Ideas, part 3: Using Them
I meant to finish up this series months ago. Oops. First off, some refresher links:
Ideas, part 2: Keeping Organized.
There is one terrific source of ideas I neglected to mention in my first post: dreams! Even one perfect detail in an otherwise nonsensical dream can lead to something useful. A few years ago (it must've been 2007), I dreamed I was standing in a graveyard outside an old stone church. Out of nowhere a man on a bicycle appeared. He was dressed like a jester, with an elaborately embroidered red-and-white suit covered in tiny bells and an enormous headdress with animal horns coming out of it, and he jingled as he pedaled around the headstones. He wasn't sinister at all; I just remember watching him and being fascinated by the general bizarreness. He pedaled around the corner of the church and, just as he was about to hit the side of the building, the back wheel of his bicycle went up into the air like he was descending into the ground, and he vanished.I wish I could dream stuff like this more often—you know, the kind of dream that still makes its own peculiar kind of sense when you try recounting it to someone (as opposed to the garden-variety dream, in which the narrative only holds together while you are still dreaming it). Anyway, that bicycling-jester-in-the-graveyard dream inspired this paragraph from the Petty Magic Christmas chapter:
Another concrete example of source to story is the time I overheard a pair of avid cyclists chatting on the PATH train, which I blogged about here. (I still chuckle over that one whenever I think of it.)Other times I go out into the world knowing exactly the kind of experience I want to have, just so I can write about it.
(Written during a trip to Nuremberg in December 2008.)Finding a use for good ideas seems like the effortless part; it's the keeping your eyes and ears open and jotting down anything interesting that may take a certain degree of mindfulness and practice.Write everything down, even if it's just a word or phrase you like the ring of. (Skullduggery. Thaumatrope. 'Dead, yet speaketh.')Write it down even if it doesn't have anything to do with the story. It might. (Christmas cards. Chaos = self organizing. Gingerbread recipe?)Write it down even if it (seemingly) doesn't make any sense. (Mr. Pants. Marsh bandits. The corpse and her impostor.)The act of writing it down puts the idea in play, adds it to the pot, or whichever metaphor you prefer. Let it kick, or bounce, or stew, or mingle. One idea may prove itself the kernel of the best poem you ever write, and another will never amount to more than words on a card; but it may be years before you can tell which is which, so you might as well write everything down.Ultimately, if it's a really great idea, you don't end up using it. It uses you.
Ideas, part 2: Keeping Organized
Go on, laugh! (If you know me, you know that I have absolutely no business offering organizational tips, because I am an incorrigible slob. HOWEVER, with three published books under my belt I figure I must be doing something right. Right?) So here's my 'system,' and I'm telling you about it partly to jump-start my own tush into actually using it again.
1. The Moleskine Notebook.
This is always the first point of capture—I never go anywhere without a notebook. I like Moleskine notebooks because they've got a pocket in the back for collecting loose notes, little inspiring things I find in my travels, or just things I like to keep with me (vintage postcards, a strangely-shaped leaf, my grandfather's prayer card). (Gee, I could really use a couple more for Christmas...haha.)
[Edit, 2013: My new favorite notebooks are Ecosystem, since they are made in America of sustainable materials. Moleskine notebooks are made in China.]
2. The Rolly File.
I wrote about the rolodex here. I haven't actually used this system in awhile, but I'll definitely be returning to it for my next adult novel. There are simply too many bits and bobs (period details, funny turns of phrase, historical anecdotes, &c.) to keep track of any other way.
3. The Brain Dump.
This is when you take a big sheet of paper (I used newsprint left over from a drawing class I took at Parsons a gazillion years ago), label it with your working title in the center, and start filling in the page with characters' names and their relationships to one another, their histories and motivations, along with anything else that occurs to you—plot points, epigraphs, research reminders or cross references...anything at all to do with your story. The brain dump is loads (har, har) of fun, not to mention a 'map' of sorts that you can refer back to again and again as you write. (I'll talk about how I outline in a future post.)
Mind map for The Boy From Tomorrow.
(I'm not giving anything away by showing you this, since I doubt this story will ever make it off my hard drive.)
4. Scrivener.
One of my Yaddo buddies, Cole, gave me a brief run-down of the features of this neat-o word processing and organizational program last year, and I eventually downloaded a copy of my own. It's got a virtual binder, so instead of having this unwieldy Word doc full of unfinished scenes, you give each scene its own page, so it's all that much easier to keep track of. I started another Scrivener project called "The Repository" and that's where I'm keeping my notes and ideas for all the stories apart from the one I'm currently working on. Infinitely better than a thousand Word docs across several dozen folders! (Also, it's going to make all the little pieces of Moon 2.0 SO much easier to manage—if I ever do get to write the second edition. SIGH. Still on hold indefinitely.) And there are a lot of other features I haven't even gotten around to exploring yet.
I swing back and forth between wanting everything in ink on paper (hard drive failure! DISASTER!!!) and having everything in a file on the laptop (too much gee-dee paper everywhere); it's like I always feel I could be more organized if I did it the other way from how I'm currently doing it. Ultimately the best method seems to be half and half: first scribbling each idea down in a notebook, then either inputting it into Scrivener (if there's already a place for it) or putting it on a rolly card for future use.
As disorganized as I am, I love hearing about how other people keep their ideas in order. Do you have a 'system'? Leave me a comment!
Ideas, part 1: Fill ’er Up
Last winter I gave a presentation to my friend Kathy's class on creativity at Temple. By 'presentation,' I mean I packed up all my bits and pieces from The Practice Novel to Petty Magic (notebooks, research materials, rolodex, printed drafts dotted with stickies), laid it all out on a table at the front of the classroom, and said this is how I work.It was an early morning class at the beginning of the semester (sigh, two strikes already). Kathy and I were the only people in the room who weren't looking like zombies. (Only one student asked a question: "Are you left-handed?") I was feeling all pumped up and enthusiastic and I kept thinking what a shame it was that nobody in the class was awake enough to be interested. Then I thought, duh, why not blog it?My notes from that presentation fell into three stages: where I find my ideas, how I organize them (or, ahem, attempt to), and how I eventually use them (this part's fun because I can show you a passage from the finished book and then tell you where the idea originally came from). So, onto part 1!Like I said, a huge part of preparing myself to write is 'filling up': reading on any topic that interests me, traveling in search of new experiences, savoring music and plays and art and movies. I hope this is obvious, but I feel the need to clarify here: when I say I get ideas watching a movie or reading somebody else's novel, I don't mean I use somebody else's ideas. The idea I get usually doesn't have all that much to do with the thing that triggered it; oftentimes it's a single word that sparks an entirely new idea. Either that, or it takes someone else's idea in a different direction (e.g., I made up 'Everyday Life in the Twenty-First Century: A Handbook for the Chronologically Displaced' in Mary Modern, and realized ages later that my subconscious must have been thinking back to the 'Handbook for the Recently Deceased' in Beetlejuice).Anyway, here's the list I made of places I find inspiration:1. Strangers (crazy or not) on public transportation.One evening on New Jersey Transit a wild-haired man ran through the car shouting "Beware the marsh bandits!" Someday I will use this.2. Pop culture--movies and television.
3. Reading eclectically.I read a lot of books about espionage before/while I was writing Petty Magic--until it's research, it's just for fun. Details are so important, especially when it comes to historical fiction, and it was neat to collect facts and tidbits I knew I could use later on (Allied planes dropping bits of tinfoil to jam Nazi radar, leaving messages in toilet roll dispensers, etc.) I also found the stories of individual spies (Violet Szabo and "The White Rabbit" in particular) really inspirational; it didn't seem plausible that my hero could escape the Nazis until I read that F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas had done it multiple times (and even when his escape attempts failed, he survived).(I think I'll write about research in a future post.)4. Music.I went to Berlin to do some Petty Magic research in September 2008, and brought home a 4-CD set of cabaret music from the 1920s. I popped in one of the discs and as soon as Irgenwo auf der Welt ("Somewhere in the World") came on, I knew it belonged in the book.5. Friends' funny lines.You know what they say about Irishmen: all potatoes, no meat.6. Things misheard."Lord of the slippy." If I could tell you what was actually said I never would have gotten the idea.7. Far-off places.
We were ushered through a doorway and up a spiral staircase, and a knight glared at us from a niche halfway up. We reached a landing and passed through a door into an inner courtyard. Here all the architectural periods in the castle's history converged—medieval, faux-medieval, and quaint half-timbering—so that if I hadn't known better I'd have thought I'd stumbled into a warren unawares. Vines of ghost ivy snaked across the stone and wood façades, and griffin-headed gutter spouts high above our heads unleashed the rainwater in roaring cataracts onto the cobblestones. The whole place would have been very charming in summertime, but that night, the last night of the year, the narrow windows reflected nothing but the storm clouds.
(A description of this place.)8. Art.In Petty Magic there's a whole chapter set at the Met. Also, I got the Leuchterweibchen (horned mermaid chandeliers) from a tour of Bunratty Castle and the fanged mermaids from a curio cabinet in a guesthouse in Ecuador.
9. Graveyards (names, histories, mood).It's so true, what John Hurt's character says in the film version of The Field: "I love the smell of a graveyard. 'Tis a sweet and peaceful smell." I like graveyards. Weird as it might sound, contemplating my inevitable demise has only ever spurred my creativity.
Stacked up and ready to go. (An Islamic graveyard outside Göreme, Cappadocia. Elliot took this one.)
(More on names in a previous post.)10. Your own life and family history.That's where the whole idea for Mary Modern came from. (See my author essay at the back of the paperback edition; if you have the hardcover or ebook edition, email me and I'll send it to you.)---Where do you find inspiration?(Next time I'll talk about how I organize my ideas using rolly cards, Moleskine notebooks, "brain dumps," Scrivener, and suchlike. Link to Part 2.)