A theory of life, the universe & writing. Sort of - by Rowena House

 

Fifteen years after starting to write fiction seriously, I’ve at last come up with a rough model of how the creative process sort of works for me, a theory that excludes the word writing– an absence that may explain why the work-in-progress largely remains a work-in-imagination (plus reams of notes) umpteen years after the idea for the story first grabbed me.

 

There are four elements to this model: research, planning, drafting and editing. They’re not discreet stages.  In fact, there’s nothing linear about this method: it’s fluid and iterative – to use a favourite word.

 

You could describe it as an inverted pyramid, with the research layer at the top, offering the broadest range of creative options, narrowing down through the planning and drafting layers, until the pyramid reaches the final, narrowest editing stage where all (autonomous) creative decisions have been made.

 

In reality, a pinball machine might be closer to the truth, with every creative decision pinging more questions into the game, with the answers to be researched afresh, planned for, incorporated into drafts or discarded as irrelevant and/or tosh.

 

To work in such a fluid (not to mention slow) way, you have to be free to move between each layer at will, revisiting plans and drafts, going deeper into the research, and revising the entire story as and when necessary.

 

Booker prize-winner George Saunders likened his writing technique to turning the course of a super-tanker one incremental shift at a time. At first, I didn’t think it would be this way with historical fiction, even though Mr Saunders was talking about his nineteenth-century novel Lincoln in the Bardo at the time.

 

My WIP is based on real events, so a lot of the plot is pre-determined, but inspiration and influences about the characters and their motivations are arriving from all sorts of sources – music, chance encounters, a radio interview, art criticism, a fierce, feminist argument about trans rights – as well as more formal research and planning.

 

So yes, he’s right. The creative process is incremental, too.

 

To date, the main stumbling block to the kind of research I’d like to do for the WIP has been travel restrictions due to Covid19. The story is set in 17^th century Lancashire and London, and while you can do a lot of desk research these days, you can’t know what it feels like to stand on a particular hill, in a particular month, during a specific phase of the moon, unless you go there and climb the hill yourself.

 

Getting this kind of subjective sense-perceptions of place – its heat, light, wind, sounds, scents, the steepness of a hill, the damp of a dungeon – has, hitherto, been my first step when starting a story. 

 

This time around, I told myself I was just making excuses about not being able to travel, but then I learnt that neuroscience says a deliberate opening up to subjective, unexpected experiences is a precursor to creativity, enabling that part of the brain which makes original connections and creates ‘eureka moments’.

 

So I’ve stopped beating myself up about being a ridiculously slow fiction writer, and will this year simply snatch whatever inspiration comes along from wherever.

 

One piece of inspiration I’ll certainly take forward into 2021 is author Hisham Mattar’s advice on creative openness, delivered during his Arvon Foundation writing masterclass last July.

 

He said that without it, writers risk getting trapped by their original intentions. To access our deeper levels of intuitive invention, he advised against planning the first draft at all. While that seems a step too far into the unknown, it’s all grist to the mill.

 

Meanwhile, it will be fascinating to hear Max Porter’s take/s on the subject of how to approach fiction in his Arvon masterclass on 21 January, given the title of his talk is:  Think like a publisher/Don’t, whatever you do, think like a publisher. Should be good!

 

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