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"That's an early discipline any artist learns. You don't get taken with the colors of paints that you've got. You've got to narrow it down. It's great to have all the possibilities, but it all starts with an idea. To sit there and hope something will happen is like dumping 400 gallons of paint on the floor and hoping a picture is going to emerge. It doesn't work that way."
- Ex-Monkee Michael Nesmith on creativity
Listen to the Monkee. You know the Monkee is right. Listen to the Monkee.
Sitting in front of the computer and staring at it in the hopes that you will be inspired to write is like staring at a piano and hoping that it will sing to you.
Life is what fuels your writing - or at least, it should be. Yes, there are people with amazing lives who couldn't tell a decent story to fill 30 seconds of dead air, and then there are those people who are so fascinating that you could listen to them talk about tying their shoe. Much of creativity comes from within, but there has to be some amount that comes from without.
In case you couldn't tell from my sporatic contributions to this column, I am struggling a lot lately with writer's block. I go through spurts where I can't stop seeing everything as a story... seeing everyone as a character or a personality trait... taking every little thing that happens to me and escalating it in my mind to the point where I don't even remember what really happened and what I made up. Then, I go through periods where I am so focused that once I deal with something, it's just gone. No story, no fantasy. Done and gone.
I've gotten some of my best story continuations by walking away from what I was writing and doing something else. Relax the brain, allow other input, and something completely unrelated would trigger the miracle bridge linking what I was writing to where I wanted to go.
This could be anything. I used to watch related films when I was working on something similar. This might help in the form of structure, but it could hurt in the form of redundancy. I could get a good idea for a gory decapitation scene from listening to Rush Limbau (who couldn't?), or I could find humor in something on the news, or turn a basic nothing-type observation of a person at an ATM into a very dramatic encounter for my main character. The one thing that never seemed to inspire me is staring at a computer screen.
You never know where your inspiration will come from. The inspiration for this week's column came from a Monkee. |
