Showing posts with label ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ideas. Show all posts

Friday, 31 July 2020

Unconscious Thought Theory as a Creativity Tool

(This is a near transcript of the workshop I ran at the 2020 World Science Fiction Convention, held virtually in Auckland, New Zealand.)

Hi, my name’s Luke Kendall. I’m writing a series of sci-fi/fantasy books about a lovable young female assassin. Thanks for choosing to attend this session, “Unconscious Thought Theory as a Creativity Tool”.

I’ve never run this workshop before: so, welcome to a world first!

I’ve laboured on this and I’m enthusiastic about the subject both because I know it works, and I know why – and also because it’s not just true, it’s based on a deep truth.

Because there’s a lot to get through I’ve practiced and rehearsed this, and ended up with a script to keep myself on-topic. So you won’t need to take notes because I’ll be posting the transcript on my website, A Toe in the Ocean of Books. It’s also being recorded, and I’ll share the presentation slides too.

Why Listen To Me?

Although I’m no expert on the Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT), I may be one of the few people with experience in consciously applying it to the writing process – until after today?

From 1991-2015 I worked for Canon’s Australian research centre. Around 2014, they paid for a full day workshop for thirty or so people on what UTT was and how it could be used in innovation.

In 2014 my wife of 30 years died. A few months later I was retrenched.

But thanks to a life-changing suggestion from an insightful career counsellor (Karen Tisdell), I decided to pursue my lifelong dream of becoming an author.

I had a 140k word MS I’d first drafted in 1993 and reworked off and on up until around 2005 when I just set it aside.

Mid 2015, following advice from my editor in Ireland (ThEditors.com) that I had 2-3 books crammed into this single MS, I had a big problem – after splitting it in two, I needed a new plot and climax for what had been the midpoint,

I found the solution by taking what I’d learned about UTT for innovation, and applying it to my creative writing.

How can Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) help in writing?

BTW: make sure you have a piece of paper and a pencil or pen to hand for a little later on…

In this workshop I’ll share what I know about using your unconscious mind for creative work – specifically, by applying the UnconsciousThought Theory. We’ll also try it out with a practical exercise.

So here I’ve listed some things I’ve found it useful for:

  1. Plotting

  2. Inventing stuff

  3. Restructuring a story

  4. Coming up with twists

  5. Solving continuity problems

  6. Fitting new elements into an existing story

  7. Overcoming some kinds of Writer’s Block

  8. Escaping corners you may have painted yourself into

What is UTT, and the science behind it

It’s a relatively new, and mildly controversial theory about unconscious thought processes, that’s grounded in science.

The handout has lots of links to papers and studies and talks – they’re not to look at now, they’re for the convenience of anyone who wants to dig a little deeper, later.

I summarise the theory this way: we have a rational, conscious part of the mind, and an unconscious part of the mind – and the two work very differently.

  1. The rational part is more logical, analytical, and sequential.

  2. The unconscious part is highly parallel, and great at finding patterns and making connections.

  3. We can consciously prod our unconscious into tackling problems for us, provided we distract our conscious mind in the right way at the right time.

Here’s a quote from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who wrote:

“One might almost believe that half of our thinking takes place unconsciously… I have familiarized myself with the factual data of a theoretical and practical problem; I do not think about it again, yet often a few days later the answer to the problem will come into my mind entirely from its own accord; the operation which has produced it, however, remains as much a mystery to me as that of an adding-machine: what has occurred is, again, unconscious rumination.”

A few references:

One of the first psychological experiments leading to UTT involved asking people to solve some real life problems like rating a set of apartments.

The experiment presented four apartments – one desirable, one undesirable, two neutral – and provided information like how big the apartment was, how old, whether it was close to public transport, hospitals, and so on… twelve aspects across four apartments, giving a total of 48 pieces of information to absorb.

Then they broke up the people in the study into three groups.

  1. One group was asked to work out the best apartment rationally, in three minutes;

  2. a second, to decide immediately.

  3. But the third group was distracted for three minutes then asked to decide.

They found that only the 3rd group performed significantly better at choosing the desirable apartment.

Functional MRI studies have shown that when your unconscious mind is at work on a problem, up to fifty areas of the brain go active. In contrast if you’re doing a logical task, there will be just one or two parts of the brain active.

The unconscious works in parallel, the conscious mind is serial, working on things one step at a time.

The unconscious can process, store, and link large amounts of information; the conscious comfortably remembers about seven things at a time. But the unconscious is very poor at working out logical stuff: it can’t do arithmetic, it doesn’t do if-then-else chains of reasoning. But it is great at finding patterns and weighing up fuzzy pros and cons.

Just don’t ask your unconscious mind to do your tax return for you.

The key idea of UTT is just this:

“Simply stated, people can either think about things or not.  UTT adds the idea that we [can] think unconsciously.”

Practical exercise (part 1 of 2)

Okay, with that basic information, and given this is a workshop, let’s try the technique ourselves right now. Grab that paper and pencil, and what I want you to do now is think about some problem that needs some creativity to solve.

  • Step 1: Write down, in bullet points, what you know about the problem
    • That consciously freshens up what you know about the problem
    • That information feeds into your unconscious and helps signal that it’s something requiring attention
  • Step 2: read over those notes
    • Add more points if they occur to you while doing this
  • Step 3: think about the problem any way you like (logically, idly, …) for just a little while
    • But if you do start thinking logically/analytically, be very wary of that; this is the phase we’re just collecting all the pieces.
  • Step 4: distract your conscious mind.
I’m going to keep waffling for a little, while write down the problem and its parts – not solve it. Just ignore me – turn me down somehow or take off your headphones for three minutes. I’ll wave when the time’s up.

When you jot down whatever you can about the problem, that includes things like all the conflicting goals you’re trying to achieve. I had a tricky plot point where I ended up listing six or more things I wanted to achieve, all at the same time. Write down the things you must have, and the things you must avoid. Or that you’d like to have, or avoid. Stuff that could be involved; including people.

What about the tone of the solution? Write down some possibilities. Dramatic? Touching? Sad? Happy? How much time might pass – minutes, days, years? What resources do the characters have available? Basically, write down anything you feel could be relevant. If you were alone and working on your own time, you might also consider whether you’ve already made notes of ideas to consider later, fragments of things that could be useful to you one day – in which case you could dig out those old notes and read them. Or do some searches for helpful information that might factor in.

Once you’ve written them all down, read them. You might think of extra details you want to factor in. You might have bits of inspiration already, ideas that feel like they might be pieces of the puzzle. Write them down.

Once you feel you’ve got everything kind of piled up and buzzing around in the back of your mind, you can think about them in any way you like – rationally or not – for a little while. But if you find you’ve started to think logically about the problem, be very wary of that. Unless your gut instincts are telling you you’re finally on the right track: if so, charge on ahead.

[Waves.]

At some point though, if you haven’t solved the problem, especially if you feel you’re going in circles, that’s the point to stop. So at that point we want to stop the logical part of your mind from trying to calculate the answer, and let your unconscious mind get to work on it. By now it knows you want a solution to this problem, but it doesn’t hurt to tell yourself that explicitly as well. Even write that down if you want. And then you distract your logical mind for a while so it can’t get in the way.

Right. So what we’ve just done is the first half of the practical part of this workshop. I’m not claiming you’ll definitely have an answer by the end of it – but you might! This will be our little experiment. I think this is being recorded, so if at any point you want to mute me or take off your headphones because you’ve just had an inspiration, then go ahead. You can replay the part you miss later, or skim the handout to get the gist of it and catch up.

So now I’ll distract your conscious mind by telling you…

How UTT worked out for my writing

So for my 1st book, the major feedback from my editor handed me a BIG plotting problem to solve. After going round and round in circles and getting nowhere, it occurred to me to take the theory I’d learned about for business innovation, and try it out for writing.

I did, and a few days later came up with a solution. Afterwards I realised, “Holy smoke, that worked!”

Later in that 1st book I had another smaller plot problem to solve, so I applied UTT again, and soon tweeted that I’d solved it with what I called a ‘horrifying teacher’ idea.

So the next time I needed a creative solution, I tried it again. Lo and behold, it worked again. I kept using it, and it kept working.

What I did discover was that depending on how tough the problem, the more time it took.

So, not knowing if the solution was there yet, I’d ‘check in’ by popping back to the problem and sit with pencil and paper and write down any fresh thoughts I had – more aspects of the problem to consider, or more ideas of things that might help, that might partly solve it. If my unconscious had the solution ready, I found that when I started writing, the solution would emerge, a sentence or a thought at a time, and I’d write that down, and then the next, and the next, until I had it all – or mostly – solved. At other times, nothing would come, and I’d realise it wasn’t ready yet.

Now, I think this approach keeps your unconscious working on the problem.

For me, using UTT often feels like working on a jigsaw puzzle – sometimes finding pieces, sometimes fitting a few pieces together.

Another of the nice things about UTT is it takes some of the self-critical pressure off you. Instead of thinking “I don’t have a solution; I’m stuck”, you can honestly tell yourself “I’m still working on it: don’t rush me! Good things take time.”

Suppose you’re writing about a character and they’re currently stranded in a desert. If you have negative thoughts, like “There’s no way she can survive in the desert without water!” either add that point to the list of things to factor in: “My character needs to find a way to survive in the desert” – or if that point’s already on your list, just say “Yep, so that’ll make a great surprise for the reader when she overcomes that!”

Do others use their unconscious for creativity?

You bet! I was listening to a Ted talk by Elizabeth Gilbert speaking about the pressures that creative careers place upon you: Your Elusive, Creative Genius. She said the notion that all creativity came from within the individual – and so the artist alone deserved both all the joy of success, or all the pain of failure – only arose in the last 500 years.

Before that, people felt the burden of both success and failure was a shared one. E.g. the ancient Romans believed in a ‘genius loci’, a spirit that lived literally in the walls of their home, and when propitiated helped the creator invent, among other things.

She interviewed the great American poet Ruth Stone 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, a great storm. And unless she could get inside and get to a pencil and paper, by the time this mighty storm train of a poem crashed through her she would lose it. So she’d run for the house: if she got there in time, she could capture the poem and copy it down; 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 spear it with her 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.

[As further evidence of UTT, thanks to a dream this morning, I worked out why it came out in reverse!]

Elizabeth also interviewed 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 knew he had to capture it at once or it would be lost. So all the usual stress and tension started building up. But instead of panicking he looked up into the sky and said out loud “Excuse me, do you not see 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.”

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. But remembering what Tom Waits had told her, she leaned back in her chair and said to an empty corner of the room: “Look, you and I both know 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 so many well known stories of writers and other artists literally dying: if not through conscious suicide, often through disabling addictions or disastrous life choices. And that by acknowledging a spiritual dimension to the process, that huge burden can be shared.

So just knowing your unconscious is able to help solve your problems, eases that burden.

It’s hard to avoid stumbling over evidence the unconscious mind is routinely used to solve creative problems.

  • James Watson dreamed of a spiral staircase as part of his and Francis Crick’s discovery of the double helix of DNA.

  • Neil Gaiman talks of his ‘compost heap’, which he fills with random facts and ideas, from which ideas flower.

  • Even our expression “I’ll sleep on it,” is an explicit recognition of the creative problem-solving abilities of our unconscious minds.

If you search the internet for how to come up with ideas for stories, you’ll often find suggestions like using the I-Ching, or tarot cards, which may be ways of tapping into a spiritual well of creativity. I basically agree, except I see that well as being inside us, and the springs that feed it are everything we experience.

I sometimes use a stirring piece of music to get into the right frame of mind to write a dramatic scene. Music is known to activate almost every part of the brain – quite like how the unconscious does. Interesting, eh?

UTT for Writer’s Block?

Writer’s block is a fuzzy sort of term, possibly unhelpful or damaging. Some say it’s not a thing in itself (a symptom not a cause), others disagree. But let’s set the term aside. If you suspect something is blocking your writing, put some conscious thought into that. There’s no reason you can’t tackle that itself with UTT!

Of course there are many, many things that can interfere with or stop you from writing, so how to get past the block probably depends on the cause. But I’ll mention a few I overcame with UTT.

For me, remembering the elements for a scene or story arc – characters, plots, resources, setting, tensions, and so on – takes mental effort. I found by writing that stuff down it removed that burden. On more than one occasion, I couldn’t progress because I was mentally juggling all these things and had no spare capacity to invent what I needed to move forward. So that’s one thing that can block me.

Writing it down also primes the unconscious, so it can start looking for patterns, making connections, and extrapolating from what’s there.

On other occasions I had my plans for what was going to come next, but somehow kept finding other things to do first. Sometimes they were real life issues I had to deal with as a priority – but not always.

But then, more than once, when I stopped and had time to let my mind wander, a great new idea emerged very quickly. So quickly, in fact, I suspect I’d felt distracted or demotivated because my unconscious had the idea waiting but I hadn’t given it the stillness it needed for the idea to surface consciously. On a couple of occasions, the new idea saved me from heading down a plot path that would have dead ended and needed to be thrown away.

(Sometimes of course it was a real life problem that needed to be dealt with.)

Practical Exercise (part 2 of 2)

I think it’s time to return to our workshop exercise. Go back to the problem you posed yourself. Now skim to the end, and over the next thirty seconds, start writing something relevant: ideally the solution. It might emerge as you start writing. But don’t start trying to reason out the answer, just start writing. I’d like you all to silence me for 40 or 50 seconds so I don’t distract you as I keep talking. Let’s see how we all do. I’ll keep talking to avoid dead air… (but it’s captured on the next slide, so you won’t really miss it).

I think the unconscious is often the source of lots of our ideas. The trick to using it is threefold:

  1. First, just knowing it exists and that you can use it to solve some kinds of problems;

  2. Second, feeding it enough raw materials, so there are bits and pieces for it to connect to solve the problem;

  3. Third piece, leaving a silent space for it to present its answer to you.

I’ve found the more I use it, the more I come to know the feeling when my unconscious has something ready for me. It’s by no means obvious. At least for me, it’s not a voice in my head that tells me the answer.

[Waves to try to attract attention.]

How did we all do, I wonder? I’d like to hope that many people cracked a knotty problem, or at least now see a path to the solution. If not, just keep checking back in every day or few, to see if your unconscious has cobbled together the patchwork genius idea you need. Feel free to leave a comment in the Chat, either way.

Luke’s Tips

So here’s my list of other things to do, to help you use UTT in your creative endeavours. They’re in no particular order.

Write stuff down. That’s a key point: don’t rely on your memory. If you don’t record the ideas, you’ll waste mental energy consciously remembering them or worrying about them. Also, once they’re written you can re-read them if you find yourself in a hole.

Clear the decks of clutter. For the intense parts of the creative thinking process – the parts where you make the act of creation your top priority and give yourself time exclusively for that – you need clear mental space. If you have other tricky problems you need to solve, either deal with them first, set them aside, or accept that you’ll take longer because your unconscious will be working on multiple problems at the same time.

Sometimes you can clear mental space for a problem, by writing it down just as a “to do” thing.

Don’t allow yourself to get daunted. The funny thing is, that although the number of pieces to a problem might look scary, each issue is just another piece of the puzzle. In a way, it adds to the richness of the solution; it adds to the stuff your unconscious can use to create an arrangement that makes them all fit, or at least blend.

Allow yourself time. Set aside distractions as far as you can and give yourself time. Do this as often as you need to, in each attempt to come up with the needed idea(s).

Try and try again. You don’t need to solve the problem in a single session. Sometimes the solution will turn out to be a jigsaw that needs to be assembled. Sooner or later though you’ll probably start sensing the big picture: and then it will start filling in quickly.

Trust your instincts. Your gut will often tell you “This idea feels right” – trust it. Think about the idea, and around it. ‘Your gut’ is your Unconscious talking to you. Don’t ignore it!

Missing Facts? It’s possible you’re blocked because you’re missing some pieces of the puzzle. E.g. in one instance I simply hadn’t imagined the physical layout fully, so I stalled when trying to write the action parts of the scene.

I’ve blogged about UTT and creativity several times, probably in too much detail. But that may be helpful for anyone who’d like to read more about applying the technique, and I captured just such an example here, which happened to me while writing book four in my series.

For authors and artists, everything you do, every movie you watch, every poem or piece of music that resonates with you, every person you meet, every pain you suffer or joy you feel, it all goes into the Aladdin’s treasure cave of your unconscious, where the alchemy of the most complex thing in the universe – the human brain – goes to work to transmute it into thoughts and ideas and works of creation.

We each carry around inside us a fount of creativity that we can tap into quite easily. It’s sensitive to our moods, it’s sensitive to and absorbs facts and impressions, sights and sounds and smells, from the world around us; it’s synthesising ideas and joining facts together, juggling things 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 goes to work trying to solve it.

Humans are imagination engines, naturally generating ideas like the sun generates light.

It’s what we do.

Thanks for listening to me, and I hope this little workshop will prove useful for you in the future.


Some further references

  • The article that kicked it all off (about 45 very readable pages): A Theory of Unconscious Thought

  • An overview of incubation (sleep, shower…) and its underlying causes: Creativity—the unconscious foundations of the incubation period
  • The nature of consciousness itself: Passive Frame Theory – suggests it’s a kind of spontaneous symphony bubbling up:
      “the information we perceive in our consciousness is not created by conscious processes, nor is it reacted to by conscious processes. Consciousness is the middle-man, and it doesn’t do as much work as you think.”
  • This study shows complex ideas can enter consciousness automatically.
  • Exploring the elusive gap between anecdotal and empirical support for UTT in creative problem solving: The Merits of Unconscious Thought in Creativity:

      “unconscious thought cannot ‘create’ knowledge; conscious learning and thought process are needed to establish a knowledge base.”

  • In case you’re wondering: the company that provided the innovation training was called Inventium. They have a few blog posts about UTT.

Post-workshop chat

I think dreams in which ghosts tell us things or do things that predict real-life experiences are your unconscious communicating to you that it’s been acting like a detective, and worked something out from subtle clues you had not consciously noticed.

I realised I conflated two separate Kate Bush songs when I was reaching for the Gurdjieff connection - it was “Rolling the Ball” where she mentions Gurdjieff as one of the “wonderful people [ready?] to teach me”.  The link from Cloudbusting to the strangely subversive Wilhelm Reich and his Orgone Energy was a complete furphy, sorry!

I think the purest experience of our unconscious mind is when we’re dreaming.  It’s why dreams can be so illogical: because the conscious, rational part of our mind is not participating (or minimally participating), because it’s asleep.

And the explanation for why Ruth Stone transcribed these poems backwards?

I think it’s simply because that’s how we can remember dreams. I think dreams are our unconscious telling us stories: which are largely the things it creates.

Usually the last part of a dream is the thing you remember - maybe the only thing.  But if you try to remember what led to that, how you got there, you can remember the previous scene in the story.  And from that one you can step back to the one before that, and so on.  So you recover the memory by working backwards, chasing the links from one piece of story to the one before, and that’s why her poems had to be remembered backwards.

Copyright © L. J. Kendall 2020. Permission granted to reproduce for free, provided this notice is included.

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Sunday, 5 April 2020

A Novel Ending

A Novel Ending

A funny thing happened on the way to the ending…

I’m loving my new being-an-author career, despite my inability to earn a living from it. (Yet?)

One of the things I enjoy is that each book feels like it comes with its own unique challenges.  I hope that means I’m learning as I go along.

For the current book in my Leeth Dossier series, Lost Girl (#5), there were two challenges.  The first was my feeling that on the subject of plot, I fly too much by the seat of my pants, so the whole journey from start to end is like a billy-cart racing downhill out of control.  Exhilarating, but also nerve-wracking.

Looking back through my revision control files, I deduce I started writing the Lost Girl segment of the story back in Apr/May 2009.  I wrote a chunk more in Jan 2015 before posting the chapters for review on the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror over a few months and receiving valuable feedback.  By Oct 2015 it had grown to about 25,000 words.  I think that was when I set it aside to devote all my energy to completing the earlier books in the series.

That took five years.

So, for book #5 I was starting with a broad idea of the story, 25,000 words of draft, and thanks to a discussion with Jon Marshall one night, a good feeling for the theme of the novel.  I also wanted to try a hybrid approach to plotting.

Pantser or Plotter?

I love the organic surprises and creativity that comes from flying by the seat of my pants, but at the same time, having watched his video Misconceptions About Rewriting, and from my own experience in algorithmic development, I deeply understood the value in at least high-level planning.  So I hoped that creating the bones of a plot might work well, since it would only be a sketchy outline and thus pretty painless to change it if the story started going in a different direction.

I started reading John Truby’s “The Anatomy of Story” in early 2019, reaching a quarter of the way through before getting distracted. (I see there’s also a video interview here.)  The book and advice is fine, but it wasn’t sparking any flames for me and I set it aside.  (I do intend to return to it and finish reading it though.)

I’d downloaded a free writing book from Daniel David Wallace titled “How to Write Better Sentences”, and watched some of his videos, and liked them, so when he offered a course on his character-driven plotting course in December 2019 I decided to sign up for it.  I did that diligently from mid Dec 2019 to end of Jan 2020, and was very happy with the outcome.  I had lots of ideas for how the plot would unfold, all of course driven by the characters, which is how I have to write.

The problem that remained was that I only had a satisfying end.  I think you also need the ending to be unpredictable.  I (still) don’t know how you plan that.  For me it’s just happened by luck or inspiration, and I was still in the same position, lacking that final piece of the puzzle.

As I’ve written on several occasions now, I’ve really come to trust Unconscious Thought Theory.  It’s an excellent way to use the full power of your mind and surprise yourself.  So I carried on writing, always with the lightly-plotted ending in mind, and things flowed along pretty well.

Now, because the World Science Fiction Convention was to be held in New Zealand in July/Aug 2020, a place I’d wanted to visit and a convention that seems exciting, I planned to attend.  I booked my travel and accommodation, with the goal of publishing the book late July and maybe even launching it or promoting it in some way at the WorldCon.  To do that I needed to send the MS to Dave at ThEditors.com by E/April.

So I was trying hard to meet a deadline of E/March to have a good 1st draft of the MS.  I was extremely lucky to be little affected by the unprecedented Australian bushfires of 2019, but no one could remain unmoved by those events - from the heroism of our fireys and communities ( (even this Aussie speculative fiction anthology put together for fire charities: Stories of Hope), to the jaw-dropping failures of our so-called political leader to actually lead.

There was also the ongoing drama of the Democratic run-up toward the 2020 US presidential election, which I had grown addicted to (since the US has an inordinate impact on world affairs, and I could see what a turning point the 2020 election could be, with luck).  Then of course, the global pandemic of Covid-19 arrived, making the insignificance of my own efforts even clearer.  Now, I may not be as stubborn as Leeth, but I am stubborn, so I carried on.

Like the period after the death of my wife Stella in Dec 2014, my writing sustained me and kept me positive. So for that reason as much as any I stuck to my plans.

Which brings me to the part of the story which most surprised me — and in the end delighted me.

How did it go in the end?

Approaching my deadline, I had set myself a (120,000) word count limit to try to hold myself to, to keep the book a manageable size for all concerned.  And as the days fell away and March 31 approached, it looked like I might just do it.  But when the days dropped from three to two to one and I arrived at the cusp of the ending, I’d run out of time and still didn’t know fully what the ending would be.

Partly this was just having confidence in my unconscious to pull a rabbit out of the hat; partly it was the belief that if I didn’t know what the ending would be, it might mean that when (if?) it did arrive it would also surprise a reader; and partly it was having faith in my characters.  I also had an interesting mix of actors there at the ending.  There was the potential to have… (counting…) seven major players in the scene at the end.  Unfortunately that meant there was a huge range of ways the ending could play out.

So I think there was a certain amount of choice-paralysis at work, although it’s also possible my unconscious was simply beavering away at the complex problem I’d set it.  Of course I was also worried I might not be able to pull it off at all.  Would the ending be good enough?  I didn’t want just an exciting one, I wanted it to have emotional depth too.  So the stakes felt high to me.

And still I couldn’t seem to make much progress.  Here’s how the last several days went:

March 29: Had reached the climactic scene — I mean, all the players were on stage together.
March 30: Wrote 3700 words of the scene.
March 31: Day off, visiting Mum.
April 1: (astute readers will see this is after E/Mar) Strangely blocked, until I forced myself to design the physical location. Then: +600 words.
April 2: Wrote 3,600 words and halfway through the “action” part of the ending.
April 3: Finished the “action” part (wrote 1000 words).
April 4: Still didn’t know how it would end. I simply considered each actor and let them do their thing. Various agendas in play, conflicting, and stage fully set and conducive to just letting the movie roll. Each one being clever and true to themselves, a dramatic race to the finish with real challenges and emotional drama. At the very end of the day (11:50pm), I felt delighted. My characters had thrilled me and moved me. I’d been biting my nails more than once, and in tears more than once. 5,100 words and the MS was basically complete.

I’ve never experienced anything like that last day.  My feeling was one of excitement and satisfaction.  I made some small additions while cooking dinner (9pm), and when I sat down with it I realised I didn’t want to watch any TV as I ate, I instead wanted to dwell on those final scenes, to savour and digest it all.  I suppose it felt a bit like I’d just stepped off an emotional roller-coaster!

I still have thirty one small gaps to fill or issues to check, and then lots of work to polish it up enough to be ready to send to my editor, so I can’t really relax much yet.  But the weight on my shoulders of finishing that critical 1st draft, and perhaps as importantly, writing a ‘good’ ending, is over.  So a lot of unacknowledged stress has fallen away, and I must say I’m looking forward to the next few weeks.

I’ve written this because the experience felt really special, and I wanted to capture it. It was nothing like I’d had for the previous books.  Once again, I feel I learned a lot.  My fingers are crossed in the hope that readers will have the same opinion!


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Friday, 3 August 2018

Writing, Editing, Creating

I wasn't planning to write a blog article, but felt after yesterday I wanted to make some notes while the recent events were fresh in my mind. I'm not sure what this piece will be about, but I guess it's going to touch on creativity (also see The Creative Process and the Unconscious, Where Ideas Come From) and An update on Creativity and the Unconscious), blocks, editing, and book 4 progress.

Yesterday was one of those wonderful writing days that sometimes happen, so this is partly about what led up to that.

I haven't written any articles for a while because I feel I'm way behind schedule on where I wanted to be for this fourth book. I had felt pretty comfortable that I could have it ready about mid-2018, but that turned out to be wildly optimistic. I'll lay out the reasons why, and let you see what you think of them.

I think I started writing the MS in 1991, and completed that 1st draft near the end of 1993. I just realised that might be a fun image to share… here's a photo of the MS.

I used mostly used sheets of paper that had been printed. In fact, on the left you can find a draft of a page from my wife Stella's PhD thesis on the Percy Folio.

In my first draft of the start of Leeth's story, it opened on the scene where Dr Harmon is in the office of the Mother Superior of the orphanage, looking for a suitable subject to adopt.

Anyway, the MS went through many stages — the next one being typing it up on the computer, in the troff/MM markup. I worked on it and polished and edited it, sending it off to little or no response to publishers, and then about ten years later realised the whole second half was full of story — but no plot. So I bit the bullet and cut it in half. Then it seemed a little short, and I still felt it was lacking something. The Godsson-Disten idea came from somewhere to fill the gap, and I developed that and wove it in to the story. At the end, the MS was back to its original, pre-halved size.

I still kept editing and polishing, improving my craft. I fed that whole MS, chapter by chapter, through the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, and learned so much from the many very helpful reviews I received, and equally, from writing reviews of other writers' submissions there.

Learning your craft by writing a long novel is a hard way to do it — you need to fix stylistic errors through a much larger mass than a short story — but I rarely enjoy reading or writing short fiction. So I kept at it.

The point of this historical digression is to explain the first couple of special problems I faced with book 4. The first was that I hadn't touched (even read) this half of the original MS in about 15 years, so there was a reasonable amount of work just to apply what I'd learned in the meantime. A bigger problem was the lack of plot. Now, the large anti-emotion plot arc definitely helped, and tied nicely into what was already there — but even so, it needed more. There was also the fear that maybe the old MS simply might not be good enough? I had little idea what to expect when I sat down to read it again, but found myself pleasantly surprised: it was kind of nice, I felt. Leeth had grown and changed more, however, thanks to all the additional trials I'd put her through while developing the 1st three books, so stretches had to be rewritten: what was there was more the Leeth you saw straight out of the Institute: no d'Artelle spirit confrontation, nothing with Disten, and, a really huge difference — no Marcie in her life.

Due to the need to write a short piece for my local writers' group, the Marrickville Writers Corner, I thought that one incident briefly passed over in the MS deserved some expansion: the heartbreaking Luiz assassination. And while writing that piece, while Leeth crept through the dark apartment in shock at what had just happened, she heard a creepy scratching coming from a drawer in Luiz's desk. I had no idea what was coming, just that it connected to Luiz's nasty past, but that led to the black dagger. That tiny seed germinated into the other major plot element for book 4.

The title came surprisingly easily: Violent Causes having several meanings, all of which were applicable for this book, so that was one element that I didn't have a big struggle with. But with all the things that needed addressing, and my desire to keep as much as I could of what was there, somehow even getting to the stage of the MS ready to send off to Dave at ThEditors.com) seemed harder. I'd arranged a slot, and as the deadline approached I found I was struggling to meet it. In the end I sent it off before I'd done my usual 2nd polish, which was stupid. I'd told myself it would make it easier for me to cut things if I hadn't made over-polished them. Instead, it just made more work for poor Dave.

And when I received his detailed critique, he had some big issues with some of the early sections, and lots of the early chapters had a lot of small issues, too. (Oops: note to self: never skip the polishing!) After some very fruitful discussions back and forth, we got a handle on them and a plan for what I should adjust, and I carried on. And after a month of hard work, I was halfway through Dave's comments, and it was the end of July. Sigh.

The Marcie Problem

There was also one major extra piece of plot to work in, involving Marcie, and a key point in that was to be Marcie's inclusion into one scene. The problem was, that scene was kind of tightly scripted, dramatic, and I could see no way to work Marcie in without disrupting a sequence I'd been looking forward to making concrete, for at least fifteen years. In fact, I let this scene block my writing for at least a year, because I wanted to work it out so I could move on to the next piece of the story. This was long before I understood the role of the unconscious, and the simple trick of just writing it down, or skipping past the block. Instead, I'd sit down, and try to work out the scene in my head… and eventually fall asleep, and have used up all the time I'd set aside for writing, with visible results of zero.

Yet here I was, in 2018, with that scene looking and working like a dream — I think it would make a great piece in a movie — and now I needed to add Marcie, in a significant way. So I worked my way closer to this with, not exactly a growing fear, since I had confidence in UTT and my unconscious… but some trepidation, let's say.

And then on Monday I was at the brink: the next thing to do was what I had begun thinking of as The Marcie Problem. Tuesday I visited Mum, and saw the Equalizer 2 with her and a friend (hi Jacqui!), and then had afternoon tea and dinner with Mum, and watched an episode of The Avengers (courtesy of my brother Jonathan: B&W, John Steed and Honor Blackman as Dr Cathy King, not the Marvel Avengers), followed by the Hammer Horror film The Hound of the Baskervilles with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. (He seemed tall. I looked him up: he was: 1.96m, 6'5"!)

So, no writing on Tuesday. A whole day with ‘no progress'. But I wasn't too worried, since panic and fear are your enemies and I knew I was just giving my unconscious more time to come up with something good. And it's always a great day, visiting Mum; not to mention, relaxing and having a great meal to boot!

So, Wednesday arrives, and still no breakthrough. I could also tell I wasn't going to get it without a bit more positive action. And now we come to the nub of this article, and what drove me to write it. Because this time, I was more sensitive to what was going on in my own mind.

I remembered my own advice, of using pencil and paper to write stuff down so you're not wasting mental energy juggling ideas in your mind while trying to create new ones. So I took my little hand-made A6-sized notepad with its 4-leaf folded ‘pages' clipped to it, and my trusty propelling pencil. There are some nuances there: that style of pencil, using 2B leads, means your letters are crisp and sharp and the physical act is effortless; and the hand-sized pad means it's not flexing and flopping and you're fighting to support it. It just fits in your hand, you can lie back on the sofa, comfy and warm, and think, and write as ideas spring to mind.

All trying to make it as frictionless as possible when the ideas start flowing, you see?

But I still didn't have my idea. What I did have was some issues. So I started writing down stuff, and also thinking. Not rushing myself. Not stressing myself because I wasn't actually writing the story. Just trying to make the solution coalesce out of whatever soup of ideas was floating around in my head.

What started happening was somehow like doing a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces of the picture didn't exist until I thought of them, and it wasn't two dimensional but three. The depth part is not especially important, but the time dimension was critical. I started with asking "How would Marcie plausibly end up in this scene?"

(By the way, I'm going to avoid talking about this in a way that gives any spoilers.)

Marcie's appearance needed to fit in with a major plot strand we'd agreed on, that involved Harmon. But how would he know? So, that meant Nelson gave him the info. And then Harmon needed to persuade someone else. And that was kind of interesting. And then Marcie herself needed to find out enough to wind up in the scene. So I wrote that little sequence, which worked very plausibly and nicely I felt, and did good things for the plot, tension, and pacing. I now had the background of my jigsaw, in the sense of both the chain of events that led up to it, and of course I already had the tightly-written scene where Marcie would appear.

Her appearance also had to be significant: it'd be pretty weak if she just waved from the sidelines. Dave had suggested Marcie's appearance should cause problems for Leeth, so that was kind of the ‘shape' of one piece. But I still didn't see how to fit her in.

Now, I'd had one thought, too, that disturbed me: "if Marcie is here, and X is here too, then Scary-Y could easily result, and blow everything to pieces." But at the same time, they say you're supposed to place your characters at risk. Yikes! So that was percolating in the back of my mind.

1st Wednesday of the month was my MWC meetup, so I gave a quick polish to a scene I'd written the week before, and headed off for a very convivial and inspiring evening at Where's Nick. But I still didn't have the Marcie Problem solved.

Thursday arrived, and I kept feeling, for some reason, that Marcie wasn't going to go alone into this scene. I kept imagining someone with her. Which just complicated things, I felt, and I didn't want to do it. But in the end, since I was just lying on the sofa and not exactly making massive progress, I shrugged and decided to explore that. I asked myself "How does Marcie go from where she is, to here?" and just started imagining and jotting down some points. That all seemed pretty natural, and that would put Marcie at the required place, with this other person. And their reaction to my smoothly-scripted scene would definitely fit into new-Harmon-plot-item-Z, and advance that.

Then Scary-Y idea popped back in my head.

And I suddenly saw that Scary-Y could easily unfold after the smoothly-scripted scene. And with that, the problem was solved. The solution wasn't to force Marcie and her scene to meld into the existing scene: it was to let that follow on and develop from the scene!

This definitely felt a Eureka moment.

So then I just let the characters do their stuff. All the different parties with their own agendas, colliding and reacting. Let me just have a count ([Spoilers stripped out]): total of 9 parties. And so events flowed, and the drama climbed, and Leeth pushed back, and things started spiralling into dangerous areas. Maybe half of it was just in my head, the other half the occasional explanatory note written down so I wouldn't forget, or a line or two of dialogue. My notes occupied less than two A6 pages of my tiny writing, but I had enough to set off and I was eager to do so. I broke for dinner, but basically wrote from 4pm till 1am, a bit over 4k words. Sitting back, I summarised it in the flush of excitement as "very plausible, didn't change the existing scene much at all, upped the tension, fulfilled more expectations, causes more troubles down the track, and also has some laughs and more character development, all while advancing the plot!"

And it was time for bed. Looking at the page, I saw that I just needed to write the emotional aftermath, and in due course explore the repercussions of what happened. "I'll just write a little bit, to start that," I thought. Then sat back and saw it was 2am. I'd summarise that effort as taking what had happened to a whole new level. Leeth once again surprised me; but this time, herself, too, and even scared herself.

So I ended the day feeling high, extremely pleased with how it all worked out, and of course relieved to have the Marcie Problem solved and the pressure/stress removed.

I won't have a chance to do any editing or writing today, and I'll be taking a day off tomorrow, so no progress then, either. And I still have the other half of the MS critique to work through. But I'm feeling much more relaxed now. Hopefully, there should only be small bumps in the road ahead.

So, what's next? I hope to have my editing and polishing done by around the end of August. Hopefully I'll find a slot in Dave's schedule for a 2nd round critique, and then with any luck a much easier job for both him and myself following that. Mirella is on the job with the cover design (again, with another idea mainly from Dave), and then I need to try to do some proper marketing for a month or two before releasing this one. So my guess is it will be ready near the end of the year.

Better late than half-baked.

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Tuesday, 27 February 2018

An update on Creativity and the Unconscious

Why have I written this article now? Well, I've been reading and reviewing and doing small fixes to the half of the Leeth Dossier MS I'd set aside in… (goes away and checks some file dates…) yikes: it may have been 2008, 2004, or even 2003!

Anyway, back then, whenever it was, I'd just re-read a print out of the whole MS and been horrified to realise the whole 2nd half had plenty of story and action — but no plot!

So I cut it in half; then realised the 1st half was now a bit short and could also do with some strengthening, and came up with the Godsson/Disten plot. From that point I left the 2nd half lying there, collecting electronic dust.

Anyway, with Books 1 — 3 published, it seemed sensible to go back to the half of the original MS I'd set aside, that followed straight on. So in October 2017 I think, I brushed off the dusty electrons and poured the MS into the word processor and started reading and reviewing. It went very slowly for a while, as I carefully polished as I went, before I realised that was silly: if I did decide I had to throw away some or all of it, such loving attention and effort would only make it harder for me to ‘kill my darlings'.

Excuses, excuses. So I just corrected minor stuff and made notes about issues that would require more effort to deal with. What with suddenly needing to prepare for Christmas — not to mention a years-overdue de-cluttering of my house — as well as allowing myself a holiday and time to spend on some other non-writing projects, progress was slow. I eventually finished my read-through on Feb 21st, 2018.

At the end, I realised my assessment from 10-15 years earlier had been correct. On top of that I found other structural flaws, all of which I felt might be corrected through ‘the right' plot adjustments. I mean, the 1st three books did lead smoothly to #4 (in particular by continuing a major plot arc from them), but overall I felt the plot was weak, with several strands that felt disconnected. It also had pacing problems too, I thought.

Overall though I still liked it, and despite the flaws, felt this could be knocked into a pretty nice shape. In particular, my gut was telling me that the right modifications to the plot would fix most of the issues I saw.

UTT to the rescue. So, with the need for some creative thinking, and having had good success with the Unconscious Thought Theory in the past (see my older blog article: Where Ideas Come From), I turned to it again.

For the UTT, the first step is to steep your rational mind in all the facts. That was what I'd just accomplished by re-reading the old MS.

But the subconscious is hungry for relevant ideas, so as different thoughts about the story and plot occurred to me — during the embarrassingly long period I spent re-reading the MS — I'd made notes I could refer to later.

Write stuff down. That's a key point: don't rely on your memory. If you don't record the ideas, you'll waste mental energy remembering them or worrying about them. Just write them down instead so you can re-read them when you find yourself in a hole.

Clear the decks of clutter. For the intense parts of the creative thinking process — the parts where you make the act of creation your top priority and give yourself time exclusively for that — you need clear mental space for a problem requiring a creative solution.

So because you need to some clear mental space, write down the problem and all the issues you can think of: like constraints, goals, characters involved, what's at stake… etc. etc. — everything you need to take into account. If you think of more problems, simply note them down as you think of them. These are all grist for your unconscious mill.

Don't get daunted. The funny thing is, that although the number of problems might look scary, each issue is just another piece of the puzzle. In a way, it adds to the richness of the solution; it adds to the stuff your unconscious can use to create an arrangement that makes them all fit.

Give yourself space. Get rid of distractions as far as you can: set them aside and give yourself time. Do this as often as you need to, in each attempt to solve the problem or come up with the needed idea(s). In other words: you can solve these problems a little bit at a time.

Try and try again. You don't need to solve the problem in a single session: you can decide, "Hmm, this might help", or "That might be part of the answer" — so, note those ideas down, too. Sometimes the solution will turn out to be a jigsaw that needs to be assembled. Sooner or later though you'll probably start sensing the big picture: and then the pieces of the jigsaw will start appearing in short order.

Trust your gut. Your gut will often tell you "This idea feels right" — trust it. Think about it, and around it. ‘Your gut' is your Unconscious talking to you. Don't ignore it!

Don't doubt yourself. At this stage, where you're not sure how much of the MS should remain for the final book (since it depends on how big a plot change or other correction is), it can be scary. You could easily spend time thinking about worst case scenarios — like tossing the whole MS! — instead of trusting your gut instincts and the hard work you put in.

Focus on what needs to be cut or added to turn your rough diamond into a fascinating piece of jewellery. At this point, negative thoughts are just distractions. So treat them like everything else: boil them down to their essence and add them to the list of Problems To Be Solved by your creative thinking.

Recording ideas and thinking. For me in this process of creation, some of the time I'll do parts of it on the computer. I'll type up notes, grouping related ideas near each other so I'll tend to reread them all when I revisit one; I'll draw up little timelines (maybe with gaps and question marks: "How does the Department discover this?" or "How do the bad guys learn that?"); I'll sometimes make mindmaps so the connections are graphical and not just linear/textual — and I'll include the holes and question marks, and maybe even colour-code stuff.

But some of the thinking I'll do on paper with pencil, lying down on the sofa. Because for some of it, the computer becomes a distraction. But the pencil and paper is important, because as soon as I have even part of an idea, I can write it down to free up my attention from remembering stuff so I can concentrate on creating stuff.

My review/read-through: While I had been (too slowly!) doing my read-through/review, I'd been:

  • Making notes of ideas that might help;
  • For my local writers' group (the Marrickville Writers' Corner — hi everyone!) I'd also written a few pieces that I felt might fit into Book 4 (Violent Causes), or might just be background events not to be included;
  • Making notes of problems;
  • Forming my overall semi-objective assessment of the MS as a whole.

So I used all these things, plus I re-read my quite large file of random ideas and notes, and the fresh ideas I'd had over the last few months. Lo and behold: a couple of months earlier I'd had a key idea which fitted very well with what I needed! It still wasn't quite right, but it felt like it could form the backbone of the plot strengthening, and so it was back to the Unconscious Thought Theory.

There you have it. With all that fresh in my mind, I thought I'd capture some of the process and get off my backside and write this combined UTT update and status report.

Ah… I suppose that means I should probably write a little status report, shouldn't I? Well, the MS now has 90k words, which at this stage I think I'll be keeping. I'm not sure how many extra scenes I need, or how much editing is needed to fix the other issues I've identified, but my feeling is that it might need as little as 10k words of new scenes (maybe 20k?). So I think it won't be too much longer before I can start trying to book an editing time-slot with Dave at ThEditors.com! I should know in a week or two.

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