Scuba diving - a fantastic form of consumption!

One of the most common questions that authors seem to get asked is “Where do you get your ideas for your books?”.

Similarly, one of the most common questions asked of bloggers is “How do you know what to write about?”

The answer to both is a balance of consumption and production. You cannot produce creative work of any kind without filling your mind with wonderful and varied fodder for the composting of imagination.

You must consume.

You must fill your creative well with new ideas. Your mind will combine these thoughts together in new ways for innovative writing – whether fiction or blogging, or anything else creative.

Forms of consumption include:

• Reading – books, magazines, blogs
• Listening – music, audiobooks,
• Experiences like pushing your limits in sport, tackling fear head on, eating a 7 course degustation menu at a fantastic restaurant
• Looking at visual arts – cinema, art galleries, (ok, even some TV shows might count!)
• Talking and socialising, asking people their stories
• Learning - going to seminars, taking a class
• Understanding and feeling – your own life, therapy, listening to children, old people

Live a life worth writing about. Consume with enthusiasm and make time for it or your mind will wither and you may feel blocked, or uninspired.

Be careful what you consume.

The word consumption is now tainted with gluttony in a consumer society that throws away so much. It is important to watch what you consume and don’t overdo it as you can feel sick and unfulfilled by consumption to excess. Consuming bad experiences won’t help your creativity much either. Watch what you put in your mind.

Reflect and produce something new.

Now take that experience, whatever it was, and turn it into words or images. Make something of it that stretches your creativity, that limbers up your creative muscles. If you read a book or go to a seminar, write an article or blog post on what you learnt. If you are struck by a painting at an art gallery, add it to your novel as an experience for your protagonist.

Balancing what goes into your mind and what comes out again allows for a constant stream of creativity to flow. Get out there and experience life, and then write it out again.

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This is a guest post from Jim Wawro, author of ‘Ask Your Inner Voice’, available June 23.

“I’ve got writer’s block!” Have you ever heard someone say that? Or maybe said it yourself?

We hear it all the time. Most writers think that their inner voice is hit-or-miss, that it is great when it arrives, but that it can’t be counted on to show up just when they need it.

But did you know that you can call on your own Muse whenever you need her?

Your Creative Solutions

Many writers quickly dismiss the thought that they can receive an insight just by calling on their own inner voice whenever they need it. But those same people also do just that on a regular basis without even thinking about it.

How do they do it? Most writers work at day jobs with challenges. New issues regularly arise in our work requiring new solutions. If fact, think of a situation at work where you were presented with a problem that you didn’t immediately know how you were going to solve, but that you ultimately did solve. What did you do? Did you give up? Likely not. If you’re like most, you take pride in accomplishing even your day–job work competently, and you likely have enough confidence in your ability to know that you will probably be able to solve most problems that crop up in your work. So, what did you do fix the work problem that first seemed insoluble?

Creativity’s Four Steps

Creativity studies indicate that you likely went through four stages in solving the problem: Research, “Kick Back,” “Ah-ha,” and Manifestation.

First, you studied the problem to understand why you couldn’t solve it quickly. Then you gathered the facts necessary to understand as much as you could about why the problem wasn’t susceptible to a quick solution. Perhaps you studied the problem visually, talked to a colleague, reviewed precedents in the files, or looked it up on the Internet. Perhaps you experimented with quick solutions to see if one would work. If none of those approaches worked immediately, what did you do then?

Second, you probably set the problem aside for awhile and went on to something else. You “forgot” about the problem, or “kicked back,” or otherwise turned the focus of your conscious attention away from the problem. What happened then?

Third, the solution likely suddenly “popped” into your mind in plenty of time to solve the problem, as answers had on many other occasions when, for example, in conversation with someone you had forgotten a name and said “Give me moment, it’ll come to me.” And it later did.

Fourth, if you’re like most, the excitement of solving a problem that had no apparent solution likely energized you to actually solve the problem, to make the solution exist in the world and to not just exist in your mind. Besides, it was part of your job to solve such problems, to make the obstacles in your work disappear, which you likely then did. And, if the problem was tough enough, and your solution effective, you probably shared the problem and your solution with a co-worker.

Creative Intuition

What went on here? You were presented with a problem that you didn’t know how to solve; you asked your intuition to work on the solution; your intuition delivered the solution in time to solve the problem; and you made it exist in the world. Aren’t you in fact in tune with your inner inspiration?

Do you think that your inner inspiration is limited to solving problems at work, or can you call on your Muse whenever you need her start a chapter, to finish a plot, to flesh out a character, to find a great title, or to simply make a writing decision with confidence? How would you go about finding a creative and effective answer to a most pressing question in your writing? How would you call on your Muse just when you need her?

Muse on Demand

Why not follow the same four steps you used to solve the problem at your day job: study the writing problem, learn all you can about it, and research possible solutions to the problem. Then forget about the problem for awhile and wait for an idea for a solution to pop into your mind. When it does, act on the idea and make the solution exist in the world. You are in tune with your inner inspiration. You can call on your Muse whenever you need her to find answers to your most pressing writing questions. If you’re at a dead end in solving a writing problem, why not simply ask your Muse for help?

Ask your inner voice.  Try it!

Jim Wawro is a Cornell-educated former international trial lawyer who condensed his study of proven methods for using the inner voice into a definitive guide to accessing the wisdom that lies within you. To order your copy of Ask Your Inner Voice (and get a free bonus gift of the Ask Your Inner Voice Workbook when you order the book on June 23–24, 2010), go here: http://activateintuition.com/launch-special .

Top image: Flickr Creative Commons Ecstaticist

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Noosa Beach, SE Queensland

I’ve been pretty hammered over the last few weeks with the day job. It has sapped my creativity and taken my precious time away from my novel writing and this blog. I sorely needed a day off so I went to the brilliant Eumundi markets and then on to Noosa, SE Queensland for an Artist’s Date. I also listened to business audios on the 4 hour round trip as I feel the need to keep my entrepreneurial side fed.

This idea comes from Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” which is a fantastic book. It is basically some time alone absorbing and refilling your creative well. It can be something entirely different, like a pottery class or a show, or could just be a walk or a new gallery exhibition. Anything that gives your brain some new stimulation and takes you away from your work in progress and your ‘normal’ life. It should be alone so you have time to reflect and can be an hour, a day or longer. (I am hankering after a writer’s retreat one of these days!)

I made this short video on the beach (1:24). You can hear some wind noise, but you get the idea! What do you do for your Artist’s Date?

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Whatever you think of the Tarot, the images are deep archetypes and resonate with us on many levels. On April 1st, let us consider The Fool and why writers should embrace it as a metaphor for our writing life.

• The Fool acknowledges he knows nothing and seeks wisdom. Learning is an integral part of life. We are all learning the craft of writing. My bookshelves are packed with books on writing, technique, plot, character building, book promotion and much more – I bet yours are too! I love to learn more every day and share what I learn here. I actually consider learning to be one of the meanings of life itself. We have brains that cannot be filled up, we can keep learning more and more and apply what we learn daily. Wow! That’s incredible. But we only learn by understanding that we don’t know enough.

• The Fool is ‘the spirit in search of experience’ – isn’t that a great idea to aspire to? The journey to knowledge is long and never-ending. We can keep learning all our writing lives, we can always improve – each sentence, each paragraph, each chapter, each book improves us and our writing. We can explore other genres, new experiences, network with new people and enjoy the journey. So often we rush headlong, desperate for the end of the book we have in progress, whereas we should revel in the journey itself, enjoy the view and the experiences along the way.

• The Fool is an optimist and naive. Both of those traits are good if understood correctly. Let’s face it, there’s plenty of doom and gloom in the publishing industry. You’ll never get a publishing deal. It’s very hard to get an agent. It’s nearly impossible to sell thousands of books. You’ll never be a NY Times bestselling author. Self publishing is a terrible idea. Why bother with blogging or social networking as no one is listening? …. and so it goes on. But then why write at all! We have to remain optimistic and a little naive about the whole thing. Believe you will make it, whatever your goals are… and stay the course, and you will make it. Life is surprising!

• The Fool takes risks. Look at the picture – he’s about to step off the cliff! It’s a sunny day in the beautiful countryside and he’s about to plummet to his death – or is he? Maybe there is a little ledge just out of our view, we don’t know. This teaches us to get out there and take some risks – finish that project, write that first chapter, start tweeting, try making a video to say hi, write a guest post for a blog and submit it (bloggers are friendly you know!), try speaking about your book. All these things take courage and are a risk – to your mental health if nothing else! But they are worth it over time.

• The Fool is alone but also has a companion. The man is alone but has a little dog, his friend along the way. The writing life is alone -only you can write those words from your mind. But there are also ways we can support each other and be companions along the way. Find yourself a writing group, online or in real life. Network with other authors online. This is brilliant as you choose when to be present and you will always find someone to talk to on sites like Twitter – just jump into the conversation.

Can you relate to the Fool?

Image: Flickr CC N0cturbulous

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As writers, we are called to think and write about the deeper things. Writing about death is possibly one of the most important subjects to consider, and one of the hardest.

Thinking about death is also important as we consider our own mortality. Life is short and we have little time to achieve our goals. Why do we waste so much time thinking about things and not actually doing them?!

My Grandfather died last week and I went back to England to be with my family. He was a man of deep faith and also had a good life,  so it is the way of the world and he was at peace. The death of a grandparent is sad but also a natural part of life. But the hours of travelling in limbo across the world gave me an opportunity to think about mortality and what we can achieve in one lifetime, a mere breath on the face of the universe. Here’s the big question:

What do you want to achieve before you die? and what are you doing towards those goals or dreams?

It is good to escape the day job for a week and ponder these bigger subjects as I lie awake in the night, jetlag screwing with my body clock. When do we give ourselves time in the daily grind to think on this? The days seem to go by so fast, and we wonder what we have achieved since we had the big dreams of youth. I sometimes wonder why I waited so long to write, crippled as I was by doubts but if I had started earlier, perhaps I would have met my writing goals already (… but then I would just need new ones!)

I am thinking about the things I want to do in my lifetime, and now I am making more concrete plans to achieve them. Most things are possible if we give them energy, time and effort.

The most common question I get when speaking is “When do I find time to write my book?“. The answer is always “you have to find it from somewhere, you have to give something else up“.

What do you want to achieve in your lifetime, and how are you going to achieve these goals?

Image: Flickr CC Autumn Leaf

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Writing the first draft of a novel involves a lot of idea generation and writing the bare bones of the story, as well as putting the overall structure in place. Sometimes you may come up with a topic or a place or theme you don’t know much about before you write it. I have found mind mapping to be very helpful for this research prior to writing the scene.

Here is a rough mindmap of my research on storms in Arizona. I used the principles in this article on writing about a new place. Although I have been there, it was a long time ago and I have no notes on it.

• I searched for pictures of storms in Arizona and found some great images. I looked through the images and wrote down my thoughts and impressions, what the lightning reminded me of, what was in the background of the pictures.

• This led to an investigation into types of lightning and what each was called, as well as what causes the thunderous noise.

• To ground the storm in a physical place, I searched on the plants and trees of the area the storm would be in, and found pictures and descriptions of saguero cactus, jojoba and other desert plants.

• I listened to sounds of various storms (free sounds here) and wrote down my thoughts, in an attempt to avoid cliche descriptions of rolling thunder.

• I used a Thesaurus to try to uncliche the descriptions I came up with.

• I then wrote around 1000 words of a scene with the storm in the background of the action. It took me a couple of hours of research to actually get this material but I think it was improved by my attempt to ground it in reality as well as get into the storm frame of mind before actually writing.

Mindmaps enable you to brainstorm thoughts and connections before you write in a linear manner.

This helps you to come up with new ideas and phrasing and acts as a guide for your writing when it is time to actually get the word count down.

Do you find mind maps helpful in your writing?

Image: Flickr CC Dark Matter

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Sometimes our brains need a rest in this crazy-paced world, and creativity needs a little downtime to percolate ideas that are just under the surface.

Farming has a concept that lends itself to creativity. Fields are left fallow for a season, which means they are ploughed but left unplanted to rejuvenate. Fallow is characterised by inactivity.

I have just had a fallow month because I had just about burnt out by the end of 2009. I spent 3 weeks in Europe and:

• Checked email twice in 3 weeks and hardly responded to anyone
• Didn’t carry a mobile phone
• Didn’t check or update Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn for weeks
• Didn’t read any blogs
• Scheduled my blog posts so I didn’t need to get online at all
• Did not have access to the internet, or seek it out for 3 weeks
• I read lots of fiction in between sightseeing around London, Venice and Rome with my husband and spent Christmas with my Dad near Oxford. A Northern Hemisphere winter holiday!

Yes, this is coming from someone who just said everyone should embrace technology!

But there is a need for balance.

We all need time for periods of achievement, hard work and creative acceleration as well as time to relax, day dream and let the masses of information in our brains come up with new ideas. I feel like I am ready to get going and achieve my goals for the year ahead after the break. I needed some time off to gather the energy to start on these again after a mammoth 2009.

Have you had time to let your mind lie fallow? Have you had a break? Are you full of energy and ready to achieve in 2010? (or do you need to set aside some time to have a break now?)

This marvelous TED video shows designer Stefan Sagmeister talking about taking sabbaticals every 7 years. He describes how the ideas he generates in that year directly provide him with the creativity he needs for his business. It has a direct financial correlation. Of course, not all of us can drop everything and take a sabbatical year, but how about a few weeks?

(Incidentally, Stefan talks about Bali and I am speaking at a Writer’s Retreat in Bali this Oct – more details here)

Image: Flickr CC Pollys Dad

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The full quote is “Mediocre writers borrow. Great writers steal.“ T.S.Eliot

There is also a version for visual artists, attributed to Picasso (or Banksy!)

I was asked on a teleconference the other day, “What do I do if I am stuck in writing my book?” and I referred to this quote. I am also making my way to the mid-point of NaNoWriMo and the well is getting a bit dry for my first fiction novel. So what does it actually mean?

• Steal ideas. Read other people’s works, or look at other people’s art work. If you like an idea, ruminate on it, muddle it around in your brain and see where it ends up. Write the same idea in your own words and you can bet it will be a different story or a new angle on it. Steal other people’s experiences and write about them for plot. Steal their words as they speak to help your dialogue. How many books about the end of the world are there? How many unrequited love stories? How many quest adventures?

• Steal words. Stephen King advises writers to read, and presumably most of us love doing just that! I am constantly reading, on the iPhone and physical book and now on the Kindle (I carry all with me!). If you are reading something and find a new word, or a description or phrase, or a poetry line, then write it down. Maybe you can re-use the word in a different context, or it helps you describe something in a better way.

• Steal chunks of work and remix it. There is a lot of work released under Creative Commons licensing now, which means you can legitimately ‘steal’ it and remix it and draw inspiration from it. This is a great source of ideas and content. Remember to check the licensing as to what you can do with the work though. [This blog content is CC licensed as below right].

• Don’t steal chunks of copyrighted work. This is plagiarism! Of course, T.S. Eliot did not mean copy other people’s work and pass it off as your own. Don’t copy down chunks of Wikipedia and claim them as your words.

“If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants” Isaac Newton

Our brains are a mass of connections and if you add something new into the mix, you will spark new connections. An old idea can be recycled into a new one, with a new twist. Shakespeare took his ideas from so many sources and wouldn’t we all love to write tales like his?

Idea for this post stolen from Jeremiah Abrams at his writer’s weekend. Also discussed in the sci-fi/fantasy podcast with Pip Ballantine, J Daniel Sawyer and Chris Lester available here.

Useful related posts:

• Get some inspiration. 15 ways modern art galleries can inspire writers
• Copyblogger “How to Steal Great Content”
• 5 ideas writers can use from Jungian Psychology

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons ahisgett

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I went to the Remix My Lit masterclass at the Brisbane Writers Festival last week, and came away inspired! It was run by Amy Barker, author of Omega Park and the notes below come from her presentation and ideas.

RemixMyLit.com is a project that took original works by authors licensed under Creative Commons. Then a whole load of new authors remixed them creating new works, also shared under the Creative Commons license.

Some of the best works were published in an anthology, ‘Through the Clock’s Workings‘, that can be downloaded for free here, a Creative Commons work you can remix and share to your heart’s content.

“It is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike licence. What that means is you can remix the stories, but only if you acknowledge the author, the remix is not for commercial use, and your new work is available for others to remix”. Remix My Lit.

What is remixing and why is it interesting?

Remixing is a term more commonly used in music, where artists remix each others work, or fans do the same (the project uses the example of Trent Reznor Nine Inch Nails The Slip album).

But it has been used in literature, most commonly with Shakespeare – endlessly remixed into films, stories, plays and other works. Baz Lurhman’s Romeo and Juliet kept the language, but totally remixed the location, scenes and time to create a fantastic version.

Shakespeare and other older works are in the Public Domain, out of copyright and available for anyone to use for any purpose. You can get free digital copies of Public Domain books at Gutenberg.org.

Public domain classics include: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Ulysses by James Joyce, Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, and of course Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, most recently remixed as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame Smith.

This is a ‘novel as mashup‘, certainly more recognisable that Bridget Jones Diary (albeit a better looking Mr Darcy!).

Whatever the literati think of these remixes, Seth Grahame Smith has made a lot more money than many, more original authors. He has 2 more books coming out, the next being “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters”. There are also rumours of a movie!

So you can remix/reuse public domain works, certain Creative Commons works and, I presume, other work you have express permission to use.

So why is that interesting?

Remixing is great for writing prompts and jump-starting creativity!

If you need some inspiration for your writing, there is literally a world of ideas just waiting for your brain to create something new! That is pretty exciting.

In the workshop, we did this fun exercise where we took the hard copy of one of the stories, ‘Cherished’ by Emily Maguire. We then proceeded to do a ‘cut-up’ – literally!

We all cut words out of the story and re-pasted them into a remix, some taking the angle to preserve some of the original ideas, and others making something very new with the same words.

You can read the original story in the free eversion here. It is short narrative.

You can see all the remixes of the original stories here.

Here is my offering (and yes, I’ve been reading too much horror!)

‘Cherished’: The Scott Sigler Remix

Behind a smear of pinkish sunless skin

her gums are dried blood

Her ragged bathroom belly

flaunting retro-blue-frosted polished stumps

stiff to the touch

squat reflection on her steel-blue veins

the rest of her remains, a goth-inspired charcoal

disposable beloved,

Emily, Cherished girl.

****************************************************

The Remix My Lit logo is a derivative work of a CC Attribution 2.0 Flickr image ‘Street Art’ by Kim Laughton, aka ‘olivepixel.’

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Tate Modern, London

I love modern art galleries and go to them whenever I am in a large city. I find they spark creative ideas and I leave feeling refreshed and ready to write more!

Here are 15 ways Modern Art Galleries can inspire writers and authors.

1. Writing Exercise: Sit in front of a piece of art/installation/painting and write what you see. Describe the piece and what it says to you. Modern art is fantastic for this because you can’t just say “It’s a portrait of a young woman with a dog”. Often the pieces are entirely based on your interpretation. Sometimes plain words will suffice. A few weeks ago at the Tate Modern, my notes say “body parts on a baking tray” and “jackdaw and hooded crow skewered by arrows”. I bet you can see those images!
2. Use as a setting in your novel. Go and notice all the physical details of the place, the various rooms, how you could use them. Would your characters meet here in the vast white open space of the main hall? or in one of the obscure video dark rooms with disturbing images on screen?
3. Write notes from the display description. Just copy down phrases that touch you in some way. I did this at the Tate Modern a few weeks ago: “I work until enough of my art has flowed into its body” (Jean Arp). What images do these words conjure up for you?
4. Free associate from one of the pieces. Just write down all the words that come to mind. Do it in a mind map format so you can spiral
   

   Artist Cornelia Parker likes hanging objects in space

   off in all directions from each word. One of the evocative pieces at the Tate was “30 Pieces of Silver” by Cornelia Parker. The words bring to mind Judas and betrayal (for me anyway!) but it was a hanging installation of circular displays featuring discarded silverware crushed by a bulldozer. You could free associate on that alone for hours!

5. Listen for dialogue. Certain types of people go to Modern Art Galleries, but you don’t know who they are until you listen. Sit in the lobby or a public area and listen for snatches of conversation. Write notes on what you hear. This will give you plenty more material and surprising insights into what others think of the piece.
6. Browse the giftshop for marketing ideas. I have found Modern Art Galleries have great gift shops with quirky ideas for items related to static pieces of art. Can you use some of these ideas in your own marketing?
7. Use it as your Artists Date. This is an idea from Julia Cameron’s  The Artist’s Way (brilliant book!). As creatives, we give out a lot of our ideas and creative juice which needs replenishing sometimes. An Artist’s Date is time out to refill our creative wells and allow new ideas to surface and spark.
8. Change your writing scene. Sometimes the act of writing somewhere else can help you with ideas and different sections of your project. Buy a coffee in the Gallery cafe and sit and write for an hour.
9. Use it as a venue for a meeting with another author. Sometimes we can spend so much time writing alone, it is good to connect. Modern Art Galleries often have great meeting places so you can hang out and chat, and then wander round the galleries together doing some of the exercises above.
10. 

    Louise Bourgeois 'Maman" (Mother) which I first saw in the Tate Modern and found disturbing but have never forgotten

    Understand you need to get your work out there. Many writers get stressed by the slow progression of their book and the difficulties they face along the way. They may procrastinate over every last sentence and potential problem. Modern art is a good wake up call for this as you will hate a lot of the work displayed, and you will wonder how the hell that could possibly be a) finished and b) worthy of an art gallery. But the artist has said “this is my work” and people can like it or not. It is out there and people are reacting which is better than having it in a studio or computer away from the world.

11. Understand the Body of Work. I love this phrase and feel that as authors we need to embrace it as visual artists do. This book we are working on is one piece of a whole lifetime, a whole body of work embracing all we are and all we want to express in the written word. I don’t think the successful visual artists stop and obsess over one piece, they are moving onto the next. Get that book out of you and move onto the next one! Embrace them all as experiments along the way!
12. Research one of the Artists for a character sketch. Pick one of the pieces you like (or hate) and write down the name of the artist. When you get home, Google them and find out more about their work and their history. Use this for a character sketch. You may be surprised by what you find. For example, I am fascinated by Patricia Piccinini whose very cute Vespa characters I fell in love with at one exhibition, but delving further into her work, you find she does disturbing mutated creatures as well.
13. Research one of the Artists and evaluate their online presence. Visual artists need a ‘platform’ as much as authors do. How else can you sell work and get exhibitions and press coverage. Google one of the artists and evaluate their online presence. Do they use multi-media? Do they blog? Have they had media attention? How can you learn from them?
14. 

    Patricia Piccinini "The Stags" from old Vespas. Brilliant characters!

    Use your visit to inspire a blog post. Your blog needs new content and it gives you an excuse to write! This post is my own example.

15. Be silly. I find some modern art utterly ridiculous! As authors we need to be a little silly sometimes and not take ourselves so seriously! The galleries often have children’s areas with play things or just take a friend and laugh at whatever takes your fancy. I took my husband once and we ended doing tracings on coloured paper with crayons on one exhibit (it was interactive!) and bouncing off huge white foamy trees. Fun, fun, fun!

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