped tunnels beneath the arena, dealing with people one-on-one. This scene marks the point where he’s moved to a passive role, after seeking people out, and stepping from the darkness of the tunnels into the bright, open space of the arena he once dominated. In effect, he goes from being a big presence to a single figure in the crowd.
- And, finally, he has his first encounter with an alien noble since the story began, which becomes the major catalyst that drives the narrative going forward. This means I’m both establishing the big conflict, but also giving the reader context for the nobility’s inhuman goals and trying to instil an uneasiness into the encounter.
It’s a lot to do, and not easy, which is why I kept getting stuck on it. Trying to figure out the techniques to use, and how I want to move the reader’s attention around through the various narrative beats. If I get it right, it becomes the beating heart of the story–a little focal point for the mood I’ve been building up in the previous scenes. A gear change that alerts the reader that we’re heading into the real shit now.
Today, two things came together for me that may actually get me through the scene (albeit with a good deal of work).
The first was a lecture I sat through last week for the class I’m teaching, where a lot of the focus was on thinking about Setting and Context. Two of the things we advised students to look for were the ways a reader is anchored and oriented–what do we ask them to latch onto? How do they know where they are?
These are habits it’s easy to forget about when you’ve been writing for a while, particularly if you’re a panster. They are tools/techniques that become subconscious habit, rather than tools you can turn to while drafting when things are going wrong. Slipping into a point of view and establishing a need (the anchor) becomes second nature, as does seizing upon the details that will give the reader context for what’s to come.
There’s very few writers I know who tend to think in terms of naming techniques like this, but it’s surprising how useful they can be. They give you a next step, when you’re stuck on something, and if you can’t complete that next step then you’ve got a tool for analysing what work still needs to be done.
If I can’t anchor the reader, it’s probably a sign I don’t yet know what’s coming in the scene and where the real conflict lies. If I can’t orient the reader, it’s because I don’t yet know what’s going to become meaningful details as the scene progresses. Both things may come if you start writing, but it can useful to sit down and list potential details rather than pelt words at the page.
Useful as those two words may be, they weren’t enough to solve this particular conundrum on their own. Fortunately, they were fresh in my mind as I started reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, and in particular her chapter on scratching for ideas when you’re stuck or starting on something.
Part of what Tharp talks about here are the difference between big ideas and little ideas–the stuff that are self-contained and self-defining. The big projects that are marked by their ambition and ulterior motives, and fire you up with their inherent energy.
The scene I’m stuck on is a big idea. And, like most big ideas, it both takes up a lot of mental space and involves an incredible number of small steps in order to bring them to the fore. And the small steps are not big ideas, but a steady accumulations of smaller ideas that are deployed in succession.
“This is why you scratch for little ideas,” Tharp suggests. “Without the little ideas, there are no big ideas.”
Or, as she puts it later in the chapter:
Scratching is what you do when you can’t wait for the thunderbolt to hit you. As Frued said, “when inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.”
…Remember this when you’re struggling for a big idea. You’re much better off scratching for a small one.
The Creative Habit, pg 98
Incidentally, people had been recommending Tharp’s book to me for years, and I’d been slow to pick it up because it was only available in hardcopy (for the curious: Amazon AUS | UK | USA and via Booktopia). It’s part analysis of Tharp’s own creative process, part meditation on what’s really going on when we create, and I’ve been pulling little details out of every chapter I come across.
The example she goes on to give draws from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, talking about scaling the ambition of a project down until your subject is a brick rather than an entire country.
And, the moment I read that, I knew where I was going wrong. Because the scene I was stuck on didn’t just need anchor and orientation, it needed the focus to be narrowed in on very specific things. I’d been thinking of the scene in cinematic terms–all the detail and grandeur that could be achieved if you pointed a camera at something and let it wash over the viewer.
I don’t have that option as a writer, because readers will only pick up details once sentence at a time. Smaller things need to stand in for larger things, and single details need to suggest a broader field of details begin.
Which meant I didn’t need to start with the crowd or the grandeur, but something personal. The give I was looking for was a slow accumulation of details and reactions, not the sweeping reveal of a cinematic scene as the characters stepped onstage.
In this instance, I can filter a whole lot of what I’m trying to do with the scene into the act of preparing–pulling on an old uniform element, contrasting the protagonists feeling for wearing it once more against the way everyone else responds to him wearing the house colours. That gives me a hook and a very specific, focused metaphor that I can hang the rest of the scene on, as everything builds out of that particular moment and emotion.
And for the first time, I can see the scene as part of a book instead of a big feast of visual details. I’m playing to the strengths of the medium, rather than being beholden to a genre beat that the medium isn’t great at replicating.
Neither Tharp’s book or the lecture would have got me started on their own, but the confluence of those ideas coming together got me thinking about things in a new way: anchor, orient, reduce the focus, find the contrasts.
It’s a neat little list to fall back on when I’m stuck on a particular scene.
