The Quest

Recently I have been watching a lot of videos on the internet of dances that have been performed for judging of some kind. I enjoy watching these videos on a superficial level (they are pleasing to the eye) but they also inspire me, and I am very intrigued by the connection between different arts.

Sometimes it seems as though they aren’t related at all! Dance may inspire me, but translating into the writing space in my mind is like trying to translate another language that you’ve never heard before. Ideas are tricky things, and I thought I would speak to that in this post.

Where do you get your ideas? I think there are two types of ideas. Spontaneous ideas and crafted ideas. Of course, the goal is that the first can become the second, but that is not always the case. Spontaneous ideas are fits of fancy that come over you. “What about a story where an elephant is trying to put on a sock but it won’t fit?” To become a crafted idea, the writer must determine how much connection and commitment they have to the idea. “Do I really like elephants enough for this? Do I relate to the poor guy’s problem?”

If the answer is “Well, I don’t really like elephants, but I can work with this idea,” the writer should be very careful in going to craft the idea, because generally it will become clichéd and trite (the elephant has a mommy and a daddy who watch with amusement, etc).

Another path an idea can take is “inspiration.” Inspiration is a very interesting topic, even if one does not believe in it. Personally, I think the concept that you have to be inspired in order to write something comes from reading. What is inspiration? Feelings, essentially. An emotional drive interpreted as the need to create. When we read, we experience feelings and we have an emotional drive--what’s going to happen to the character? So when we sit down to write, we expect the same thing to happen. The trouble is, we’re supposed to be creating. By definition, the two experiences are extremely different.

So connection to an idea is important, but inspiration is not always the same as connection. I have an example, there was this idea I had recently that I felt a connection to and was able to write without becoming too contrived and without being “inspired.” It was a piece I wrote for Flash Fiction Month (July) called Amphibians about a boy who essentially thought he was a frog.

This is an excellent example because the ways it could have become cliché were many. We could’ve seen him hopping around the yard, his mother amused, then have a girl dressed up as a princess appear and “turn” him back into a boy. It’s very clear how cliché that would have been, right?

Instead I went through a checklist: Unique Relationship? (I gave him a friend instead of a princess, a friend who believed him and followed him around). Unique Inner Landscape? (I gave him a fascination with muscles, a fascination that led him to decide he was a frog). Unique setting/language? (I didn’t do much with this one in the piece, but it’s good to have on the checklist). Unique personal-relations conflict? (By this I mean a unique conflict in the relationship. In this case, the friend went along with everything until frog-boy wanted to jump in the river). As a side note, closure is also important. It can be unique, but it’s okay if it’s not, just that it’s present.

So the quest is to find ideas that you as the writer can transform into interesting, unique pieces. I find that having tools to get me there is very important--tools like the checklist above. Practice is the other thing. The only way I got out of the indulgent, poetic-fluff days was by writing myself out of them and by trying everything. Maybe checklists don’t work for you when you’re doing your first draft--try going through the checklist at the end. There are as many methods of writing as there are writers, but there are still universal things. Look for them.

See you over on the weekend. I’ll actually be in New York, maybe I’ll do something about how landscape can inspire. No promises though :P