Recently, I’ve been working on getting Public Transit ready for its ISBN so it can have its official “debut” as an actually published book. This has involved heavy editing, which (as a writer) is not so much fun. But where I work, we have a writers group and one of the members brought up some contests we could enter some shorter works in. As a result, I’ve also been polishing up one of my old short stories.
All this has got me thinking about creativity in general. Sometimes, writers are asked where their ideas come from. For many, this is one of the most frightening questions that could be asked! Indeed, it is doubtful that many writers know where their ideas come from.
I have sort of a split personality on that issue. The story itself–who the characters are and what motivates them–is almost always something that comes out of “nowhere.” My characters will often surprise me and do things that I did not expect them to do, but which make perfect sense within the logic of the scene. On the other hand, the overall structure of my writing is always set in stone. It’s like having an over-arching worldview in place, and then coming up with characters to that would either go with or compete against that worldview.
I am always coming up with story ideas, by which I specifically refer to plot devices, types of characters, situations, and events. But writing is not interesting to me until after I develop that necessary worldview. As such, I don’t write anything until after I’ve gotten the philosophical point of the piece.
Because the philosophy is the important part (since without it, I don’t even begin to write anything), my stories only come about after I get to that position. So I always have stories in my mind; I only take the time to flesh them out when I have a purpose to do so And I’ve discovered once I’ve got my philosophy, all the story concepts that bounce around my head can plug in almost instantly.
So where does my mind get its creative impulse from? Half of it is that nebulous place that all authors point to–the part I cannot define. But the important half is found in my doing exactly what I do on this blog or on other blogs I visit. It comes from debating people, understanding worldviews, coming up with distinctive philosophical concepts, and from hashing out presuppositions. Ultimately, my characters are designed with those presuppositions in place, with an overarching objective worldview, and then they behave according to the rules set in place.
In the end, somehow, a story comes out.
