Writing is Just Thinking 'Out Loud.' Lynn Huggins-Cooper

I am working on too many projects. This is a bad thing (tiredness, lack of social life; family forget what I look like). This is also a good thing (exciting; educational). The best thing though is the way I find my mind expands during this periods of 'feast.' I am constantly thinking, making connections, researching and discussing ideas for these projects, and I swear can almost feel the new pathways being created!

One of the reasons I became an author was because I like playing with ideas. Writing gives me a place to put them, before they fall out of my ears. I trust (hope?) that my writing has improved over the twenty one years I have been a published writer, but I am just about sure that my thinking has.

I started out writing when I was a teacher, and continued as a lecturer. I 'thought' a lot as part of my work: reflection, connections and exploration are a vital part of teaching. Yet it is the act of writing itself that I feel expands my mind the most - and I love it! Researching a new area (I LOVE the research phase of a project!); finding the right context for my writing; mapping out how characters act, think and behave - utter bliss.

The only thing is, sometimes - like last night - the thinking goes into overdrive and I snap awake in the darkness of the small, wee hours and then think until the sky brightens. Tiring; awkward (I don't want to wake my husband with my loud pondering) but somehow satisfying...but how do I turn it off? Perhaps better that I don't - or how would I write all of my books? Perhaps I should just content myself with the thought (there's another one) that writing is just 'thinking out loud.'































(Image by Cyril Rana https://www.flickr.com/photos/retrogui_photos/)

Feeling the Way - Heather Dyer

“I think, therefore I am,” said Descartes.

In response, Milan Kundera writes: "I feel, therefore I am, is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive." But Kundera is quoted less frequently. Why? I suspect it’s because we live in a culture that values thinking over feeling - and this inhibits our creativity.

As we get older we learn to control and suppress our inner feelings. It's necessary that we don’t take our feelings out on those around us – but if we continue to deny our inner experiences, we become desensitized to them. This damages our creativity because creativity relies as much on feelings as it does on intellect.

The education expert Ken Robinson, in his book Out of Our Minds says that "the persistence of this apparent dichotomy between reason and emotions presents real problems for education and for the general development of creative abilities." If we want to continue to grow and to be creative, we need to stay open and responsive to what we feel.

Being responsive is hard work. "In workshops," says Eric Booth, author of an incredible book, The Everyday Work of Art: Awakening the Extraordinary in Your Daily Life, "I am always struck by how hard it is for participants, of all ages, in all fields, to notice they are indeed having experiences. They do the activities, do them well, and have fine insights, but they resist considering what happens inside them during the experience as if it were important, worth noticing. Many have an ingrained bias that dismisses those inner events as inconsequential because they are intangible."

But we can learn to notice our feelings again. "As workshop participants are prompted to start noticing their experience,” says Booth, “their awareness flashes in fragile and ephemeral glimpses. Slowly, participants get a sense that those inner events are full of important, surprising information and accomplishments."

And noticing begets more noticing. When my mother started watercolour painting she became someone who noticed cloud formations and colours in the sky - and pointed them out to the rest of us. As a result, we began noticing them, too.

My friend Dounia is a herbalist. On a walk she’ll point out tiny flowers growing in the hedgerow, or berries on a tree. The way that she touches the delicate fronds or runs her fingertips along the bough of a tree, makes me see these things with fresh eyes, and has given me a new appreciation of their complexity and beauty.

© Wester Ross

In the same way, when we become more attuned to how we feel inside we are better able to hear our intuition. We become alert to our hunches and can follow our bliss. In this way, we exercise our ability to 'feel' our way through our storylines - both in our writing and in our lives. 

© Colin Bryant

Heather Dyer - children's author and Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow

• For enquiries about creative writing workshops for children or adults, or editorial services, go to www.heatherdyer.co.uk
• For enquiries about academic writing workshops, go to:  http://rlfconsultants.com/consultants/heather-dyer/

Why ‘the worst idea ever’ can be useful

Sometimes the worst idea you can think of, is the best way to start filling a plot hole. When I'm writing adventures, I spend a lot of time trapping my characters in impossible situations, then thinking: ‘great trap, but now how do I get them out?’
Sometimes, the perfect answer arrives immediately, so I just keep writing. But sometimes when I’ve trapped my characters in a cave or a basement or another nasty situation, I’m just as stuck and confused as they are.
So what do I do next? If an idea doesn’t arrive overnight like a present from my snoozing imagination, then I sit down the next day with a notebook and I think of the worst possible answer to the question. I write down the things I definitely won’t do. I write down the clichés, the obvious, the boring, the naff and the impossible. And that Worst Ideas list usually leads me in a roundabout way to an answer which will work.
For example, in my first novel First Aid for Fairies And Other Fabled Beasts, I trapped my heroine in a basement, with baddies about to knock down the door and the wooden stairway lying in splinters on the floor because her heavy-hooved friend had just broken it.
And I had no idea how to get her out.
So I started by writing down the worst possible answer: A ladder in the corner.

An Obvious Ladder

(Why is that a rotten answer? Because if there’s a set of stairs into the basement, why would anyone need a ladder as well? Also it’s just too convenient and obvious and boring, and I don’t like making things convenient for my characters.)
Next worst answer: Helen just happens to have a long rope wrapped round her waist. (Why is that a rotten answer? Because unless she has a very good story-shaped reason for having a rope round her waist, that’s even more unlikely than a ladder and very unflattering as well.)
I also detoured through other really naff ideas like a previously unknown fairy godmother turning up to save her, or indeed Helen waking up and it was all a dream.
Then I looked at those first two answers again and started to think about why they didn't work. If it’s not practical for her to take the right object with her, then whatever she needs to escape must already be in the basement. And if it’s not exciting enough for the object she uses to be something you would naturally climb, then let’s have her improvise and use something unlikely. Which is why Helen ends up balancing along the narrow banister of the shattered staircase to get out.
So that’s one of my tactics for getting my characters out of traps. I start by writing the worst possible solutions and use those to sneak up on a more workable solution. By acknowledging why something is obvious or naff or daft, you can sometimes identify elements of the right answer.
It’s almost a Sherlock Holmesian way of working – once you’ve eliminated all the impossible or impossibly naff solutions, whatever snuck into your head while you were sniggering at the silly ideas must be the right answer. Though maybe Sherlock Holmes didn’t snigger…

Lari Don is the award-winning author of more than a dozen books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers.
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I'm thinking, not writing...... Miriam Halahmy

When I run writing workshops I tell the students that all the words they are going to write are already inside them...rather like your teeth.

Finding those precious words is an act of mining; digging deep into the seams that run through our subconscious and bringing the words and thoughts and images to the surface. One of the most effective ways of mining is simply thinking. Meg Rossoff recently wrote in a blog that writing is only 20% of the work of forming a novel. The other 80% is thinking. I absolutely agree with her.

The problem in our high tech, race around world, is allowing ourselves the space to think. When I was young ( i.e. before marriage and kids and sharing all my space with other human beings) I spent an awful lot of time just lying on my bed dreaming into space, thinking and thinking and thinking. Today with all the distractions in our lives this seems to be so much more elusive, that magical thinking time when you let your mind wander and follow the thought all the way to Mars and back...you know what I mean.

But without deep thinking the novel remains on the surface, unlayered, undeveloped, the characters never truly reveal those hidden characteristics which will make them so memorable long after the last page is read. Yes, some of that comes as a gift, leaping onto the page as we write. But a great deal of those deep and important details sift up to the surface through the seams and seams of words and thoughts, during the hours of simply – thinking.

As working writers maybe we find it difficult to give ourselves permission to sit and think, or walk about and think. We might feel that we have to have an excuse, like, ‘Just off to the gym’ or ‘Must take the dog for a walk’ and yes, those might be the best ways for someone to do their thinking.

But thinking is such an important part of the work of writing that we should not feel we need to make any excuse at all – if ‘they’ come upon us, sitting on a chair, staring silently into space. We should be able to say, I’m thinking. And that should be seen as work as much as walking the dog or bashing away on our laptops.

So the next time you see me sitting without speaking, eyes glazed over, you will know exactly what I’m doing..... won’t you?

www.miriamhalahmy.com