Posts Tagged ‘ideas’

Ideas are Skeletons

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

It occurred to me this morn­ing that ideas are skele­tons upon which I hang the rest of my sto­ries, like so much meat and gris­tle.  Before I can write one word, I need a cen­tral struc­tural frame­work of the idea.

I am the pale­on­tol­o­gist of my sub­con­scious.   I dig and poke in so much muck of the mind, but some­times I strike upon the out­lines of some­thing unusual, some­thing I’ve never seen before.  You see, I am not inter­ested in recon­struct­ing ideas of the same species as another I have already done, so each is exam­ined, iden­ti­fied, and if a known quan­tity, left for some­one else to excavate. 

It’s only once I have that skele­tal idea with its odd pro­tu­ber­ances, fan­ci­ful fins, and strik­ing spurs that I can begin the process of recon­struct­ing the whole of the beast, lay­er­ing on the mus­cle of plot, the skin, scales, or fur of descrip­tion, the ner­vous sys­tem of characterization.

That’s not to say that the crea­ture lives when I’m done.  More often than not, it col­lapses under its own weight, wheezes once or twice, and expires.  But we try, as they say.

So how about you?

On Recreating the Shower Creativity Surge (minus water)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I know I am not the only writer who finds that inpira­tion oftens strikes in the bath. I’ve had a num­ber of con­ver­sa­tions with fel­low writ­ers about how strange it seems that some of our best ideas come to us at that moment. I can think of a cou­ple of the­o­ries as to why this happens:

  • The time of the day that you shower is par­tic­u­larly con­du­sive to cre­ative think­ing. I shower first thing in the morn­ing, and I know my cre­ative brain is a lit­tle bit stronger when the ana­lyt­i­cal brain is still swip­ing away the pre­vi­ous night’s cob­webs and puz­zling over what the hell those rab­bits on stilts were doing in that last dream.
  • The white noise sound gen­er­ated by the shower puts us into a par­tic­u­lar brain wave state or something.
  • The absence of dis­trac­tion from elec­tron­ics and media and every­thing allows us to actu­ally think freely. Personally, it is the only time in the day that I am not inter­act­ing with some kind of elec­tronic device. If I’m not on the com­puter, I’m watch­ing TV, or read­ing a book, and my iPhone is never more than a reach away. Basically, dis­trac­tions abound.

It is hard to say which of these three aspects are most directly respon­si­ble for that cre­ative burst, so I am going to try and recre­ate the expe­ri­ence with a few mod­i­fi­ca­tions to make it eas­ier to actu­ally cap­ture the ideas that come from it. One of the biggest prob­lems i have with hav­ing inspiri­a­tion then is that I can’t remem­ber it long enough to get it down on the com­puter or paper. Someone sug­gested putting in some kind of mark­ers or bath­room crayons in the tub so that you can write it out on the wall, but as I rent, I don’t want to deal with any poten­tial dis­as­ters there. So:

  1. Roll out of bed first thing and into the office. Turn on a white noise gen­er­at­ing pro­gram, or a long record­ing of rain.
  2. Turn off the inter­net con­nec­tion. Load up a full screen wordprocessor
  3. See what happens.

I will be attempt­ing this exper­i­ment in the next cou­ple of weeks, and will report back when I’ve gath­ered enough data to deter­mine whether it’s help­ful. If you want to join in, please do so. More peo­ple attempt­ing to do this could result in a bet­ter per­spec­tive on the phenomenon.

Photo by Flickr user Turyddu