Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Wellspring of Creativity

The Wellspring of Creativity

I have some good news for my army of readers. particularly those of you who suffer from the dreaded writer’s cramp. I am going to tell you how to come up with a great story line without the agony of pulling a thread from your almighty brain. The answer is…”Go back to the classics!”

I hear a woosh of disappointment. “Shucks! “I hear a voice mutter in the wilderness….Not another “Snow White” or the “Sound of Music.” Another voice cries out….”I don’t run retreads, Mr. Goodfellow…. I pride myself in a little imagination and creativity.“

“And so you should,” I think to myself with another “So you should.” I am not talking here about dusting off another old story line, I’m talking about checking out a well uncovered long ago and still full of water. “Huh?“ Let me explain.

Great writers when they get on a rip leave behind wells that are still full of water. Go back a couple of blogs to the one I wrote on Diagramming a story. Take that template and apply it to the best screenplay you ever saw or book you ever read. For heavens sake don’t use “Real Steel” use something different. But diagram it like I did Real Steel.

Step two. Now you remember how I am always harping on writers getting it wrong on central characters… Let me tell you, great writers throughout history and down to the present wrote some classic stuff but often missed the boat on who the central character should have been. I mean there were some characters that never got the role who should have. As you diagram your favorite piece of literature you will see who I am referring to and say to yourself, with a gasp… “Oh my Gawd! Percy’s right.“ If the story had been written through the eyes of Susie Spotless it would have been entirely different and Joe Bazats is a whole lot more interesting than BOZO the clown. Why don’t I write about this other character who never got a shot at the big time.

So that is a nugget I offer as a gift to all my friends who have endured my blogs and keep peering into a disjointed mind from underneath the carnival tent.

As a matter of fact I will take the secret even one step further. It doesn’t have to be a great historical or contemporary writer. One of my favorite writers here at WDC is AMAY. The reason I like her writing so much is that she does well what I am always striving to do. First she animates her writing with sensual prose….I have said before that I think our human sexuality is the engine of our creativity. Anyway AMAY writes wonderful stories and as appropriate goes boldly and walks with ease in areas where most have too much baggage to write comfortably about. As I was reading one of her stories recently I thought to myself, this sounds like a Janet Evanovitch, who isn’t riding the clutch with a heavy left foot. She uses the language that is appropriate and it doesn’t sound obscene.. It sounds absolutely in character with the people and the setting and the sensual prose is an accent and not the main course. This contest, Sensual Prose 2, is one of the best on the WDC site and is struggling to stay afloat.

Now we compete in this same contest and she always wins and the reason is because she deserves to. Anyway she wrote one piece about an editor of children’s books at a major publishing company who gets an assignment from her boss to try and rehabilitate the work of a mystery writer told to amp up his work a bit. The Publisher paid the writer a big advance on his next book. The writer in response bought a porn movie and used that as a model and as you might guess it simply didn’t work. So the heroine in this vignette had to step in and try and get things straightened out. Now this is where I thought about Janet E and her Stephanie Plum series. What if Stephanie had only written one serial of her best selling continuing saga. This is what I am getting at.

I told AMAY she had a dynamite story line in this germ of an idea. To take the Evanovitch model and run with her completely different take. That there was plenty of water left in the well of the story she unearthed and breathed life into. I doubt that she will take advantage of my advice but here is the point I am trying to make.

Writers die of thirst paddling around in a lake full of fresh water. Holed up in your cubicle, sitting down in the basement, writing in bed in the wee hours of the morning is not where you need to be coming up with a story line. As Victor Hugo so aptly put it…You have to keep the pitcher of your mind full of water… and the well from where your creative juices spring is in one sense inside your “…you know what?“ and in the other scattered about in the world around us. The thread or rope and bucket are inside and the well is in the back yard. If you are looking for where to find a great story… part is in the compulsion we have to make babies and part is in the world around us… in springs uncovered long ago which still await, in the undeveloped material of the greats and not so great. Don’t try and make writing such an intellectual exercise. Most great ideas are not buried in the caverns of your soul, …they are scattered about the sidewalks of your hopes, and dreams, driven by obscenity and wrapped in the written material you’ve been reading for a long time.