Creative Disruption - Lari Don

This week and last, I've been trying to write with workmen in the house. And it’s not gone very well. I haven’t written any of my current novel. I’m even struggling to concentrate on blog posts and emails.

I’ve escaped to cafes and libraries, and I've done some useful reading and research. But I haven’t done much writing, even in my favourite library.

I've also done a little bit of thinking about disruption, and its effect on creativity.

I don’t need peace and quiet to write (I once wrote a fight scene in a library that was hosting a Bookbug nursery rhyme session.) I don’t need comfort or space (I wrote my most recent picture book in a cold spider-infested shed.)

But I do need clear head-space and a clear stretch of time ahead of me. So sudden crashes (wait, what was THAT? Should I go up and see?) or irregular queries about tiling and plastering, keep knocking me out of my creative zone. And I suspect that coping with disruption of my domestic routine uses up most of the energy that I should really be directing towards my story.

So, I didn’t get much writing done this week. 

Which reminded me of a novel that I abandoned five years ago. I had written about a dozen chapters, when the story suddenly ground to a halt. I couldn’t see any further, I couldn’t work out what to write next. I didn’t even know what questions to ask of my characters… That story fell apart in the year I moved house twice. And I've never been sure if the idea wasn’t strong enough, or if the constant domestic disruption pulled me out of the story so often that eventually I couldn't find my way back in.

But now I’m fairly sure it was the house moves, not the idea. So perhaps, sometime, I might revisit that story.

And this current disruption hasn’t been all bad. When I was walking around central Edinburgh last week, to get away from the plaster dust, I had a bright shiny idea for a new picture book!

So: disruption, is it good or bad for creativity?

My experience suggests that for me, disruption doesn’t help with steady creation of an ongoing project, but it might provoke new ideas…

I wonder what other writers feel disrupts their creative process, and what supports it?

Lari Don is the award-winning author of more than 20 books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales, a teen thriller and novellas for reluctant readers. 

Lari’s website 

Lari’s own blog

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Lari is on Instagram as LariDonWriter

Dreamy Island Day - Eloise Williams

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, and probably again after that – sometimes the endless online business of being a writer becomes too much and I have got to take a break.

I’ve done it again. I’ve taken ANOTHER day off.

I know, I know… slovenly, slack, and absolutely needed.

After chasing up the addresses for books I have already posted, forgetting my father is having an operation, and many fitful nights filled with little sleep and lots of nightmares which mostly consisted of filling in forms, I decided my brain was too addled to be able to create anything.

My husband, who sleeps / doesn’t sleep next to me when I’m like this, suggested a day on Skomer Island and it was exactly the right tonic.

I forget, when I’m sat in front of my laptop all day, that to write well it is actually quite important to experience life well too.

We set off at stupid o’clock this morning, sausage baps in hand (than you Linda McCartney) and furrowed brow beneath a floppy brimmed sunhat in hope of turning my frown upside down. It isn’t all that far from where we live to Martin’s Haven where you catch the boat and as we were there early – because you have to be to actually get a space – we wandered about amongst cows and bumble bees waiting for our turn to board. I managed to keep the frown this far.

I worried about rain. I hadn’t brought a coat of any kind which is an almost deadly option here in west Wales. I hadn’t had enough caffeine before our stupid o’clock leaving time. Thankfully, there is a helpful coffee machine to hand. I would have to do this, that, and about fifteen other things when I got home. Lists ran through my head like Mo Farah on a roundabout. I was careful I didn’t walk too close to the cliff edge in case lovely husband, Guy, decided to put me out of my misery once and for all.

Finally, we boarded. The sun came out. The sea was a clear turquoise blue. A seal swam past us and I cried. It was the seal, for sure. Nature has always been my first love and it moves me beyond measure, but it was also remembering that I am a human and humans need to have a brain break now and again.

We spent several hours wandering around Skomer. Laughing and doing impressions of puffins – I used to be an actor so mine were very much better than spouse’s efforts. Snoozing and snoring (Guy, not me) on the salty, sun-soaked grass. Smiling, laughing, breathing all the air out from our lungs to take a whole new fresh peaceful lot in. Eating apples and ginger biscuits and slugging water back as if it was the most magical liquid in the world – which of course, it is.

And then something happened which I wasn’t expecting to happen. I took out a notebook and started to write a completely new story.

It’s not one I’d been thinking about and I won’t bore you with it here but it was remarkable to me that after only a few hours of what I am now calling a ‘Brian break’ instead of a brain break, my creativity would come back to me.

I’ve spoken about this in previous blogs but I am so quick to forget the importance of getting away from the screen and getting out there, wherever that may be, instead of typing away till my hands are gnarled hooks which I can’t even use to rub at my own square-shaped eyes.

And on that note…  

Eloise Williams

www.eloisewilliams.com

The Power of 'I Don’t Know' – Lari Don

I think I’ve worked out where stories live.

I was touring Northern Ireland last month, with the Scottish Book Trust’s Scottish Friendly Book Tour, chatting about my new Spellchasers trilogy. I met almost 1,500 fabulous friendly imaginative primary children, I shared my stories with them, and I encouraged them to come up with story ideas of their own.

In a school towards the end of the tour, one wee boy was imagining an exciting story about shapeshifters chasing each other, and I was asking open questions to prompt him. But suddenly his chase scene ground to a halt.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what happens next.”

His face fell, and I could see his confidence draining away.

“But ‘I don’t know’ is brilliant,” I said. “’I don’t know’ is how I write stories.”

He frowned at me.

I pulled out the half dozen notebooks I keep in my briefcase. “These are filled with questions I don’t know the answer to, and all my scribbled attempts to find the answer,” I said. “All my novels are answers to questions that I didn’t know the answer to when I started.

“‘I don’t know’ means that you have to find out. ‘I don’t know’ means that you have to imagine, invent, discover what happens next. And that’s what writing is!”

The wee boy started to perk up.

“’I don’t know’ is a good thing. It means you aren’t writing something obvious or predictable! ‘I don’t know’ means you’re writing something new and exciting. You might have to stop and think and play with ideas and come up with an answer to the question, but ‘I don’t know’ means you have a story worth playing with.”

The wee boy grinned, and started to think about all the possible answers to fill in his ‘I don’t know’.

And I realised that I hadn’t just been saying something positive to give confidence back to a wee boy and his shapeshifters. I had discovered a truth about my own writing. When I first discuss a novel idea with an editor, I can almost always describe the main character, their big problem, the baddie, and the first few scenes. But fairly soon after that, there’s a point where I say quite cheerfully: ‘...and I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know how they solve the problem and defeat the baddie, but I’m sure I’ll find out while I write.’ And, so far, I always have...

Those are the stories that excite me, the ones with great big ‘I don’t know’s in the middle and at the end, because I want to write them to find out.

That’s where stories live, for me, and I hope for that wee boy. Stories live inside ‘I don’t know’, and the fun is in finding them!

Lari Don is the award-winning author of more than 20 books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales, a teen thriller and novellas for reluctant readers.

Lari’s website 

Lari’s own blog

Lari on Twitter

Lari on Facebook

How long should art last? - Lari Don

When I write a draft of a story, I am starting a process that I hope will result in a printed book, an object that will last forever. When I first start to tell a traditional tale out loud, I am developing a performance that I hope will become a long-term part of my repertoire of stories.

Sometimes a draft falls apart, sometimes a folktale or legend doesn’t grab the audience the way I hoped it would. So not all my time and effort and creativity goes into something that lasts. But I always start off hoping that it will. Except, it turns out, when I’m on holiday...

This summer, on holiday in Orkney, my family and I found a geo cutting into the coast of a small tidal island, which was filled with small stone sculptures.

We decided to join in with this community enterprise and use the flat and rounded stones lying on the shore to build our own sculptures.

Most passing sculptors had tried to find safe places to create their art. Far up the narrow beach, or high up the steep cliffs (a safe place for the stones, but surely not a safe place to build!). Somewhere that their creations would last, for at least a while.

But I walked right down to the water’s edge. I spent half an hour putting all my creativity and thought into selecting the perfect stones to build something that I expected, that I HOPED, would be knocked down by the first strong wave of the next high tide. I did this entirely deliberately. I tried to build something that was attractive and satisfying. But also unstable, and below the tide line.

Why?

Because I was on holiday, and I didn’t want to make anything permanent.

I wanted to let my brain create without worrying about audience or permanence, without trying to make it perfect for ever. I wanted to create something which was specifically designed to be temporary.

And that challenged me to think about the permanence of art, and whether caring about the longevity of the work you are doing stops you noticing the process of creating it and enjoying the moments of its present time because you are thinking too much about its future.

 And it forced me to consider whether ANY attempt to create permanent art is doomed to disappointment (the sun is going to burn out eventually, after all.) So my hope in the first line of this blog for books that last forever is probably naïve...

And it showed me that planned obsolesce is surprisingly difficult – it wasn’t easy to build something that wouldn’t fall down the moment I stepped away, but would fall down very soon.

And it amused me.

And it also freed me up.

But I wonder if I could have deliberately created something with no future, if I had been building with words...

(And I now realise that taking photos of the resulting temporary creation, means that it wasn’t temporary after all!  But it was my first time... )

Lari Don is the award-winning author of more than 20 books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales, a teen thriller and novellas for reluctant readers. 

Lari’s website 

Lari’s own blog

Lari on Twitter

Lari on Facebook