Last week, I posted a “Dear Prudence” letter that got my head spinning with story ideas. This weekend, after a conversation with my grad-school “sorority” sisters (not a real sorority, but it’s the closest most of us have ever come to one), I wrote up a story treatment based on an idea for a character inspired by a certain news broadcaster I think is good looking.

But there’s a huge difference between “getting an idea” for a story and actually beginning to write that story. So there are two issues we need to examine: how to choose the story idea and how to get started writing it.

How do I choose which story to write?

“If the work comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am, serve me,’ then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve.”
~Madeleine L’Engle

As of the writing of this post (February 2009), I have completed six manuscripts. Before I started seriously studying the craft of writing and preparing myself to pursue publication, I would write and toy around with whatever I felt like working on at the time. For ten years, as I’ve mentioned on this blog many times, I wrote and rewrote a manuscript that grew to almost 200,000 words (though with as much rewriting as I did on it, I probably wrote something more like 500,000 words when all was said and done). It isn’t a complete story—it’s a collection of scenes and vignettes—really just things that I wrote to spend time with the characters I’d come to love so dearly. But before, and even during, the time I worked on that manuscript, I had so many story ideas that I would start writing—and usually got a page or ten into before setting it aside from disinterest. (See this post from the First Lines series for an example of some of those started and abandoned ideas from over the years.)

So how did I choose which stories would be the ones I would spend six, eight, nine, twelve, thirty-six months writing? How did I choose which of the many ideas that bombard me day-in and day-out?

For me, the stories I’ve written—either the unfinished ten-year project, or the completed manuscripts—came from ideas that just wouldn’t leave me alone. And for me, it stems from the characters. Characters are where my stories begin. Many of those partials that I have on my computer—those abandoned ideas—were started because I had an idea for a character in some kind of situation that might be interesting, but it never grew from there. Either the character or the situation ended up not being interesting enough for me to want to come back to it time and again to see what was going to happen next.

There’s a difference, though, between discovering your story/character isn’t interesting enough to sustain a novel and getting to a point where you feel like the words just won’t come anymore. In the second case, you’re most likely just blocked—and you’ll probably discover that if you continue to focus on the story in other ways (such as casting your characters or putting together graphic storyboards), you’ll find yourself overcoming your creative block and getting back into the story again.

There are several things to consider when choosing which story idea to pursue:

• Are the characters interesting enough to you, with sufficient mysteries and depth to them, that you’ll want to spend month upon month thinking about and talking to them? Are they real enough? Is there something they’ll need to learn/do that will give your main character(s) a growth-arc over the length of a novel?
• Even if your idea is character-driven, is there sufficient potential for a plot that will drive the story on to a climax and conclusion? If someone asked you what your story is about, would you be able to tell them?
• Is this a story idea that’s been formulating in your mind for a while and just won’t let you go, or is it something you came up with on a whim?
• Is there more than just an interesting character or a flashy plot to your idea? Will it have emotional depth? Depth that goes beyond emotional/physical?
• Do you have a theme? Conflicts beyond the main plot?

Now, not everyone goes through these questions when beginning to write a story. But when you get to a point where you’re ready to give up on an idea after three, ten, or twenty chapters, these questions may come in handy when trying to determine if it wasn’t a good choice or if you just have writer’s block.

How do I get started writing a book?

“The empty page is a Sphinx, blankly ferocious.”
~Richard Rhodes

Putting the first words of a story down on page is like cutting into an expensive piece of silk to sew a garment. If the crafter doesn’t know how to sew, doesn’t know what a dress pattern looks like nor how to read the instructions on it, they are going to end up ruining the silk and being discouraged from ever trying again. So what is the amateur to do?

When learning to sew, we start with simple patterns and cheap fabrics—but we still choose to make something that we’ll like in finished form. Just like the first-time crafters wouldn’t expect to turn out a perfect red-carpet evening gown on her first attempt, you can’t sit down to start writing expecting to turn out a perfect story/manuscript the very first time.

Where do you start? It depends on what kind of a writer you are. I have to start at the beginning and write through in linear order to the end—even though I stink at writing openings. I have to see the story evolve on page just as if I were reading a book from cover to cover. Upon a rare occasion, when a scene comes to me fully formed, I might write ahead, just to make sure I don’t lose the idea—and many times, this might help me gain momentum in the linear writing, to write toward that scene. However, sometimes, I end up not using that scene—but it did teach me something about the characters I might not have otherwise known.

Before I started full-steam writing A Case for Love a month ago, I had several bits and pieces of scenes, dialogue, and narrative as a way to start priming the pump and getting into the characters’ heads to figure out exactly where I wanted to start the first draft. When I finish the first draft, I may decide that it wasn’t the right place to start. But until the draft is completed, I won’t know that. And every story has to start somewhere.

The most important thing to keep in mind when you sit down to that Sphinx-like blank page is that you’re not sitting down to write “a book.” You’re writing a Chapter or a Page or a Paragraph or a Sentence. If you sit down at the beginning of a project with the weight of a 100,000-word manuscript hanging on your shoulders, you may find yourself crushed by it. If you write a page a day, you’ll have completed a novel in a year.

So, now, since most of my readers are also writers with more than one manuscript finished, I’ll turn these two questions on you: how do you choose which stories to write, and how do you get started writing?

I’ll be writing more on this topic next week, but this prime example of where story ideas can come from in the real world was too good not to share. See if this doesn’t make your creative juices start flowing:

When I was a freshman in college, I had a tight group of friends. Two of them got together and married last summer. We three were close in college but less so since we graduated. I found out from mutual friends that the groom recently committed suicide. Since people in the group hadn’t heard from his wife, I was put in charge of contacting her. She said there was nothing to talk about and asked me not to visit. I then contacted her brother, who had been close to them, and this was the first he’d heard of her husband’s death. She apparently had a closed funeral and told no one, because she said that is how he had wanted it, even though he had many friends and was always outgoing and happy. His college friends are distraught and don’t know what to believe, especially since there is no record of this in any of the area newspapers. Also fishy is a rumor that he got one of his female friends pregnant. I checked–she is pregnant and says he’s the father. His parents live overseas, and his wife never got along with them; as far as we know, no one has contacted them. How can his friends be sure he died, so we can come to terms with everything? I have a crazy idea that maybe she found out about the other girl and killed him in a fit of rage. What is the polite way to make sure our dear friend is resting peacefully and not locked away somewhere?

(from the “Dear Prudence” column, 1/29/08, www.slate.com)

The last few posts in this series have been laden with lots of information. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m still trying to digest some of it.

So it’s your turn to help write this blog—it’s time for a writing exercise!

Write an opening paragraph (no longer than five sentences—or about 100–125 words) for a scene/story using at least five of the following words:

Eggplant
Agreeable
Bowelless
Misanthropic
Ursaphobia
Curdle
Antagonize
Opine
Wrest
Nor’easter
Unnerve
Stealth Bomber
Old Codger
Maiden

Use your imagination, be creative, and get inspired. Comments must be posted by 4 p.m. Central time on Thursday 1/29. I’ll pick a winner, which I’ll announce on Friday, who will win his/her choice of a signed copy of Stand-In Groom now or be placed at the top of the waiting list for a signed copy of either Menu for Romance or Ransome’s Honor, which both come out in July.

What’s the difference between imagination and creativity?

Well, the biggest difference is that imagination is passive while creativity is active. Just look at the root of the words: image and create. One’s a noun, one’s a verb. With our imaginations, we form images in our minds; with our creativity, we do something with those images, whether it’s painting, acting, composing music, or writing poems or stories.

So if imagination lays the foundation upon which our story is to be built, creativity is the process by which we begin construction.

“The creative process has a lot to do with faith…
at the moment of creation, [the artist] must have complete faith,
faith in their vision, faith in their work.”
~Madeleine L’Engle

In most artistic disciplines, the practitioners will often times speak of “the process” or the methods unique to creating that particular type of art. What kinds of brushes, paints, and canvas did the artist use? What kinds of brush strokes? What masters does his work most resemble? What musical style did she write in? Who were the musicians who came before her who influenced how she uses her voice/instrument?

For most people, analyzing authors in such a way is usually left up to academics and literary critics. Sure, when we write reviews of novels we’ve read, we might compare one author’s work to another’s, but it’s usually more about how the story made us feel than any real analysis of the authors’ process—of their creativity.

One topic I’ve been asked about in numerous ways in interviews over the past couple of weeks is what my writing process is. It’s usually asked this way by other writers: “Are you a seat-of-the-pants writer or an outliner/plotter?”

My answer: I’m somewhere in between.

There are more than two processes to creating novels. And our own personality and approach to creativity is what determines our own personal process of writing. You may play the whole scene out in your head before you ever start writing, or you may have a vague idea for something and won’t be able to imagine it until you actually start putting words on paper. The process of creativity is as unique as the person doing the creating.

“Everyone engaged in any kind of creative activity is as enamored of the process of making as of the thing made.”
~Denise Levertov

Inspiration, the Breath of Life
So we’ve imagined something that’s sparked our creativity—our urge to create, to construct something. But there’s this third, vital element: inspiration. I’ve written before about how the origin of the word inspiration is the same as the word for breathe (inspire). But what does that really mean when it comes to the creative process?

You can have the greatest imagination in the world; but without inspiration, without breathing life into it through a creative action—like writing or painting or sculpting—what you imagine isn’t going to go far.

Where does inspiration come from? Well, in Walking on Water, Madeleine L’Engle wrote that inspiration “far more often comes during the work than before it.”

Have you ever used an old-fashioned water pump? If it hasn’t been used in quite a while, you’re going to have to work long and hard to get anything out of it. But if it’s used regularly—every day—when you go to it wanting a drink of water, the pump is already primed. The water is right there, waiting to pour out.

Inspiration comes when we prime the creative pump. It is not thinking about a final product that gives us inspiration. What gives us inspiration is what leads us to write in the first place: the joy we take not just in imagination but also in creating, a.k.a., creativity. When we are in the creative process and inspiration hits, everything else falls away. We lose track of time; we’re deaf to anything going on around us; nothing fills us with more joy than creating a story from our imagination. Or, as Gordon Dickson put it, we “fall through the words into the story.” That’s inspiration.

“The writer in the midst of writing, like the penitent in the midst of prayer—finds the self falling away. Or getting out of the way. Only when we slip out of our writer bodies do we truly don the skin of story. We become one with the piece we are creating.”
~Jane Yolen

“All my seven Narnian books…began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.'”
~C.S. Lewis

What is Imagination?
Well, if you go to the dictionary, you’ll read this:

1. the faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.
2. the action or process of forming such images or concepts.
3. the faculty of producing ideal creations consistent with reality, as in literature, as distinct from the power of creating illustrative or decorative imagery. Compare fancy (def. 2).
4. the product of imagining; a conception or mental creation, often a baseless or fanciful one.
5. ability to face and resolve difficulties; resourcefulness: a job that requires imagination.
6. Psychology. the power of reproducing images stored in the memory under the suggestion of associated images (reproductive imagination) or of recombining former experiences in the creation of new images directed at a specific goal or aiding in the solution of problems (creative imagination).
7. (in Kantian epistemology) synthesis of data from the sensory manifold into objects by means of the categories.
8. Archaic. a plan, scheme, or plot.

If you do a little more research and go to the encyclopedia, you’ll find concepts like these:

• the process or form of images or concepts
• plays a key role in the learning process
• the ability to invent partial or complete relative realms within the mind
• the process behind invention
• helps in problem-solving
• helps us develop our perception of the world

The ancient Greeks defined art as an imitation of reality. This precept stood for nearly two thousand years; however, by the 19th century, philosophers and artists alike questioned that if art really were merely a reflection of reality, then why did art so often diverge from reality, forming the basis of the Romantic movement. The concept of imagination replaced imitation.

“None of our conscious interaction with the world
around us is free from the imagination’s input.”
~Janine Langan

The brain is like a kitchen. Reason provides the raw ingredients, imagination is the recipe, understanding and knowledge the pot and stove; the product is a complete, well-rounded “meal” or worldview.

Imagination gives us the ability to distance ourselves from oppression or stress. Over the past twenty years, multiple studies have been conducted on the efficacy of creative writing as therapy. Results have shown that college students’ test scores increased an average of about one letter-grade; blood pressure and heart rate can decrease; it can improve immune function and reduce the rate of minor illnesses such as colds and flu; it can reduce psychological distress over a traumatic experience by reducing “intrusive” thoughts about the event; and so on.

Other things imagination helps us with:

• empathizing with situations different from our own
• seeing other points of view/making compromises
• generating hope—allowing us to create optimistic goals and actions even when circumstances are dire
• defying the idea of fate/destiny

Where Does Imagination Come From?

“I know very little about how this story was born. That is, I don’t know where the pictures came from. And I don’t believe anyone knows exactly how he ‘makes things up.’ Making up is a very mysterious thing. When you ‘have an idea,’ could you tell anyone exactly how you thought of it?”
~C.S. Lewis

Some anthropologists and psychologists would tell you that the imagination is what separates humans from all other animal species on the planet. I say some because others have enough imagination to imagine that other creatures might have the capability of imagination!

For those who are spiritual, they consider the imagination not just a gift, but a reflection of the Infinite. It is the thumbprint of their deity on them. It is a tiny glimpse into the power behind the creation of the universe and the infinite diversity of what surrounds us. Or, as Luci Shaw put it in her essay “Beauty and the Creative Impulse”: “It is … grace in action … grace in astonishing three-dimensional color with better-than-Dolby sound, and fragrance, taste, and texture thrown in to make it even more memorable.”

I cannot define where imagination comes from any better than C. S. Lewis did. But I do know that the more I pay attention to those “pictures” that come into my head, the more I allow myself time to think about them and let them ferment and develop, the more frequently and clearly they come.

Do We Use Our Imaginations Enough?
Is imagination necessary to life, or is it the ice-cream sidecar to the birthday cake of life? So often, as adults, when we hear the word imagination, we think of it as a distraction—a charming distraction—but nonetheless something we should label as “childish” and to be put aside in favor of reason, logic, and responsibility.

“Human beings cannot be human without some field of fancy or imagination; some vague idea of the romance of life and even some holiday of the mind in a romance that is a refuge from life.”
~G. K. Chesteron

Do you know why TV shows—whether scripted or unscripted (so-called “reality” shows)—take commercial breaks right at the pivotal moment of the story/right before the winner is announced? Because if they’ve done their job right, they’ve worked our imagination into a fury, and we have to stay tuned to see if it’ll turn out the way we imagine.

In this busy world, when, at any given time during the day, there are at least five things vying for our attention—between work, e-mail, phone, blog, writing, bills, family, and so on—allowing time for the free-flow of the imagination doesn’t get priority. But the good thing about imagination is that it can happen anytime. So instead of listening to the radio in the shower or in the car, turn it off and turn on your imagination. Same goes for the TV. If you have a set amount of time to write every day, take fifteen minutes at the beginning of it to just let your mind wander—try to remember what you dreamed about last night, or take a snippet of a conversation you had earlier in the day and imagine it went in a totally different direction, or imagine you’d made a decision differently earlier in the day. Anything to tap into your imagination.

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry