Advice for Creatives

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of advice online for “creatives”. The trouble is, almost none of the advice takes into consideration the way “being creative” actually works.

If you need to fix the broken hinge on the back screen door, it’s relatively easy to break the job down into small steps: 1. Take the door off. 2. Unscrew the hinge. 3. Take hinge to hardware store and get replacement. 4. Screw new hinge onto door. 5. Put door back up. Each of the steps is a clear physical action. Even if something goes wrong (4a. Realize that screws for new hinge are too narrow for old holes in door, and will pull out), it’s usually fairly clear what the next step is (4b. Second trip to hardware store for new screws, plastic wood, and/or advice on making hinge work).

If you are writing a book, however, things get murky. You can theoretically break the job down into small steps, but they all look the same: “Write a sentence. Write another sentence.” What goes in the sentence is not clear.

So you back up: “Make up next sentence/scene/paragraph.” But “Make up X” is fundamentally unlike “Go to hardware store for new hinge.” You can walk to the hardware store, or bike, or take the bus, or drive, but which method you use to get there isn’t particularly important, because the destination is a physical location that doesn’t change on you.

“Make up X,” on the other hand, doesn’t have any edges or obvious endpoints. “He went to sleep” is a next sentence; so is “Out of the corner of his eye, George saw Candy s mother creeping away from the fire, holding something that looked a lot like a gas can.” You can’t even make mental rules about which is the “better” sentence without knowing more of the context. If the last sentence you wrote was “Candy was right, thought George; he needed rest,” then “He went to sleep” makes a lot more sense than something about a fire. Even if the plot revolves around finding an arsonist, that second sentence may not be the “better” choice if George was, in the previous sentence, peacefully mowing his lawn with no hint of a fire anywhere at the moment.

Making stuff up at random seldom works. If you don’t pay attention to where the story has been or where you want it to go, you get a heap of disconnected sludge: “It was raining on Mongo that morning. The dry air burned Gregory’s gills as the night birds called softly to each other. The office building swayed, then toppled sideways when the San Andreas fault cut loose at last. Watching the airship take off, Jennifer cheered herself hoarse.”

Furthermore, the process of making stuff up is itself non-quantifiable and non-standard. How I do it is not how you do it. The visual cues that work for one writer – imagining the color of the wallpaper, the shape of the desk, where the characters stand and what they’re wearing – do very little for me; what I need is what they’re thinking and saying. Except when I suddenly don’t find that useful because the important thing in the scene is the shape of the table and which people my POV can see from where she’s sitting.

A related problem arises from the simple fact that planning is not the same as organizing. Planning usually involves looking forward, but time and sequence is only one of the ways one can organize one’s thoughts or one’s vision for a novel. It’s entirely possible to be organized without planning, though I’m not at all sure one can plan without being at least somewhat organized (at least along the time-and-sequence axis of organization).

Organization can focus on the components of a story (characters, dialog, action, problems, etc.), on the time-based sequence of events, on the structure of the story (which may not be linear), or on the priority the writer chooses to give different elements (theme, plot, idea, etc.). Lots of people work best by thinking about story components individually – character sketches here, historical background there, specific locations, major plot points, subplot ideas, theme, situation – and then putting them in some kind of order. Others start by focusing on one specific aspect of the story – often plot or the main character – and layering on the other things as they come up, or on a second or third pass. Still others do little in the way of advance planning, and make it up as they go based on how much a particular twist interests them.

None of that maps well to a one-size-fits-all method for “making up X.”

Creativity isn’t neat and tidy. It’s not systematic (at least, not for most people). There are times and places when a systematic approach can be really useful for organizing what one has already made up, but a lot of the time, the way to “make up the next scene/sentence/plot point/novel idea” is to encourage serendipity by looking at some of the things that have sparked one’s personal creativity in the past. If you are more creative listening to music, find some new music you like or go to some concerts. Walk in the woods. Go to an art museum. Sit in a busy coffee shop and watch/listen to people; leave town for an empty open space where you can sit and be alone for a while. Hide out in the library. Watch some movies. Read some history or some cool new science. Sing.

The next thing you have to do is make up the next sentence, then write it down. It’s harder than it sounds.