The Creative Process - One

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Keystone Creativity

So when does an idea for a story grow big enough to rate a novel? How does any story come together, really?

My personal observations would lead me to believe that there are as many ways to develop your creativity into tangible writing as there are writers. I don’t know if any two authors truly work the same. There are some craft techniques that can easily be duplicated from person to person, but what about the creativity percolating at the very heart of the experience? Getting your imagination to function and flow in the first place?

That’s an issue that’s going to seriously vary for the individual from project to project as well, depending on your intent. Obviously, you think quite differently writing a fourteen line poem than you do writing a three hundred page novel. I’m working mostly on novels these days, and have been doing it long enough to get some distance from how the process seems to work best for me.

Writing is a twenty-four hour a day experience. It all stems from how you sense the world and choose to order those sensations, and how well you remember your dreams. This process continues on more abstract planes as well. Your brain takes in that sense input and does the physical remembering for you, but your mind applies those impressions to what you already know of the world and how you pray it actually functions. Twisting and retwisting, devising and revising concepts constantly. At any given moment, I’m certain I’ve got an almost uncountable number of potential ideas for writing bouncing around in my head at once.

And then, BAM! I experience something that makes me articulate what I call the Keystone Concept. The keystone is the stone at the top of the arch that holds all the other stones in place to create a beautiful form. Without the keystone, the other stones fall to the ground in a scattered mess, lacking coherent form or recognizable relation to each other.

I experienced this most dramatically in conceiving the novel I’m working on currently, a project which due to circumstances beyond my control -- they’re always lurking out there  -- I’ve been pursuing on and off over five years. The interruptions have created a new set of challenges for me to complete the book I’ve never had to face before. But making it work is proving more satisfying than I dreamt as well.

So there I was, one bored morning five years ago in my past life as someone who actually worked for a living, at my job with the Manitoba Department of Education. I worked in the Transcription Services Department, recording talking books for blind kids. I narrated myself and also worked as an audio technician recording other people reading. Occasionally we got to do a novel, but most of our time was spent on text books. Some mind numbingly boring, some quite fascinating. And it was a great job to learn about words.

We were working that morning on a post secondary law text book, examining different judicial systems around the world. Glen, my narrator that morning, was manfully struggling through a chapter on the Japanese Justice System. Not a subject I had ever given a single thought to in my entire life previously.

Who could have guessed that the Japanese Justice System was a Keystone Concept for me? I certainly never suspected.

Glen is reading away, and I’m grasping the subtleties and differences in how the Japanese approach the court system as opposed to what I watch regularly on Law and Order, and suddenly wham! The Keystone drops into place. A beautiful arch of otherwise unrelated concepts takes perfect shape within my mind. I scramble for a piece of paper and outline an entire novel in five minutes I had no idea I had any idea of ten minutes previously.

Yes, it happens that quickly. I’ve spent the next five years hammering out the details. But the essence of the novel and its six defining moments, a book now shaping up to be around 350 to 400 pages in length, were abruptly and suddenly there. And haven’t changed significantly in the execution of the writing so far.

The problem is I can’t make this process happen any time I choose. I just have to be open to it when it does. And also do my best constantly to accumulate as many of those seemingly unrelated impressions from life that represent the stones needing to be jammed  into shape by the sudden appearance of the Keystone.

So what happened next? If this is such a great process, why haven’t I finished writing the damn book?

First off, I had the overall concept, but I needed to do the research to flesh it out. Glen did a good job reading that morning, but I still needed a little more background on the Japanese Justice System than he could give me with his awkward attempts to pronounce foreign language legal precepts. As well the thing was this was going to be a science fiction novel. A straight out science fiction novel, unlike any I’d ever written before. I wasn’t just creating a book, I was creating a new universe. That took a little thinking.

I made pages and pages of notes, and started writing the first draft of the book. Since I was new to the full out science fiction format -- usually I mash together elements of as many genres as I feel I need to make up anything I write -- I was being careful to meet what I believed to be the expectations of the genre. Everything went forward, driven by that wonderful Keystone thumping into place.

But I was still working my day job at the time. And I would be for another year and a half, after I started writing. Not dwelling on my numerous health problems once again, let me say that within six months of starting the book, my medical complications were rendering life so difficult I was lucky to haul myself into the paying job any morning, let alone still retaining any energy to write once I got home. At one point in life, I could work all day, spend the evening with my family, and then sit down to write for an hour or two between ten pm at night and midnight. Not any more. It rapidly became apparent that either work, me, or the novel had to go for me to continue at all.

So the novel went. First. It wasn’t enough. Life finally built to a situation where it was a race to see if either I or the job was going to break first. My Doctor finally told me to quit before they had to carry me out. So I did. Started writing full time and have never felt better.

But there was now a considerable gap between when I’d been writing up that wonderful concept the first time, and taking up the pen again. I’d lost the flow, and moved on to other projects. But never forgot about that Keystone thudding so powerfully into place.

I’d come up with a title for the book that stuck. The Veridical Corridor. And I’d made some fifty pages of notes, and wrote close to two hundred pages of manuscript. There was something to work with there, when I wanted to get back to it.

Trying to keep it alive, I made Corridor’s two central characters, Billy Garlock and Major Dez Rega, key Contestants in the first Reality Fiction Contest. Hoping that would shame me into having to finish the book, and also teach me more about them so I’d have some continuity happening when I got back to it.

Last fall I decided to pick up the Corridor again. But I was overflowing with ideas last fall, so I ended up trying to work on six different projects at once, and discovered that I couldn’t successfully complete anything working in those numbers. Thinking about the book in the meantime, I realized I really didn’t want to pander to science fiction genre expectations, and decided to try giving the writing more of a noirish edge based on early American crime classics I’d been reading. And while the initial six points that defined the book were still the same, I’d been wandering in my physical confusion in the last weeks while I was first writing the book, introducing too many characters and extraneous subplots (what? Me use too many characters? Never!) and generally losing the forward momentum of the book. I’d have to fix that. But more importantly, with my memory, I’d need to go back to page one and start rewriting the book from the beginning to fully pick up the thread of the story’s development.

The book is in three parts. I’d completed part one in the original draft, and got lost somewhere in the second third of part two before I collapsed. Picking it up again, I managed to rewrite about half of part one, altering the flashback structure of the book to make it more effective as well. This essentially redesigned the flow once more to target the two lines of conflict that mix to define the central conflict clearly at the end of part two, to be resolved in part three.

This year, I resolved to carry the book out to some conclusion. I would either make it work, or establish that I couldn’t take it any further than I already had. Which was a serious concern. More than a few years had passed since I had first conceived the idea. Would it still stand up for me? Would I have to listen to Glen struggling with his Japanese pronunciation again to rekindle the spark?

Holding myself down to only two projects at once, a number I seem to be able to manage quite comfortably, I whipped through the rest of the rewrite of part one. Within a week or two of starting up again, the Keystone thudded repeatedly into place for me once more, reasserting the central premise driving the whole plot. I was able to make a further three pages of notes clarifying substantially what I need to do to make things happen in that regard with my new approach to the style of the book.

The momentum of strictly rewriting what was already there took me about a sixth of the way into part two. Then new challenges arose. Suddenly I wasn’t just reworking what was already there anymore. The second part of the book was where I had bogged the pace down the most with endless sci fi exposition -- good stuff to know now, but better to work with in terms of developing the action of the story rather than endlessly explaining. Now I had to start taking events that I’d already written, but write them anew in a completely different manner to make them work and be consistent with the revised style of the first part and the new vision for part three.

As I worked through the manuscript, this process grew more and more disjointed. I couldn’t follow the story as I’d been writing it already anymore. But there was still a lot of valuable material I needed to salvage there. So new outlines took shape, new writing shaped itself around old concepts, and instead of following the old manuscript page by page, I was now jumping around over about forty pages reworking this paragraph here, rescuing this half page of exposition there, cutting these six characters here, dumping that subplot there, and shoring up the central push of the story as strong as I could make it.

Finally, breakthrough. I had moved beyond the original manuscript completely and could start writing completely new material. In a surprisingly short time, I dashed off the rest of part two, including two of the most central scenes in the book uniting the conflicts almost exactly as I had originally conceived them that magical moment when the Keystone dropped five years ago. It’s a method that works. For me, anyway.

Now, I’ve only got to write part three.

Given the saga so far, who knows where, when or how that will exactly happen. But at least I know now the Keystone has really, really got legs. To mangle a metaphor or two, but hey, isn’t that what the Internet’s for?

*******

REALITY FICTION UPDATE!

And what is Reality Fiction, you may well ask?

Simple. The concept of the Reality Television Series translated to the printed page. 40 characters from my backlog of generally unpublished material are gathered together to compete in a different theme each Episode, with one or two characters being eliminated each sequence until there are only two left to fight it out in the final. The winner gets a short novel of their own as the grand prize.

But somehow, things always seem to go horribly wrong ...

What’s happening now? I posted Episode Fourteen: Flying yesterday. I’m really curious to see what the reaction -- if any -- will be to this one. While indubitably still Reality Fiction, the approach to the theme exemplifies better than perhaps any other Episode my approach to fantasy writing depicting a greater dream state made real. I keep thinking one certain story is going to make this thing explode. Or maybe I'm just dreaming, myself. Perhaps this will be the one ...?

Continues Friday at:  realficone.blogspot.ca

REALITY FICTION TOO!

EPISODES TO DATE

EPISODE THIRTEEN:     SLAPSTICK:     “The Phantom of the Werewolf”

EPISODE TWELVE:     DAIRY FARMING:     “Early One Morning”

EPISODE ELEVEN:     BURROUGHS:     “Chapter Nine”

EPISODE TEN:     WEREWOLVES:   “The Silver Solution”

EPISODE NINE:     WRESTLING:   “Suckerslam XIV”

EPISODE EIGHT:     JANE AUSTEN ROMANCE:   “The Proud and the Senseless”

EPISODE SEVEN:     THE JAZZ AGE:   “The Bucky-Dusky-Ruby Red Hop!”

EPISODE SIX:     SUBMISSION:   “Re-Org”

EPISODE FIVE:     MASQUERADE:   “The Eyes Behind the Mask”

EPISODE FOUR:     SELF HELP:   “Sausage Stew for the Slightly Overweight Presents:

Some Several Suggestions Guaranteeing Success for the Mildly Neurotic”

EPISODE THREE:     NUDIST:   “If You Have To Ask ...”

EPISODE TWO:     FRENCH BEDROOM FARCE:   “Un Nuit a Fifi’s!”

EPISODE ONE:          STEAMPUNK:   “The Chase of the Purple Squid!”

A J.H.B. Original!