I just had an interesting insight into my own writing process. It's something I've known about myself for a long time, and always had a framework to work around it, but today was the first time I've consciously recognised the idea.
Since the purpose of starting this blog for me is to start living my belief that story is a vital aspect of human consciousness, why not start out with an article about writing?
It might seem obvious to say that writing is a key component of all forms of storytelling. However, when you're trying to write something new, and that machine in your brain that is supposed to spit out ideas on command refuses to fire up, you might attempt to convince yourself that's not true at all.
For this very reason, I've dabbled in forms of content that appear to be unwritten. An example might be the "Cinecast" videos I created for the Popcorn Lobotomy channel. In theory those began with recording, not writing, and I told myself I would be able to create more of those because the concept did not necessitate a laborious writing step.
But the truth is that was all a convenient conceit to trick my brain out of writer's block. Those videos are as written and story-based as the videos that were created in a more conventional write-shoot-edit sequence.
Even when you're performing something on the fly, you're writing it in your head. It's really just a tweak on the order. Write separately, or write and create at the same time. In the end, it's much of a muchness.
But the video above DOES tell a story. The journey the viewer goes on in their head while watching has a logical sequence of ideas, and the way information is revealed in layers is common to pretty much all video forms except perhaps some "experimental" movies.
Another way to look at it is that the voice provides an alternative narrative to that intended by the maker of the original video -- and any narrative is a story.
Back to writing. I guess the "normal" way to write is to have an idea, or an inspiration, then plan it out to some extent, design some characters, inject some plot devices and then write it all down once you have it pretty clear in your head.
Or at least, that's how most of the articles and books on writing I have read imply it should be. Of course, they are always careful to say, "there are no rules, do whatever works for you", but they always end up laying out some rules immediately after that caveat. You can't very well write a self-help book without defining a process.
This morning, I realised that I don't follow this process, no at all, and especially not when attempting to write fiction.
I was thinking about a novel I've been planning to write for maybe 5 years, and as I tried to nut out parts of the story in my head, I found words were flowing for the beginning of the novel. This is probably the first time I've had actual words occur to me for this particular story -- it was a moment of inspiration!
So what would you normally do in such a moment? Seize it, right? Sit down and start writing immediately. But I didn't do that. Instead, I tried to calm the words spilling out of me, to stem the flow and procrastinate the ideas.
Even as the thoughts went through my mind, I wondered, why the hell am I not writing this down? What if this never happens again, and not seizing the moment will result in the novel never being started?
And this is where the insight happened. I don't WANT to sit down and write yet, because I know I'm not "ready". The words coming to me might have felt like inspiration, but I knew they weren't going to do the story justice. Not yet.
Even though there was a voice of dissent and low confidence in the mix somewhere, I knew with a high degree of confidence that the words for this story would flow again. And they would flow better next time.
There's this ideological thought in my head that says any idea good enough to act on will stick in your mind. I don't just want inspiration, I want compulsion. For this story, I want to wait until the words are literally spilling out of my mind!
There was the insight. I don't work to a plan or a process, because that's not how ideas work in my mind. I work to pure, 100% inspiration.
Interestingly, this idea cast my mind back to the first "serious" novel I ever attempted to write. The story involved two rival writers. One became successful and one didn't.
The jealousy of the second writer compelled him to seek out his successful friend and lock him in the basement of his house. He couldn't write with that jealousy eating him from the inside out, and he needed his friend taken out of action so he could get his masterpiece done.
The successful writer, while locked in the basement goes through all sorts of head games. Being restricted from writing starts manifesting in strange ways. First he has hallucinations, then those hallucinations start affecting the REAL world.
His mind, with no outlet for his creative drive, starts manifesting in the real world. His creativity becomes creation. And therein lies his key to escape.
It's "The Collector" meets "The Dark Half".
I look back now and I realise this story is somewhat "student film". It was written at a time when I was, literally a student, so I give myself a pass. But the idea it's trying to express is the very same idea I'm writing about now.
I guess what I'm suggesting here is that self-denial helps stoke the fires of inspiration.
Creativity is an innate force inside every human. You can't control it, but you can encourage it. You either flex the muscle or you don't.
And if you have confidence in the strength of that muscle, you'll find the only limitation to your creativity is time.