Capturing ideas without suffocating the creative process

Ideas can be slippery things. Powerful, evocative images perish like dreams, intensely felt feelings fade with time, the seeds of immortal stories are forgotten. Writers know they need to capture these things, to store them up, work them into stories, characters, scenes.

But tying an idea down - capturing its essential truth whilst giving it context and believability often kills the idea dead in its tracks. Worse, if your mind works faster than you can write other tangential ideas may be lost. There are practical issues too - when articulating an idea three or four others may occur and where do you put those? In the middle of the sentence you're writing? On the same page? Another index card? Some expensive computer software?

Here's a system that doesn't require anything fancier than a notebook, pencil and your imagination.

There are five categories of ideas - 3 Primary: Characters, Plot, Scenes, and 2 Secondary: Questions and Answers.

The first initial idea is assigned a primary heading - you know how this works, you think of a great character, a wonderful scene, or plot point/idea - give it the heading and start writing it down. If anything else occurs then immediately note that down under the appropriate heading - you can either then go back to the original idea at any time, or continue to pursue the new one. If your primary ideas prompt any questions that you feel need addressing don't try and answer them, but do write them down under the heading Questions. If any potential answers to these questions occur, don't be afraid to jot these down under Answers. Avoid striving for answers at this stage though, they tend to have a blocking effect.

If you adopt this strategy it won't be long before you'll have a notebook full of untamed ideas scribbled under useful headings. I find even when my mind is a vacuum reading over my notes and contemplating the questions I previously wrote down will get the creative juices flowing, and before I know it, I'm scribbling away again.

I've talked about generating ideas and how to push them into material for a novel, and plotting systems previously on this blog – but I'd be keen to hear any useful ideas you may have. I'm always looking for new things to learn.

Five Ways to an Atrocious Blog Post

With everybody blogging these days you really need to stand out from the crowd. You're probably sick to death of blogs telling you how to write a great blog-post, so here's one telling you how to write an appalling one.

Don’t deliver on the promise of the headline

Nobody likes to feel like they've been led up the garden path, so what better way to alienate your potential readership by luring them in with a killer headline, only to completely undeliver on the implied promise?

Make the post as long as possible

Life moves pretty fast - most people are lucky to get 45 minutes to eat lunch - why not completely cheese them off with a post that takes 50 minutes to read? If people realise they're going to be eighty by the time they finish your masterpiece, they might just move on to tauter, punchier and more energetic posts.

Include an image that is completely unrelated to the post

The web is a visual medium right? So it makes sense to have an image. Creative people will pick an image that resonates, is striking, and adds some kind of value to the content – therefore best to spend as little time as possible on selecting one - here's an even better idea, why not have a picture of a generic random female in the hope your readership will relate? Hands up everybody who considers themselves a generic random female? Quelle surprise - zero – which with any luck is about how many hits you'll get for your post.

Make the image much larger than the content

Nothing to say? Why not just stick a massive image to hide the fact? Nothing will rile your potential follower more than having to root around your blog only to think – I clicked through for that?

Leave an unwarranted question in the hope of generating comments

No matter if your content doesn't inspire ideas and comments – you can always leave a completely unwarranted and patronising question to at least give the impression you want feedback. Make the question as insincere as possible, you don't want readers to think you actually want their answers. An example follows.

How atrocious do you think this blog is, and do you really care?

World Cup of Writing

Even if you don't love football, it's hard to avoid it at the moment. The concept of the game, like all the best games, is easy to understand – you score the most goals, you win the game, you win the most games you win the league. Simple. But achieving that is far from easy – a strange mixture of science, talent, hard-work, luck, a huge amount of cash, and some alchemy are required to take a team to the top, the next level, the knock-out stages, or whatever the current goal is – still, you always know what you have to achieve. I sometimes I envy those football managers their clarity of purpose.

Writing a novel requires the same amount of ill-defined ingredients but the goals are not so clear, no-one is there to tell you what the rules are, there is no system by which to gauge your success. People have tried, but no-one is buying it, there is no World Cup of Writing.

No-one can argue who's won a football match, everybody can disagree on whether a book is good or not. We've all struggled to wade through Booker winners, laughed at atrocities on the bestseller lists.

So it's easy to get wishy-washy with writing – you could send this draft out now, or spend another 10 years rewriting it; you could work the synopsis, or crack-on with the WIP, you could churn out a thousand words, or get down the pub to 'gather material.' Or you could just go and watch the World Cup.

The point being, we have to set ourselves goals – they can be small or big, short-term or long-term, but they must be three things: clear, achievable and within our power to attain. Getting published isn't within your control, but getting a scintillating submission pack together is; getting on the bestseller list is not something you can make happen, but writing a story worthy of it is.

Keep the goals simple, keep them sensible, and keep them real – that's the way to win in writing.

Come on, England.

How to write all the time – Part 1

Writing a novel takes time, and if you hope to ever write more than one polished opening section, you have to find the time to do it. Trouble is, Real Life has a habit of getting in the way. We already know that writing isn't just about putting words on paper, and if you're serious about your work, sacrifices have to be made – but still – wouldn't it be great if we could write all the time?

The fact is, you can, even when you're asleep, and here's how.

You can distil the creative process down to two things: observation and invention, and when you look at it like that, it's hard to imagine a situation where a writer cannot exercise these two core skills – daydreaming, listening, watching – can be done at any time. The trick is, capturing these observations and thoughts when you really haven't got the time or should be doing something else entirely. Every writer should keep a notebook, and this is the time to use it – but what do you do when you haven't even got time or hands free to jot some notes down?

Dictaphone

Once an indispensable tool for writers/journos/secretaries the world over - it's time to reconsider this trusty device. Not only great for whipping out and capturing thoughts verbally, it's also good to record yourself reading your MS. It may feel weird articulating observations and ideas without the luxury of immediate re-editing via a keyboard, but it will encourage the construction of immediately coherent sentences as well as capturing content, so you'll be developing style and voice too. Many come with a microphone that can be discretely clipped to clothing so no-one even has to know that you're not just talking to yourself.

Camera

In the same way that the Impressionists were influenced by the advent of photography, forcing yourself to record details using a camera will make you see the world in a different way – capturing scenes, land or city scapes or just powerful images that move or provoke you - and the interesting side-effect of this is that you may see something in the pictures later that you didn't see at the time. You can also use them as prompts for short-stories. A picture can be taken in a fraction of a second, and perused at leisure later – so there is every reason to add this string to your writerly bow.

Mobile Phones

Most mobile phones have both vocal record functions and cameras, and even note-making facilities – so we have even less of an excuse not to exploit these methods of recording ideas and observations when we're away from our keyboards. What's particularly good about a mobile phone is that it's not going to look odd or even unprofessional to use one - you can take photos discretely, use the handsfree set to record your observations, and even if your phone doesn't have a record function or a camera, you can phone your voicemail and leave yourself a message if you have that earth-shattering idea that you really need to record whilst waiting in line at the water cooler.

Essentially, it's all about training yourself to take every opportunity to augment your writing.

Part 2 of this post will discuss further techniques for writing when at work, driving a car, or even asleep, amongst other things.

Anybody else got any other good ideas for writing when writing isn't really an option?

How not to fix your novel

Sometimes the cure is worse than the cause. You know things aren't quite right with your novel - it's pretty good, in the main, but there are still a few areas that need work. You haven't got time to re-structure it and throw away all the words you spent ages writing – you've been at it for years already - there must be a quick fix, right?

Wrong. Here are some sure signs that an author knows something isn't right, but hasn't taken the time to fix it properly.

Attempting to allay potential reader disbelief by getting a character or narrative to directly address it.

'I thought to myself, why am I about to burn this entire street down with petrol? Me, a middle-class school teacher with a loving husband and three beautiful kids who hasn't shown a vaguely deviant tendency for the entire novel so far. Why am I doing this?'

Yeah, why are you doing it? Whatever the reason, it has to be justified and believable in the context of the story for that character. If it doesn't wash, the reader won't buy it, no matter how much the author shows she's aware of the problem.

Motivational explanations after the event.

'You see, the reason I burnt that street down was because I was bullied at school.'

Whatever. So why didn't you tell us before we stopped reading?

Attempting to create suspense by being vague.

'I pick up the plastic tube and wrap it around my head. That terrible thing that happened to me, that terrible thing that I am about to do, that thing that I haven't even decided what it's going to be yet will be so bad and so terrible and so completely vague that if you've even read this far you really need to get a life.'

Vagueness does not create intrigue. Detail and fore-knowledge creates expectation and suspense.

Trying to project story interest by asking questions.

'Sally was thinking. How could she get her boyfriend back? How could she find her dream job? Why was her mother so horrible to her? And will anybody continue reading?'

Probably not. Writing questions does not make the reader want the answers. You have to create dramatic questions in the readers head, then he'll start to want answers.

Any other quick-fixes you've come across or found yourself guilty of? I know I've done most of the above.