Ideas come ... Joan Lennon

The arrival of ideas is a very strange thing indeed, and no two show up in exactly the same way.

Sometimes it's like penguins - out of the murk and back again.

[after spending a stupid amount of time and roping in sons to try and fix the problem, I give up. A video from my phone of penguins swimming is not transferable onto a blog. You'll just have to imagine it.]

Sometimes it's like the surprising appearance of flowers on an old stump.

Sometimes it's like ribbons in the wind.

[this one was also from my phone, showing the ropes in the gibbon enclosure waving about in a high wind. Trust me, it was mesmerizing. Too bad I can't show it to you. Sigh]

Different ideas, different routes - all you can do is notice them when they come and be prepared to pounce!

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

Your money or your life? (Anne Rooney)

 

Why do ideas flock in when you don't have the time to deal with them? 

When I don't have much to do, ideas seem to stay away. It's not that common that I don't have much to do, but it certainly happened in the first lockdown when I was suddenly living alone and most of my book contracts were cancelled.  Even ideas I'd already had didn't seem to be keen to be worked up. They hid in the (many) shadows of my mind, no longer looking shiny and exciting but either a bit bedraggled and drearier than I had thought they were, or out of place, as thouh they'd wandered into a dark alley in their party finery and were afraid they'd be mugged. They were probably right, to be honest. I wouldn't have done them justice. Their potential would have been wasted making something only half of what it could have been, or that was never finished, an unsaleable string of the wrong words in the wrong places Asset-stripped, really.

But when I'm very busy, more ideas come. They pop thickly to the surface of my mind, like bubbles in soup, announcing themselves with a distacting mental splatter. One is never enough. Once they've started, they keep coming with their gaudy look-at-me finery, parading in front of me as I try to focus on the ideas I need to get the current books finished. They're a bit like a virus. A virus gets into your cell and takes over the manufacturing mechanism to make copies of itself. An idea gets into your brain and takes over your imagination, using your energy to make more ideas or grow the idea that's just got in. It's a hijack. Or maybe a stick-up. Your money or your life. Well, both really.

That's what it comes down to with ideass: your money or your life. I have many more ideas than I will be able to write up in my remaining life, so some choosing has to take place. How do you choose between ideas? The shiniest-looking ideas might not be saleable but they will be so engrossing and such fun to pursue. That's a 'life' choice. Others are more likely to garner an income but are perhaps not quite as exciting. That's a 'money' choice. Of course, the writer's dream is an idea that will bring, rather than take, both. You usually can't tell which they will be, and even if you could theoretically tell, far too much depends on how (that's once you've got beyond 'if') a publisher handles it, from layout to marketing.

I'm currently very busy, so I have lots of ideas. I write them all down and hope a window of opportunity will open before they start to curl at the edges and go a bit stale. I turn them over and examine them carefully, trying to decide which will get more attention. Sometimes I'll mention one to a publisher and see if there's any interest, but I don't like to do that really. It feels a bit like arranging a marriage for your child when she's still a toddler. The idea might grow up not to suit that publisher, and then you have to decide whether to force it into an unnatural shape or break off the engagement — betrayal of the betrothal in one way or another is almost inevitable.

How do you choose between ideas to work up? Is it your money or your life? And how does it work out?

 

Anne Rooney

website

@annerooney

Out now

Mind Map Your Story (or anything else) - Heather Dyer

Allowing your ideas to branch organically promotes divergent thinking; the mind thinks ‘wider’ that it might do if you were making a list or writing in a linear way. This can give rise to new and unexpected connections. 

There are all sorts of ways to use mind maps:

• Taking notes in a lecture or from a weblog or podcast, or book
• Exploring an event, process or a concept – for example, ‘moving house’, ‘sand dune erosion’, or ‘haiku’.
• Structuring a piece of writing or coming up with ideas to write about. 
• Performance. For example, if assessing a teacher, you could write down the areas for assessment beforehand – or the performance categories red, green and amber (for improvement) – before branching off each one according to your observations. 
• Designing a presentation. You could even show the mind map as a PowerPoint slide, to introduce the presentation or sum up at the end.
• Explore a character, chapter or storyline. 

How to do it?

1. Write one central word (or better still, draw a single image representing it) in the middle of the page. Then branch out, writing one associated word along each branch.
2. Draw a thick line for the first words that come off the central image, and thinner lines for more remote tributaries.
3. Branch again and again; the only limit is the number of associations you can make.
4. Tony Buzan recommends using colour, but I’ve never bothered.
5. Importantly, allocate only one word to each branch – even if you want to write a phrase.
   For example, I recently drew a mind map to explore potential income streams. One of my branches was ‘school visits’. But breaking this into two words on two branches, allowed more connections to arise. As I drew a separate line for ‘school’, universities and home-schooling groups suddenly occurred to me. Then, as I drew the line for ‘visit’ I realized I could offer virtual visits as well as real visits.

Other ideas:

• If your mind map is getting too crowded, one of the branches could start a separate mind map of its own, thereby drilling deeper and expanding further.
• Mind mapping can be done as a way to collaborate. It can be useful to do individual mind maps first, collaborate to create a combined map, then separate again and reflect further.
• Try prioritizing quantity over quality. Choose your central word or image, then write at least five words branching from it. Write another five from each of these five. Try another five, if you can. How far can you go?
• When you’ve finished your mind map, try connecting random pairs of words and seeing if any new connections arise.

Heather Dyer teaches Writing for Children for the Open College of the Arts, and provides writing and publishing advice through The Literary Consultancy, The Writers' Advice Centre for Children's Books, and privately. If you’re ready for feedback on your work-in-progress contact Heather at heatherdyerbooks@gmail.com. 

For further information, see Heather's blog at Writing for Children: Creative Inspiration for Children's Authors.

Everything's Connected - Heather Dyer

This plotting exercise was inspired by Rory’s Story Cubes, a children’s story-generating game. No cubes necessary here, however. 

I've tried this on my own children's-book-in-progress, and also with PhD students working on their theses. There's no reason why you couldn't use it on any sort of project. 

1. Quite quickly, write down 20 words associated with your project. Write them down in two adjacent columns of 10.
2.  Now draw random lines linking pairs of words in each column.
3. Freewrite (or make notes or just reflect) on the connections between the words.

Creativity is about making new connections between previously unconnected ideas. When I used this exercise in a workshop for PhD students, a dance student connected the words ‘dance’ and ‘movement’. She said that freewriting on the relationship between these words had, for the first time, made her really reflect on how they differed. ‘Dance’ is defined and shaped by convention, whereas ‘movement’ is more fluid.

You can modify this exercise by listing characters in a story in order to explore the relationships between them. You might be surprised by the connections that can arise between characters you previously didn't think had much to do with one another. 

Heather Dyer is a consultant in writing for children. She provides writing and publishing advice through The Literary Consultancy, The Writers' Advice Centre for Children's Books, and privately. If you’re ready for feedback on your work-in-progress contact Heather at heatherdyerbooks@gmail.com. 

Heather’s children’s novel The Girl with the Broken Wing was one of Richard and Judy’s book club picks, and The Boy in the Biscuit Tin was nominated for a Galaxy Best British Children’s Book award. Heather also teaches creative writing for the University of the Creative Arts, and facilitates workshops in creative thinking techniques for creatives and academics.

1.      

Why do the words flow best when I only have limited time? By Tamsin Cooke

Sometimes, when I write, the words pour out of me as if I’m in a dreamlike state. It’s like my fingers have a mind of their own. They fly over the keyboard and a story seems to magic its way onto the page. I look up at the clock and realise an hour has passed. And when I read through the words, I can’t believe I actually wrote them. They’re good. The scene is almost complete and hardly any editing will be needed. I love it when this happens.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen a lot!!!

More often than not, I stare at the computer. No, I glare at the computer. It’s not as if the story isn’t in my head. I know exactly what’s going to happen. I might have just been on a dog walk and a whole scene has played out in my mind, like a TV show. I’ve hurried home, knowing exactly what my characters are going to say, knowing exactly where the twist will be. I’ve grabbed my laptop, ready to dive into the story, my enthusiasm brimming …. except nothing happens.  The words refuse to play. They stick in my mind as if they don’t want to be shared.  Argh!!!

But I won’t take no for an answer! I will write the beginning sentence for the breath-taking scene I’ve just thought up. As long as I get one sentence down, the others will surely follow … but then the words feel wrong and I end up deleting each attempt. 

Before I forget it, I quickly jot down the scene into a notebook, and then decide I must need a break. I could clean the house. Nah, what a ridiculous idea! Instead I make a hot drink and check my emails. I’ll just have one quick glance at Twitter or Facebook before I get back to my masterpiece. I don’t look at Instagram because I can’t get the hang of it. Maybe that’s a good thing – because the next moment I realize an hour has passed. I have been sucked into social media. 

Right – that’s it. I refuse to use the Internet until I’ve written this amazing scene … except I’m not quite sure what has happened in the world today. What if there’s been some catastrophe that I need to know about? Does the world need me to save it? (Not that I have delusions of grandeur!) And so, I take a quick peek at the Guardian and the BBC website. Phew – we’re all still safe.

Then I clench my fists and know that now is the time to get back to my story. First, I must make another hot drink. Sitting back at my laptop, I force myself to write. I don’t care how bad it is. I will edit it later. Ignoring the awful words trickling out of my fingers, I write and write. Unfortunately, I am not one of those gifted people, who can type while looking at the screen. I need to see the letters on the keypad. Therefore, when I eventually look back up, I find lots of red squiggly lines. Oh well, at least I don’t have autocorrect – otherwise the whole thing would be indecipherable. Like my texts before I edit them!!!

I start correcting the spellings and as I read through my pages, I’m astonished to discover it’s not quite as bad as I first thought. OK, some bits are truly horrific, but I can change them later. And then, finally, the rest of the words start to flow; the scene in my head begins to materialize. I want to do this all day. At this rate I’ll probably finish the entire book and be submitting it well before the deadline.  My agent and editor will be amazed.

But then l glance at the time and am absolutely horrified. I have to stop right now. I’ve got to pick the children up from the school bus.

I stare forlornly at my screen.

Oh well, at least I know what’s going to happen in the scene. As soon as I can, I’ll get back to it. The words will flow ... I try to ignore the niggly feeling that it took me AGES to get into it.

It’s a cruel trick. Why do the words flow best when I only have limited time? 

Tamsin Cooke

Author of The Scarlet Files Series and Stunt Double Series

Website: tamsincooke.co.uk
Twitter: @TamsinCooke1 

Where Do You Get Your Ideas From? by Jo Franklin

As every author knows, the question that gets asked most frequently at any event is

Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?

In On Writing by Stephen King (the most important book on the subject of writing, by the way) he describes how he formed a band with a few writing mates. They liked to hang out together to discuss their writing with fellow writers.

'We are writers, and we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don't know.'

And that is the truth. Authors don't really know where we get our ideas from. Ideas breed, develop, evolve in our heads. No single character is our mother or our selves. 

Thoughts, memories, fantasies spring up and stick together to form something in our heads which we recognise as an idea. That idea transforms into a story and if the mood takes us, we write it down.

So here are a few images that have led to an idea that in turn has morphed into one of my books. If you have read any of my books, I wonder if you can recognise which image generated a spark that I turned into words. 

If you want to check out my books, head over to my website www.jofranklinauthor.co.uk

But a dream - Clémentine Beauvais

Once again I found myself the other day in that situation where someone tells me they're writing a novel for which the idea came to them in a dream. Every single time, I have to stop myself from rolling my eyes so hard that I get little tingles in my optic nerve or something. A dream! What are you, the oracle of Delphi ? Who on Earth has ever published an interesting book from an idea that came to them in a dream?

(Apparently Stephenie Meyer did, for Twilight. Hmm.)

Maybe I get a bit annoyed out of petty jealousy, because, well, I hate to brag, but I've always considered myself to be a pretty good dreamer. I mean, everyone dreams, sure, but some of us are simply better at it than others. Yes, there are some elite dreamers out there, who rise above the mediocre norm, though our secret is generally hidden and, to be honest, worth relatively little as social capital or any other kind.

Many of us better dreamers are so partly because, of course, of strenuous practice. Not just of dreaming (the conditions of which I do enjoy very much and strive to adopt as often and for as long as possible) - but also of writing the dreams down, pinning them into place firmly for the purpose of meticulous study.

Thus when I was a teenager I dutifully noted down my dreams, and I even still do sometimes today, in my diary, when I find them intriguing.

some of those teenage notebooks

At the time I was an intensive, competitive dreamer - much more than today, for I had hormones and strong frustration against parental authority on my side, as well as a healthier diet of fantasy and science fiction.

I even kept close accounts of how many dreams I had per month, and looking back I can now tell you that no year rivalled the great annus mirabilis of 2006 (I was 17 years old):

Yeah, yeah, look at you with your novel you got the idea for in a dream! Did you have 59 dreams - fifty-nine dreams! - solely during the course of April 2006? Did you? Did you?

Clearly my philosophy was that if you're going to do something as important as this, you might as well do it seriously. The activity of noting down dreams was so time- and brainspace-consuming, and it was so important not to miss a dream (59 dreams, as the best calculators among you will have noticed, is almost 2 each night) that I got into the habit, whenever I woke up even slightly in the middle of the night, of scribbling down notes from the dream I'd just been having, so as to remember it in the morning.

The last page of each notebook was used for that purpose: the notebook would be left open all night, a pen at the ready, and in the morning I'd squint my eyes to decipher my night-time squiggles:

Yes, this page includes things such as 'Halle Berry', 'Queen of Wales', 'house with people who kill each other little by little', 'glue for organs', 'redhead', 'Pig and Pag', 'scout leader dead plane' and 'Nutella crêpe'.

So, with the help of those notes, I wrote down the dreams every morning, extensively, between 6.30 and 7, and also added elaborate drawings and maps in order to remember exactly what everything had looked like:

'View from the cliff', as the caption says, and I believe the girl on the left is me, alongside another 2 girls, waving goodbye to Father Christmas and his reindeer. In the background, horses are throwing themselves down another cliff.

Now that's vaguely interesting, because in one of my novels (Piglettes), there are indeed horses who jump off a cliff. Unfortunately, I don't think it's extremely meaningful, because I had literally hundreds of dreams so one such coincidence isn't statistically significant.

All that to say: why did you get the idea for your novel in a dream, when I, doubtlessly by far a superior dreamer - I'm sorry, you protest? May I see your dreambooks? where are your 4pm notes on your nightmare involving Halle Berry and Nutella crêpes? - when I, then, have never had a shred of a worthwhile idea for a short story, let alone a novel, in a dream?

OK; show me that idea. What? Really? A coherent one like that? With armies of well-behaved characters, dramatic irony very much in place and a narrative arc of Joseph-Campbellesque perfection? How is that possible, pray?

I'm not sure I understand. If I were to write a novel from a dream I'd had it would be probably quite inappropriate, and also boring, and probably bits of it would be considered slander, or at least an elaborate lie involving famous people, and if it was funny it would only be so to me and maybe six other people, and many parts would be sexually frustrating but not in a titillating way, more in an annoying way, and there would be very, very many toilets that don't work properly and trains that lead nowhere. Also many forgotten babies, whom I attempt in haste to gather into my arms as I flee from some danger.


There would be no plot. Sometimes I would try to kill people with a gun I'd found somehow lying around for instance on the office photocopier - but bullets, made of a kind of chewing-gum-like substance, would repeatedly pepper their cheeks and foreheads without even blistering the squishy surface.




The setting would be, at best, unpredictable. There would be very limited characterisation. Friends I know quite well, as well as vague acquaintances and random people I sometimes see at the bus stop, and also legions of made-up people, would try to kiss me, which would be most of the time perplexing and scary but sometimes also furiously enjoyable.




It wouldn't be a novel for children. 

Really? It came to you in a dream? Just how tidy is your dreamscape? How much do you comb your brains into perfect little plaits before going to bed?

The other day, then, I asked, as always, 'What, like - like that? In a dream - the full idea? Or just seeds of...?'

'No, pretty much everything.'

'But did you, like, rework it or something?'

The other person: 'No, it was pretty much all there.'

Who are they, those über-competent dreamers whose unconsciouses are impeccably aligned with the demands of the fiction industry? What kind of daemon team of Hollywood scriptwriters do they host in their temporal lobe?

Are you one of them? Have you ever had an idea for a novel that came to you in a dream? Tell us in the comments. And about your whole childhood, so I can see where mine (or yours) went wrong.

I promise to get only moderately irate. You might reappear in a dream of mine at some point, but don't worry too much. As mentioned earlier, my dream rifles are inefficient.

--------------------------------
Clémentine Beauvais is a children's and young adult author in French and English, as well as a literary translator. Her latest YA novel, Piglettes, is out with Pushkin Press. 

In the Grist - Heather Dyer

'Grist’ was the corn brought to a mill to be ground into flour. Today, if a thing  is ‘grist for the mill’ it still refers to something that’s a potential source of profit. For a writer, being ‘in the grist’ can mean that rare but lovely mode of being in which everything you see and do seems to relate somehow to the book you’re working on.

When I’m working on a novel, taking a day off makes me feel guilty. But if I don't take days off, where will I find grist for my writing mill?

Curiously, I often wind up doing as much work on a day off as I do on a working day by taking notes or writing random scenes. Days off seem to liberate the mind and allow us to take detours that are sometimes profitable.

At the moment I’m working on a time travel book for children aged 7-11. I am resistant to getting down to write – I can't see my characters clearly yet, and am in a state of slightly-discomforting uncertainty. So, I shut down my writing mill and took a couple of days off, waiting for grist for the mill to arrive.

Here's what provided grist for my mill:

A fashion blog I subscribe to featured ‘gentlewoman style’ (wide trousers, waistcoats, brogues and oversize shirts). Looking at one of the models, I realized that one of my characters was a ‘gentlewoman’! Now that I could ‘see’ her, suddenly I knew her much better.

I idly opened a book I’d been meaning to read for ages: Take My Advice.

I opened it to an essay by Lucius Shepard on American politics. Written nearly 20 years ago, he says: 'The cornerstone of a successful democracy is an informed populace, and because we have let ourselves grow uninformed, we have licensed a dynasty of third-raters to govern our lives.'

He goes on to say that newspapers and media 'have become propaganda organs whose function is to manipulate, to soothe, to compose via the scripted dialogue of some blow-dried creep the government-sponsored view…’

I realized I could put similar words into one of my characters' mouths, and suddenly his motives became much clearer. There will be consequences for the plot.

Curious, I Googled ‘Lucius Shepard’ and discovered he was a science fiction writer. I immediately ordered one of his titles from the library and realized that the book I’m writing is also science fiction. My imagination feels strangely liberated.

That afternoon a Facebook post on recycling pictured an overflowing landfill. I envisaged the dystopian future that my characters will visit before they reach the utopian deep-future.

In my inbox was the latest email newsletter from Wait Not Why. It was all about Nerualink, a brain implant that can (and apparently already is) allowing us to communicate telepathically. I will put this in my book, too. I suddenly imagine how we will live in the deep future.

My bedtime reading is Mark Nepo’s Seven Thousand Ways to Listen. I decide that my political activist character is also as a dreadlocked Zen practitioner and homeless person. Perfect!

All these sources of inspiration are totally unrelated – yet my unconscious finds a way to weave them together in the world of my story. They are like missing pieces of a jigsaw. It’s as though my unconscious draws me to certain objects, images or lines of dialogue because they ‘fit’ an underlying theme or pattern that my unconscious already knows.

My desire to explore this storyline is driven by the same desire that draws me to gentlewoman style, the political essay, recycling, and Mark Nepo’s poetry. I suspect that this desire is driven by some lack in me, or something I want to understand or work through – and that, in following my yearnings in my life and in my storyline, this lack will be revealed if not resolved.

Carl Jung gave a talk once, in which a member of the audience asked: ‘What’s the quickest way to find my life’s true path?’ Jung said, ‘take a detour’. So, the moral of this story is: take a break, wander freely, pay attention, and who knows, maybe a clue is waiting out there, ready to be grist for the mill...

Heather Dyer, Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow

http://rlfconsultants.com/consultants/heather-dyer/

www.heatherdyer.co.uk

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