Writing: from Idea to Page

From 13^th to 17^th April, 2017, I visited Perth for the first time and attended SwanCon 42. SwanCon is Australia's longest running speculative fiction convention, and this was its 42^nd year, with a theme of honouring the work of Douglas Adams. They had wonderful guests of honour, and a huge range of panels and activities — generally about four talks on at the same time across the day from 10am 11pm or later, along with four or more activities running in parallel, from board games, to live action role-playing to console gaming to children's and other activities.

(Michael Troughton and Sean Williams holding up the SwanCon costume party sign, with Alan Baxter keeping an eye on the effervescent crowd.)

SwanCon 42 was held at the Metro Hotel, Perth, doing a heroic job supporting the convention (and feeding a large crowd several times a day). The hotel strained at the seams, but in my view they can be proud of the job they did.

I must say I was also impressed by the dedication of the organising committee, and their ability to fix things and cope when things unexpectedly went wrong.

This is just a short piece to record and share some notes I made as homework for one of the two planned panels I was on. It's a companion piece to a related panel focussed on publishing (and hence, is over on A Toe in the Ocean of Books). (I just intended to type up my notes, but saw they'd be a bit too cryptic if I did literally just that.)

The topic of the panel discussion (organised by Michael Cogan), was "Writing: from Idea to Page":

"Have you had a story in your head for ages you want to tell the world but not sure where to begin? Join our panellists who have been there and done that. Gain some tips and ideas on how to get your story idea down onto paper."

My most excellent fellow panellists were Satima Flavell, Glenda Larke, and Meg Caddy.

I think that collectively we provided good information. Please understand this is not a record of what we all said, but merely some notes I made beforehand as a memory jogger. Some of these points were made by other panellists independently, in their own words. Because we had only an hour and there was a lot of ground to cover, only some of these notes were covered in the talk.

So, in no particular order, these are my notes:

Look for the heart of your story — what is the key thing that is the essence that's driving you to write the story? What is it that is special and unique about your story that's pushing you to bring it to life in other people's minds?

For the above navel-gazing, there are a few ways of looking at your story, through the lens of words, that may help you. They'll help you most if you do it once you've got a good feel for what you want to do; but you can do it at any stage of the writing process. And it's simply to try writing the blurb (the short description designed to tell them readers just enough to intrigue them — maybe 100-200 words); and/or to write down "the elevator pitch" for the story (what you could say in one breath while to someone who asks "What's your story about?"); and the theme of the story (what is it exploring?). I'd add you can also try to create the "tag line" for your story (what might appear on the front cover if it was produced as a book).

People often talk about plotters vs "pantsers", or people who outline and meticulously plan vs those who fly by the seat of their pants and just write and see what happens. Use whatever works for you. You can also mix and match. I'm mostly a "pantser", but I've found that a sketchy outline (just bullet points) often provides a useful anchoring framework that I can work within or ignore as I see fit. You can use one method for the whole story, or different methods for different parts or at different times. E.g. I tend to use outlines when I need to solve some complex plot issue, or work out how on Earth the character could get into, or out of, some tricky situation.

That kind of leads me to the beautiful piece of luck that writing can help you write… When we create stories, we use three parts of our minds: the rational part, the unconscious, and our memory. Now, imagine trying to construct an entire novel in your head: working it all out and then just sitting down and start typing it up. Crazy, right? But you can paralyse your creative writing by trying to do that same kind of thing for much shorter things than a novel. It might be just a scene, or even just a piece of description.

Sure, spend some thought and try to work things out in your head: it's far faster and less effort than writing it down. But if you find you're not getting anywhere, or going around in loops, then just sit down and start writing.

You write stuff down so you don't spend 90% or 99% of your mental capacity just remembering everything. The blank page is not your enemy, it's your friend. It's an external part of your memory that can hold your thoughts and ideas effortlessly to free the rest of your mind to work on everything else that will go into your story. So, write stuff down that will be or may be useful: ideas of all sorts, bits of the story, sections of dialogue, possible bits of plot, a cool situation or setting… whatever you like. Once it's written down on your "external memory surface", it won't be distracting you at inopportune times saying "Don't forget me!"

And here's a related secret: once an idea is written down, you've basically put some very well-behaved modelling clay down that's ready and willing for you to shape it and improve it. It doesn't have to be anywhere near perfect when you write it down. There's an excellent quote from Terry Pratchett: "The first draft is just you telling yourself the story."

Read a lot. Write.

Always be looking for ways to improve what you write. Read about writing; read advice from others (Google searches will tend to find you stuff that is popular with other people); get reviews from other writers. But most of all, write.

Writing is a very learnable skill: you learn it by writing, while consciously trying to improve. (I don't mind literally all the time: that would be distracting and unhelpful when you're "in the flow" and creating!) But be open to learning new stuff, and finding weaknesses in your own work. It's very learnable, but it's also one of those skills that requires thousands of hours of practice.

Know your characters. Know your world. You can learn about them by writing down whatever you dream up for them! Don't write this stuff down thinking it needs to go into your story: it doesn't. It's so that you, the author, gains a deeper understanding of some of the key things in your story. For your characters, the personality is more important than their appearance. So make sure you pose yourself some fun questions about them that will give you a deeper understanding of what drives them. What music do they like? What food? What clothes do they love or hate? What do they spend money on? What piece of clothing would they put on first in the morning? What thing did they love most as a child?

Likewise, pose yourself some suitable (and helpful) questions regarding the setting.

Write these things down in some kind of background notes file. Use enough organisation so that you don't lose them, so you can find them if you need to remind yourself of them later. Write them down: it will help you remember, and it's more practice in writing.

Look for a writer's group and participate. But bail out and find another or form your own if you're not getting what you need from the group. I highly recommend the

Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror — reviews by other writers are the DNA of the site/community, and the site itself is wonderfully powerful and helpful in sharing and reviewing among the members. It costs US$50/year, which is super cheap for what you'll get from it (because 99% of the value comes from the members themselves writing and receiving reviews), and you can even try it for a month for free. I feel sorry for other genres that they don't have a site as good as this available to them.

Accept criticism and try to learn from it — if you sense it's been given honestly, i.e. with good intentions. But keep in mind that no piece of writing will please everybody. Just because one person doesn't like or ‘get' what you're saying, is not a reason to change it. But if two people tell you that a specific thing didn't work for them, it probably means there's something odd there. But if they tell you how to fix it, they're probably wrong: only you can know how to alter that piece to avoid that reaction. (Paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, I think.)

On the subject of improving your writing, go back to some of the stories you love. Actively study them and try to work out why. The consider whether something like that would be something you'd like to do, and start practising doing it.

Look for your own writing style — every writer has their own distinct style. ‘Different' can be good. But to get a feel for how other writers work, and the range of literary devices that are available for you to use as you see fit, try some exercises of writing a something in the style of an author you admire. Something reasonably short, just so you get a feel for how that technique works. Stretch your writing muscles.

Less is often more. If you can express something in fewer words, without changing the feeling or the meaning, then those words will have greater impact. (I think of poetry as like distilled alcohol: it's strings of words that have been super-concentrated so they pack a powerful punch.) Pretend you have a word budget: you kind of do. The reader will appreciate you using only the words you need to achieve the effect you want. Omit details which the reader can fill in for themselves.

Trust your readers' intelligence. You don't need to spell everything out for them. They will enjoy figuring stuff out and piecing things together for themselves. Don't spoon feed them, or lead them buy the nose. Leave them room to exercise their own imagination, too.

If you write something odd, readers (especially if you're little known), are likely to think "Oh, look, there's a mistake." and be thrown out of the story. So, when you are doing something deliberately odd, make sure you also provide some subtle hint, some indication, that lets the reader know that you know it was odd. Then they won't think "Mistake", they'll think "Ooh, weird, what's going on here, I must read on."

It's less effort to learn the writing craft by writing short stories, simply because when you find problems in your writing style and go back to fix them, there's proportionately less to fix. But if you are not interested in writing short stories, or don't like them, then don't!

Do have a go at writing poetry. It's hard! But valuable. Learn about poetic devices, too. Sometimes they're useful to use in prose, a little.

Keep a pen and pencil beside your bed in case you have a great idea as you're falling asleep or waking up. Write it down. Ideally, with some light on, even if it's just enough to make sure your sentences don't run over the top of each other.

Think about flow. I see books as made from lots of interleaving flows operating across a range of levels. At the bottom level are the words of a sentence, which give you both the flow of the sounds but also a flow of meaning, and emotion. The rise and fall of these flows lead to a rhythm in each. Very similarly, when the sentences are showing a dialogue, or just letting us see the flow of ideas inside someone's head, the ideas should usually flow smoothly, each one connecting somehow to the next. Until, of course, you signal that that thread has stopped. Mostly, these flows will connect smoothly: but you can get a lot of impact from jarring or breaking the flow, provided you have done it consciously for that purpose.

The next level up are paragraphs, and then pages, and scenes, and chapters, and the whole book, or books. There are flows in pace, in density of writing, in emotion, in intensity, … any sort of quality you want to imbue in your story. Gradually learn to be aware of these flows.

You do need to vary the rhythm. Monotony gets boring pretty quickly. But don't just vary the rhythm randomly: be aware of the flows, and build and release the rhythms to create the effects you want in your story. This applies across all the levels.

Unlike literary fiction, other stories must have a plot, not just a story. (A story = "this happens, then this, and this". A plot = "this happens, and because of that, this happens, and that leads to this.)

Trust your unconscious. You can set it working on a creative problem by thinking about your problem, feeding in or refreshing your mind by consciously going over the information relevant, that may include all the requirements that the solution must satisfy. Consciously be aware that you're doling this to feed the raw data to your unconscious so it can get to work on the problem. Then do something else that will distract your conscious mind. And every now and then, do a little revisit to the problem so to keep things bubbling along. Sooner or later, the solution will pop into your head.

None of these are rules. Even if they are, if you know you're breaking a rule, but you're doing so for a good reason, then that's almost always going to be fine.

So there are lots of things to learn about writing, but it is a very learnable skill. But the work you put into learning about writing should be small compared to just writing your stories. You learn writing mainly by doing it. Don't think that you have to learn everything before you can "start to write". Just write.

Where Ideas Come From

(Image from Andrés Nieto Porras)

I was daydreaming recently about what I'd say if I sat one day on an author panel, and someone asked the classic question.  But I've thought about it enough, and followed perhaps enough interesting research, and been lucky enough, to maybe partly answer the question.

A stupidly arrogant claim, eh?

The short, half answer, is: the same place dreams come from.

One clue was a fascinating documentary some years ago which mentioned an (Italian? French?) researcher's idea that the same mechanism the brain uses to form dreams is at the root of our consciousness itself, and our thought processes.

Another clue is our ability to create mental models of other people - what they're thinking, how they'll react, how they're feeling - and the discovery of mirror neurones, that let us experience the pain or joy of other people, as if whatever is happening to them is also happening to us.  That all ties up with our ability to form social groups, and through that, to survive.  The evolutionary pressure that drove that development is very clear.  So our ability to construct models of other people, good enough to allow us to hold imaginary conversations with them, is another large piece of the puzzle: we really are very adept at creating hypothetical situations, populating them with imaginary or "real" people, and then letting them act and react with each other in our minds.  That's a big part of the answer.

Another equally big part is our hyper-developed ability to see patterns; patterns in all the bits and pieces of things that make up our mental landscapes — whether they're simple geometrical shapes or complex sets of actions with causes and effects.  Our brains are hungry to find patterns, to predict the future or to make sense of the world around us. Again, this developed because the ability to read a warning sign, evolutionarily speaking, has very much been a matter of literal life and death.  For individuals, tribes, or whole societies.  So we're also great at making connections between apparently disjoint things: whether it's an apple falling from a tree, or a dream of two snakes coiling together.

Another really powerful element in our idea creation arsenal is our unconscious. I've blogged previously about the Unconscious Thought Theory, but it's worth recapping here.  Unlike our conscious mind, which is great at managing sequential lines of thought and performing logical manipulations, our brains also provide with "an" unconscious, with something like fifty separate and independent "mental processing units", that can all access all our memories and whatever it is our brains use to represent parts of thoughts (facts, idea complexes), and then form new connections.

Fifty streams of thought that are all able to match and measure and compare and select and create.

This forming of connections, I suspect, is how we construct those structures in our brains that represent our ideas.

So as well as our logical minds, we also have this powerful parallel processing thinking engine at our disposal.  I've been happily and very productively using UTT since I learned of it in 2014, to solve problems and generate ideas.  So I know that for me, at least, it works. Very effectively.

And if that's not enough, to this "most complex thing in the universe" (the human brain and mind), we have perhaps mankind's greatest invention: words, and language.  The ability to write stuff down.  When you think of it, written language is "just" the capturing of ideas in a static, black and white, two dimensional form. Frozen in time: visible for anyone to see, however far away in space or time they may be from the original writer.  Which is pretty amazing.

But for a writer, the written word becomes in a real sense an extension of the brain. Once written down, the burden of having and holding the thought has been transferred out of our brain and offloaded to an outside memory screen, sitting there for us to read at a glance and add back into the melting pot of our thoughts.  It frees up the mind to generate the next thought, the next piece of the idea, and holds it in a stable form that won't collapse if we're interrupted, or lost if we're distracted.

And the final piece of the puzzle, I think, is each person's "mental wealth": the Aladdin's cave of memories, experiences, sights, sounds, music, pictures, ideas, feelings, facts, tales, people, hopes, …. in our heads. I don't know the limits of the storage capacity of our brains, but I do know it's huge.  And the more good and rich and interesting stuff we store away in our treasure troves, the more building blocks we have for new ideas, new stories, new inventions.

So with all that thinking capacity at our command, and all that rich source of stuff from which to create new ones, I think the question of where our ideas comes from starts to seem a lot less surprising.

It comes from the most fundamental part of what makes us human, and from all we've seen and done.  Humans are imagination engines, naturally generating ideas like the sun generates warmth.

It's what we do.

The Creative Process and the Unconscious

I'm fascinated by the creative process, and I've had a few pieces of luck, perhaps, in getting some insights into it.

I'm right now in the middle of watching a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love) which I found on Shannon Ellison's absorbing blog at Nearly Eloquent (more specially in Four Tips on Writing Well), about the creative process.

(image courtesy of Pexels)

Elizabeth's talk is great (as so many TED talks are!), and I think would resonate with most creative people. She speaks of the pressures that the creative writing career (and creative careers in general) place upon the creator: two of the big ones being "My work is crap; what if I never achieve success?" and if you're lucky enough to have a big success: "What if for the whole rest of my career, I never produce anything anywhere near as good as that first big success?"

She goes on to say that only in the last 500 years or so did the notion that all the creativity came from within the individual arise — the idea that that person, and that person alone, was owed all the (narcissism-inducing) glory of the success, and all the (soul-destroying) acid for all the failures. She said that the ancient Romans idea of genius was a spirit that lived literally in the walls of your home, and which came out and assisted the creator invent. So, the burden of both success and failure was a shared one. She told fascinating stories of interviewing the great American poet Ruth Stone when she was in her 90s who spoke of being able to sense when a poem was on its way: to her it was like a thunderous wind barrelling toward her across the plains, like a great storm. And unless she could get inside, get to a pencil and paper, by the time this might storm train of a poem crashed through her, she would lose it. So she'd run for the house: and if she got there in time, she could capture the poem and copy it down to the paper, but if she was too late, it would surge through her and past, and be lost. But if she could grab a pencil before it had passed completely through her, she could kind of reach out and spear it with the pencil tip, and drag it back inside her body, gripping it until she could find a piece of paper, in which case she would then haul it back inside her, word by word, transcribing it onto the paper. And most fascinating of all, it would be in reverse: word for word, backwards.

She also spoke of also interviewing the musician Tom Waits, who had similar experiences, until in middle life he did something novel one day which changed his whole process. She tells how he was driving on the freeway in Los Angeles, unable to stop, and suddenly heard in his head a most delightful melody, and he knew he needed to capture it at once, or it would be lost. So all the usual stress and tension started building up. And so, she said, instead of panicking, he looked up into the sky and said out loud "Excuse me, do you not see that I'm driving? Does it look like I can do anything for you right now? So, either you come back later, when I can give you the care and attention you need, or go and bother someone else; go and bother Leonard Cohen."

And she told the story of one of the depressing times while working on Eat, Pray, Love, when she became convinced that what she was writing was not just going to be the worst book she'd ever written, but the worst book ever written. And she remembered what Tom Waits had said to her, and leaned back in her chair and spoke to an empty corner of the room, and said, "Look, you and I both know that this isn't all just on me: I'm doing the best I can; I'm putting everything I have into this; but it needs the both of us. So if you're not going to do your part… well, I'm going to sit here and keep working. But I'd like the record to show that I showed up for my part of the job."

Elizabeth's thought was that by putting all the credit for success and failure on the shoulders of a single person, we're putting incredible pressure on each creative individual, and it's this awful pressure that leads to the so well known stories of writers and other artists literally dying: if not through conscious suicide, then often through disabling addictions or disastrous life choices. That by acknowledging a spiritual dimension to the process, that huge burden can be shared.

Now, from what I've read on the web and from seen in interviews and heard in conversation from other writers, most would agree, and welcome that. I think I'm an oddity: I don't seem to be assailed by self-doubt, but nor do I feel overweening pride in my abilities. I think I have a talent, but I think I'm far, far from the best, and still far from the best that I can be. But I'm learning and improving, and I don't need to be the best: it's not a competition, and anyway, what strikes one reader as genius will quite likely leave other readers cold and unimpressed. There are two parts to creating and appreciating artistic works — there's creativity on both sides, not just the artist's. As much, perhaps, goes on inside the reader as it does in the writer, as words or pictures resonate with the receiver's own life experiences and they add their own layer of meaning to the picture. So there is no "best writer", there are only "the writers who best resonate with some set of readers". My guess is that it would be hard to even find two readers who agreed completely on which set of writers they'd collect in their "best writers" bag.

So all this is just by way of saying, I think I'm a realist when it comes to evaluating my own work. I generally like it, and often even love it; I can see flaws in it — undoubtedly, not all the flaws — but when I do, I work to fix them. But I rarely (never?) look at something I've written and say "That's crap." Maybe because I tend to write from the heart, and I try to always write with honesty. And if I don't have anything that I feel driven to write, well, I either don't write, or don't put it in the same box as I do with the stuff I care about. If it's just a cooking recipe, or a note about how to fix some problem on my computer, or an email about some practical matter, then that's all it is. I know that not everyone will like what I write. I know I can't please everyone, and that I shouldn't try. I've set my bar for success, with just a little thought, as "If my writing generates more hours of reading pleasure than hours of writing effort, I'll consider myself successful." So for me, I don't think I place a huge burden on my shoulders: I write the best I can, and try to learn and improve, and if that's not good enough to please some people — that's okay. And if I'm one day lucky enough to have a best-seller — well, I know that there is luck involved, and that there are many other writers equally worthy of such success. Writing is not a rare talent, there are hundreds of thousands of good writers around the world, all working away to create literary wealth for the human race. I'm just a drop in that ocean. So I think that knowledge is enough to ward off the narcissism which success could all too easily induce.

One of the lucky events I experienced was a talk from a successful self-publishing writer and illustrator, where I was fortunate enough to be able to ask the question "How do you avoid the danger of becoming self-indulgent, and stay open to criticism?" And instead of taking the question in the spirit in which it was intended, he took offence and said that he knew better than anyone what he wanted to create, and had learned to ignore criticism. I'd been thinking of the astonishing and unfortunate level of misogyny that his work had developed following a bitter split up with his girlfriend; and he proceeded to demonstrate that, yes, the danger of becoming self-indulgent was all too real. (I think it's an even bigger risk for self-publishers, since they really can choose to have complete creative control.)

And my viewing of Elizabeth Gilbert's talk came just days after watching a TV documentary on Philip K Dick. I hadn't known that he was troubled by visions, that he dabbled in counter-culture stuff — maybe including drugs — and maybe even had some mental problems. But there's no question that he had enormous creativity, and genius, and has been hugely and deservedly influential in Western culture. Many people credit him (through Bladerunner, initially), as being the person who made sci-fi palatable and even desirable to Hollywood, and through it, to mainstream culture. Today, it's mainly only the literary crowd who really look down on and turn their nose up at all genre fiction, especially sci-fi and romance. But until Bladerunner, and probably Star Wars, sci-fi was commercially uninteresting to Hollywood.

Anyway, the thing was, that many of Dick's ideas for short stories or novels came to him from a place that seemed outside himself. He spoke of being hit by a beam of pinkish-red light from the crystal piece of jewellery around the neck of a young female Christian visitor one day, that knocked him into an altered state of consciousness. He spoke of being hit by a beam of ultra-bright pink light on later occasions too, that seemed to pour cosmic knowledge into him. He "intuited" a medical problem in he and his wife's young boy, and urgently insisted on taking his son to a doctor, and tests showed that he was perfectly correct, and the appropriate treatment was applied. It was around that time, and IIRC while stalled while trying to write "The Man in the High Castle", that he started using the I-Ching to solve his plot problems. When faced with a problem, he'd cast the sticks, read the appropriate entry from the I-Ching, and then apply that to his novel. Apparently he used that technique from then on, since he found it worked so well.

In a similar vein, I'd read advice about creating plots for role-playing adventures in which you used a deck of Tarot cards to lay out pieces that would be used to create the characters and the threats for a session or a whole campaign, kind of in a similar way to using them to read someone's fortune.

Now, all these stories sound very much like spiritual interventions, or tapping into some mystical well of creativity or knowledge, right? After all, such stories are part and parcel of human history through the ages. And it could be what's happening: I can't disprove it. And it would be a very comforting thing to be true.

(image courtesy of Pixabay)

But I think there is an alternative explanation, and it's simply rooted in possibly the most amazing thing in the universe: the brain, and its ongoing process, the mind. Another piece of serendipity was receiving a day of training on creativity, on innovation in the workplace, at the R&D company I worked at for many years (hi, CiSRA!). This training was unusual in being science-based, drawing on research into how the mind worked, and what influenced creativity. It was run with a mixture of lectures and workshop exercises in small groups, and all of it was fascinating — from the theory to the practice to watching how the group dynamics affected all this. One of the key pieces of the theory was about the unconscious or sub-conscious, as opposed to the conscious rational part of the mind.

(Just as an aside, my understanding of things is that brain is the hardware for our thinking, affected of course by our proprioceptive senses, hormones, chemistry and health — as well as external influences like very strong magnetic fields, flashing lights, or pounding beats and heart-swelling chords — and the mind is what emerges from processes running on that astonishing hardware.)

The rational mind is basically a single process (in the computer sense: if you're not into computers, you could think of it as a connected series of mental tasks, a series of logical steps in some chain of reasoning). Rational thought is pretty logical, and proceeds step by step in a line that can be straight or meandering and even looping. Unconscious thought, in contrast, uses huge amounts of parallelism. I don't think we yet understand how much cross-connectivity and echoing and rebounding resonances operate to simultaneously evoke memories and form new connections; but we do know that in addition to that complex process, there are somewhere around fifty different processes at work, or available to work, on certain kinds of problems. Some of these, I assume, are tied to sensory input, but not all. All this complexity and richness is I think why the myth of people only using ten percent of their brain developed: it's because we have areas in the brain specialised to deal with certain problems. Just as parts of the visual system break sight down into pieces, some recognising horizontal and vertical lines, other recognising movement, some (I'm sure!) evolved to detect an eye pointed in our direction, and so on. All layered together in a hierarchy or network of networks. All able to cross-communicate. So using all parts of the brain would only happen if we were being flooded with all sorts of sensory inputs, as well as facing challenging problems.

But the rational mind, being serial in nature, and tending to be logical, is the only part that can handle certain problems: like counting and working out sums, and purely logical reasoning. Whereas the unconscious is great at making connections between ideas, weighing up pros and cons, relating one memory to another, matching patterns, and so on. There are some fascinating research papers about this, which you can find by Googling "Unconscious thought theory." One way of applying the theory to solve problems, especially creative problems, is basically this:

1) Learn or revise as much as you can that is related to the problem at hand.

2) Consciously pose yourself the question you want to answer or the problem you need to solve.

3) Distract your conscious/rational mind for at least ten minutes, doing something like a crossword puzzle.

4) Return to the question, and then, as quickly as you can, pick from the available options, or jot down an answer to the problem, without trying to analyse or reason it out.

I have confidence that this works, since it worked on the day of our training to solve a good range of problems, and I've used it often since then when I faced creative problems in my writing. On numerous occasions I had plot problems, or needed some creative idea that satisfied a whole web of logical and emotional issues. Often, they were daunting, and I wondered if there even was any solution at all. But I simply set aside the fear and self doubts (thank you, ratbag cops from Perisher Valley back in about 1983, for forcing me to learn that lesson), and let my subconscious churn away at it; sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. And then, when I felt the time was right, I'd sit or lie down with pencil and paper and start writing: sometimes with a brief note explaining what needed to happen, sometimes then picturing in my head various options, sometimes just writing down bits and pieces that might help, sometimes a mix of all those things — and in short order, suddenly the plot and/or story would flow, with the actors and action unfolding as I wrote.

So, all I'm really saying here, is that we each carry around inside a fount of creativity that we can tap into quite easily. It's sensitive to our moods, it's sensitive to and absorbing facts and impressions, sights and sounds and smells, from the world around us; it's synthesising ideas and joining facts together, juggling things together and looking for patterns, and best of all, if something is important to us and we consciously pose a problem, that mighty unconscious array of mental powers can be put to work at solving the problem.

Go and watch Elizabeth's TED talk (Elizabeth Gilbert on Genius): even though she comes to a quite different conclusion to me, I think her idea would work as well or better than mine, for many people. Her idea is more romantic than mine, and I think more appealing for many people. But for me, the idea that this creative genius can be inside all of us is just as exciting.

And now, back to work on book 3...