On using your original source of imagination to overcome writer's block

There are times when your imagination runs dry. It could be from overwork or stress of another sort. It could be that you are simply tired. Unfortunately, such times can coincide with when you need to come up with a new story, new piece of art or new song. Sometimes the pressure of having to come up with a complete idea or at least the basis of all the ideas to come in one fell swoop is enough to have the imagination stalling in a form of shock.

There's plenty of solutions available for what's called writer's block, with advice from going on a run to taking a boat trip. All are valid and many will get you the result you want. There is, however, a difference between a forced idea such as one found in a newspaper article and one fresh from your own imaginings and insights. The difference is realised as something so insubstantial as a sense of playfulness or freedom. Normally you'd think these elements to any form of art wouldn't be so important when art can be made quite well without them. But I suppose it is fairly safe to say that the difference between good and great art and writing comes down to these insubstantial elements.

So, if you've got yourself a case of writer's block and you're looking to overcome it you can take that boat trip and observe those around you or read the newspaper and pull out interesting stories. There is a chance you will pick just the right story and a sense of play falls upon you before you even pick up a pen or brush. Or you can find your original source, or form, of imagination and apply it to whatever is currently concerning you.

When you were a child you would have tried all sorts of artistic things, whether you knew it or not. You may have had a paintbrush handed to you by a frustrated play school teacher who just wanted you to waste some time and time waste you did with great joy. You may have loved playing with sand or sloshing water about in whatever pattern you preferred. You may have formed imaginary friends and held tea parties or you may have excelled at building Paddle Pop stick (ice blocks for those who don't know about Paddle Pops) weapons to throw at your siblings. There was something you did as a child that at first was just fun but then became a bit of a skill or identifier.

For example, I was the child who did such a thing as imagine two large and patterned rocks as car parks or mines and run my matchbox cars over them while imagining scenes. My sister was the child who would skip about the back yard collecting leaves in a basket while singing to herself or her imaginary friend (we were never sure). My brother was the one who loved to make himself into a crocodile at the pool and chase his sisters about, snapping his hand/arm jaws the entire time. All of us excelled in various types of backyard warfare.

These times flew by rather quickly but they are lasting memories of who we are. These were things we did that identified us. You couldn't swap them around easily. There was no way I had an imaginary friend but I was definitely one for imagining large scenes. And while I tried on the crocodile form it was really best suited to my brother. These activities reflected the wells of imagination and interest that were originally there. People, places, dramas, big scenes, strange animals, playful human interactions. Of all the things you did as a child, there has to be something that spells you or holds much of what you were as a child. And it is that which you could easily draw on to create playfully.

Having an imaginary friend means you're deeply interested in both others and yourself on a close scale. You like relationships and don't like being alone much. Or at least you didn't when a child. Being creative now, you might have departed from focusing on relationships and people to things like politics or social issues. It seems like the two should be the same but what's happened is you've skipped from having imaginary friends to having imaginary scenes. It would be like my sister trying to be me and it would work out just as well as my time trying to be the crocodile. You could do it, with effort, but it won't feel altogether natural. Skipping back to creating close relationships may make you think you will have to give up on wider issues but this is false. Don't forget about microcosm viewpoints on macrocosm issues.

In all, to solve writer's block, a lag in inspiration or the desire to create just look to your past. Find what it was to be you back then and incorporate it into the work that is a reflection of you now. You can still be smart and insightful, cutting edge or old school with a twist, but with the addition of some original interests there is a greater chance your final work will include some of that all important playfulness and sense of freedom.

On approaching the blank sheet or screen

There is almost nothing more daunting than a blank sheet or a blank screen to a person bent on creativity. Aside from putting to ink what has only been pencil scribbles up until then, that is. Both beginning and finalising are terribly hard as beginning begs you to fill in the blank with your own thoughts and dreams, no prompting allowed, and the finalising gives you that terrible feeling you're about to be marked and judged worthless.


I say "you're" rather "your work" as for most people who've done something creative, any rejection to their work feels like a rejection of the mind and inspiration behind it rather than just of the work presented. It is all too personal. This is the reason why most people who go about rejecting works, either for a living or for fun, need to be a little gentle in their criticism. Constructive criticism is good and usually most helpful before the final stage. Downright slandering or "poo-pooing" like Matilda did the lion is just plain hurtful and doesn't really get anyone anywhere. Except maybe a pay packet for the critic and tears for the artist.

That said, this is on the beginning of creativity and less the finalising.

When starting out in writing or drawing or painting you're usually faced with a blank sheet, blank screen or blank canvas that seems to take on a life of its own. It stares back at you as though challenging you to fill it in properly and to make every word, pencil or brush stroke born of genius. There is no allowance for inept scribbling, according to the blank surface.


But far more often than not with art and writing, the work that is finally produced is actually the result of several trials and mistrials. To get a single sketch fairly finalised and ready for inking it may take several sheets of scribbles or several layers of scribbles before the image pops into being. Just as it takes several rewrites and edits for a novel to completely bloom.


The trick to getting past that blank screen or blank page stage is simple enough. You just have to realise that genius is usually born of hard work, skill is much practice and that you're only human and likely to stuff up multiple times on the way to creating anything fairly decent, not to mention gob-smacking awesome. That an boring another pair of eyes to help you see the faults and flaws in your work, especially if you're still insecure about your own skills, is how you go about creating.


That blank screen can be scribbled on and then returned to being blank or saved away for later thought. The sheet that's staring at you is likely one on top of a pile of sheets so think of it as a first draft rather than a final one and the sheet as replaceable if necessary. Canvasses are a bit more challenging as although you might have more, by the time it is set up as a blank canvas there has already been a lot of work done or a lot of money spent. So think of a canvas as an opportunity to layer those sketches and scribbles one on top of the other, followed by several coats of paint that create texture and a blending of colour you likely hadn't thought of. The same principles apply to painting a canvas as rewriting and editing the first draft of a book. It is all about adding and smoothing away and polishing.


Blank sheets, screens and canvases just need to be viewed as an opportunity rather than a challenge and from there you can play to your heart's content. As an opportunity to express yourself a blank page or canvas is enticing, especially if you have something on your mind that you'd like to show the world. And if the page or canvas is still a little daunting then just take up a pencil and scrawl a few light shapes on it, light enough that they can be rubbed away without leaving any marks behind. That way, the surface to work on isn't blank anymore and you can approach it freely.


If you're writing then just write down the conversation you just had or the lyrics of the music you just listened to or even a quote from the movie you just watched. Write down something that stuck in your mind. Then just write what's on your mind, whether its a different topic or not. Start with a feature of the world you're imagining or a character that's bumbling about in a half built world within your mind. Anything will do until your ideas begin to form properly. And anything you don't want to keep just delete once the page is no longer scary.

The relationship between protagonists and their writers

The question that sparked this post was "Are protagonists what their writer wishes they were or even what they are?". By this it could be seen that the writing of a protagonist is a form of self exploration and revelation. But my answer to this question is no, not really. The relationship between and author and their protagonist is far more complex than that, not to mention their relationship with the other characters in their stories.


Writing is cathartic in a way, in that you can express a lot of the pent up thoughts and emotions you otherwise find to impolite to reveal, but that doesn't mean that what you write necessarily has a direct relation to what is causing you to think or feel in a certain way. A writer might be angry over something, grief stricken or even tortured with indecision, for example, and have no one they can talk to about these issues. Thoughts build, the mind wanders and a story pops into mind that just begs to be written. And within that story is a range of characters. (This is one example of how a story comes into being but there are, of course, many others. Some far less organic.)


Of the characters that are formed in the mind of the writer there are some that are wholly born of the imagination, with little to no research involved and barely a flicker of more logical creation (as brought about when you're trying to find a character to fit a certain role). These characters are the ones that are the most related to the writer's own personality as they are born directly from the writer's mind. Yet in the range of characters you will find good, bad, righteous, ugly, cowardly, brave, foolhardy, ignorant, close minded, open hearted, learned, sexy, disturbing and mentally broken people. Which is the writer? Your first option for identifying the writer as a character is by saying they're the protagonist but what if the protagonist is a gung-ho army man and the writer is a tiny woman with a family of five who spends most of her day tapping away on a keyboard?


The relationship between a writer and a protagonist isn't straightforward. There isn't so much wishful thinking as there is exploration or sympathetic identification and even that is stretching the buck when it comes to the antihero protagonist.


So what is really going on is more a form of dreaming where every character written has some reflections of the writer but none have the entire writer revealed through them. All the good, bad, righteous, ugly, cowardly, brave, foolhardy, ignorant, close minded, open hearted, learned, sexy, disturbing and mentally broken characters share something with the writer as they are all understandable enough to the writer to be written in the first place. It is nearly (only added nearly as someone may have done it, possibly) impossible to write a character without any correlating features or characteristics as your own. You could push the boundary with writing everything as the opposite but then all you get is a reverse reflection so that the good and bad are swapped, leaving the impression that there is something oddly familiar about the character.


To find the writer in the story is to read the story as a whole, pull every possible meaning, hint, characteristic, personality, event, reaction and thought from the book and remould it into a piece of the writer, then continue reading any other work they've ever written and hope that eventually you'll have enough overlapping pieces to figure out which are the most dominant features of the author and which aren't. Then and only then, can you say that you know part of the author. But as a reader only, you'll never know the author entirely by reading their works. And assigning the writer as the protagonist is just delusional.


The gift of this is that there is an endless array of reflections of humanity out there, not simply a list of writers as protagonists. The characters in books reveal aspects of humanity, what it means to exist and what we experience along the way. Through this we can learn to form methods of identifying with those we'd otherwise struggle to connect with. We can pass on information, so much so that a person reading works written centuries ago can see that the essence of what it is to be human hasn't changed all that much over the years. This lets you think that maybe it hasn't changed much since we first evolved as humans. That there might not be that many differences between our experiences and that of apes. In essence, connections are born of writing, connections that allow us to see the individual, the global, the historical and the entirety of creation depending on the mindset we're in when reading.


So writing a protagonist as yourself isn't exactly a bad thing but it does defeat the purpose of fiction, which is to bend the mind to realise our realities. Whether a writer starts out intending to bend the reader's mind or starts out simple to entertain or vent is neither here nor there really. That only works as a partial guide to distinguish between literature and fiction. A distinction I argue in many cases.

On the pressure for original ideas in novel writing

As I concluded (well, started too) in my post "On ideas, originality and creativity" humanity doesn't come up with new, fresh or original ideas that are completely disconnected from any other idea out there. It is impossible.

And yet, in the creative field of writing there is an enormous pressure upon writers to come up with just that. The pressure comes from the public and from the industry itself. It is strong enough that even those starting out in writing or who want to feel the pressure to write on something that's never been written before. Failing to think of anything usually ends with a failure to write.

It is a utterly impossibility to come up with something completely new but the current state of our own propaganda, copyright system and our belief that "we can do anything" as long as we try makes many a beginner or aspiring writer believe they can and should do the impossible.

We can't. Don't even bother worrying over the fact that we can't. Just do what you can, solve what you can, work hard and you'll see benefits. That's what we humans excel at and what has brought humanity to this point (yes, some of you may be saying we should have done it all differently but that's hindsight and working with more knowledge than we had then. There is a certain number of us being pointedly blind and corrupt but this isn't to the point of everyone throughout our history has been).

Individual humans are like worker ants in a swarm. We learn what we learn and work within those principles alone while others learn something else and do something else. Separately we work on what we each believe important and join forces with some who share similar views. Altogether our achievements are in the masses and reach far beyond what any single person could ever do. This, we should be proud of. It is a rather efficient method of ensuring pretty much any possibility we know of gets explored somehow, often repeatedly for different variables, and our collective knowledge therefore expands with the results.

As you can see, I find Isaac Asimov's long distance views of humanity quite interesting to read.

So if we all work with separate little pieces of knowledge on life, the universe and everything and (as noted in "On ideas, originality and creativity") produce new or not so new blends of ideas we've separately encountered there will be many an overlap of ideas produced. 

Everyone capable of writing knows about death, betrayal, love, war, hate, suicide etc etc. Everyone is concerned in some way or another with the young and the old, whether they are of these classes or not. Everyone has beliefs as to what happens after death though not everyone agrees as to what: nothing, something unimaginable, a strict structure or a reincarnation.

2001 Booker Longlist novels broken down by theme.

Can't read the main themes?

Death

Love

Betrayal

Corruption and Theft

War

Suicide

Running Away

Only one lighthearted topic there and it is probably tinged with betrayal.

If even on the topic of what happens after death there are only four main options to choose from, how are you going to write something completely knew and unheard of? Can you think of a fifth option that has nothing to do with any religion or belief system out there? Something no one else has ever thought of before, even partially?

Are you wracking your brain right now trying to think of something to prove me wrong? Don't bother.

Put simply, you can't. But like before, don't even bother worrying over the fact that you can't.

Originality, newness and uniqueness is never found in its pure form. Just as truth is never found in its pure form. You will never create it no matter how smart you think you are or how original you think your current work or idea is. Your idea, work and smartness do not revolve around complete, pure originality. It revolves around how you blend what you know together, how you write this blend down and on what you focus upon amongst the miriade themes, events and issues that appear in your work.

On the opposite end of the scale there is this old saying on monkeys and typewriters. "The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare."

Probability may say so but I highly doubt it would ever happen because the probability is so incredibly small. Besides, why bother? We already have the original and making monkeys do it is about the only novelty there is in producing another copy. If you find monkey slavery amusing at all.

Authors, writers and prospectives shouldn't feel so under pressure to come up with original ideas that have never been broached before. The pressure of copyright is there so you don't act the monkey and type out Shakespeare's plays to claim for yourself. It isn't there to force you to come up with something completely unheard of before, despite the pressure you feel.

Write with the knowledge that you can pay hommage to others, especially if you reference them. Write with the knowledge that you are allowed to touch on subjects, themes and characters other people have created or written as long as you alter them enough through actions, encounters, personalities, placements etc to be your own versions. Or reference them.

Copyright is there so that you pay your dues to the one who developed or owns the little idea you're using without altering. And fair enough, even if this is a complete distortion of how humanity has worked with ideas before copyright. In this case copyright is mostly progression (some disadvantages are included) because it does force you not to mimic word for word, idea for idea, thus promoting heightened change and development.

In a world where we can only blend the ideas already floating about we shouldn't force ourselves to write beyond what is possible. As with every other field we should challenge the impossible, expand our views and discover as much as we can through reforming ideas, exploring the possibilities of new discoveries humanity has made and heightening our collective knowledge and understanding by writing on every theme possible, not just the few labelled in that diagram above.

Collectively, writers shed light on everything for everyone, through recording and reformatting information, so that we can all consume knowledge and then act as we believe we should. If there is anything to worry about in writing and publishing it isn't coming up with a completely new idea that's never been heard of before. It is on shedding light upon the most unlikeable, troubling, problematic and disturbing aspects of ourselves and our world and hoping it will be accepted by a publisher.

Luckily gritty reads are believed mostly palatable and acceptable because they challenge a reader and cause a stir. You'll only be rejected for works that cross popularly help beliefs on common decency as well as moral and ethical acceptability.

On ideas, originality and creativity

Have you noticed how often there's a proclamation or a new, fresh, original or creative idea or concept and when you go to find out all about it you’re disappointed to see it is either a rehashing of old ideas in a new format or a blending together of themes already well known but the blend just happens to be a little different?

By this time in my life, after hearing the terms new, fresh, original and creative being thrown about for nearly every newly popular book or fad out there I've come to expect to be disappointed. In fact, experimental science is about the only thing I find worth getting excited about after hearing those words. Today's example of exciting news was "Eye microchip gives sight to blind".

Now that is as new, fresh, original and creative as we get. Which is pretty good as far as I'm concerned, even if the discoveries were based on years of research, bandied ideas from multiple scientists and thinkers and a collective effort on the part of the IT industry to come up with the chips in the first place. As you can see, the originality is all in the application and the ability to connect the dots.

For a while I pondered why there weren't any truly new ideas about, ones that are completely disconnected from anything that has come before. A few years back I came to the conclusion that we don't have new ideas, just blending of old ones in new ways. Sometimes in incredibly outstanding ways and sometimes in incredibly idiotic ways.

Many I conveyed this thought to didn’t accept this idea of mine as most like to think they can come up with new ideas, particularly in the age of copyright. But I think the arguments just came down to the definition of a new idea. They thought that if no one had done it just like they had then it was a new idea. I thought that if you’d used multiple old ideas and concepts to create your new idea then it wasn’t really new, just a new or different blend (one others have possibly had too).

Instead of new ideas, completely disconnected new ideas, what we have is like an endless building process. Over the course of our existence as a species, humanity has gathered data on the planet, ourselves, our fellow inhabitants of the planet and the universe. It is even possible that the data collection may have even started before we could be labelled truly Homo sapiens. The amount of information we have collected is beyond extraordinary. To the point were it is now absolutely impossible for one single human to hold and remember all the information at once, let alone access it all in their lifetime. We have truly amassed a sea of data.

So what a person holds in their mind is the knowledge passed down to them (sometimes correct and sometimes erroneous) and the information they've searched out for themselves. They do not and cannot hold information in their minds that they've never encountered before in any way, shape or form. Not even a hint. Otherwise we'd be psychic of a sort. Or fore-thinkers. I really don't know the category or extra-human you'd like to class such a type of human as so suffice it to say we'd be other than bog-standard Homo sapiens at that point.

Instead of trying to come up with information we've never encountered before we in fact have a better solution for data gathering and application than any encountered in the animal kingdom, although many animals will have a similar ability to part of ours. We have two things. We have synapses that fire scattered and uncontrolled impulses along with controlled ones. And we have the ability to record our thoughts, writing, crafts and art being the first forms of this recording.

Our synapses are constantly firing, zapping each other over and over or disregarding each other to fire at others instead. The weaving patterns of emphasis and disregard create memories and forgetfulness. If particular synapses don't fire then they become dormant, as you read in that article about lost coloured dreams suddenly returning after years of darkness. The unused are sometimes overwritten for use by another skill you find more important. So you forget one thing and remember another (thus you can't remember your old maths solutions but can remember how to go through the stages of cooking a BBQ). The used connections become stronger and more permanent. But even in their use they change, much the same as an over-trodden path in the woods does through the years. So you memories change over time, and truth is lost almost immediately (don’t go hunting for absolute truth – it will drive you mad.)

With all the firing, misfiring, ignoring and whatnot come your memories, movements, sensations, thoughts and consciousness. But there is also something else happening. There is a lot of "static" going on, particularly in the misfiring, that can link thoughts, memories, movements and sensations together to change your conscious awareness of any particular thing. And this static and misfiring happen all the time. A simple test is the old tongue twister. After a very short time you simply can't say what you wanted to say and start saying complete gobbledegook.

Maybe even gobbledegook, a new way of iterating sounds, could be used as words if given a meaning. And those words built into a language. People do this all the time too, for example: "Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I'm anispeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation." – Blackadder.

Your brain just keeps making connections over and over, through misfiring and static, mistakes or intentions, discoveries and new information gathered. And anything newly added to your memories becomes fodder for another odd blending of ideas that comes from your brain doing something that seems quite impractical from the outset but is in fact one of the most practical and magnificent things about the brain at all.

The other thing that humans do, that which no other in the animal kingdom does, is record what knowledge we've gathered. We don't just pass on our discoveries through "monkey see, monkey do" anymore, we write it down and store it for anyone (mostly) to see and use. And we've been doing this for thousands of years. There is too much to handle for any single person. Ever. But that doesn't mean any particular person couldn't go a research any particular subject, blend it with whatever else they know and apply it in a new way. They could and do.

The upshot of all this is that humans are constantly coming up with combinations of ideas and developments that astound us. No single human could think of them all so most are amazed when anyone comes up with one, particularly so when that person comes up with one that benefits so many and seems so simple an idea but is so complicated and requiring extreme skill to develop. 

Humanity doesn't come up with new, fresh or original ideas. It never has. The advertising that we do is false and the self-congratulations we give ourselves are attributed to the wrong skill. Humanity instead has this gorgeous mind that constantly blends and mixes data in creative ways to come up with solutions to problems and answers to questions through experimentation. It is our problem solving skills and our ability to actively search for answers that should be acknowledged. That and our ability to write and communicate.