Image by ColiN00B via Pixabay
A few years ago, if you asked me if I consider myself a “creative type”, I would have said, “Not really.” It’s not that I don’t appreciate art (I do!) or that I don’t enjoy creating things, but I wasn’t driven to write like I am now. I would have ideas for novels here and there, but nothing like the flood of them I find myself with now.
How to be Creative
What changed? I started writing—almost every day. In the process of writing (and reading others’ works), ideas come to me without conscious effort. It’s such a strange feeling, but it’s not unique to me. Everyone has the potential to tap into this creative well, and this saying beautifully encapsulates the phenomenon:
Creativity is a muscle
If you generate creative works, your ability to produce future creative works improves. You’re forging neural pathways in your brain. It’s like any skill. Use it enough, and it becomes second nature.
The Seed
But how exactly does this process work? Every writer is different. All I can do is speak to my own experience. For me, I get a seed of an idea that I recognize as promising. I stash that idea away (usually in the form of the Notes app on my iPhone) and let it stew. Then anywhere from a few hours to months later, the basic premise of a story comes to me.
From there on out, it comes down to fleshing out the plot, characters, world-building, etc. I’ll talk about how I approach the actual writing and planning processes in a future post. For now, I’d like to illustrate how the germ of an idea turned into a novel that seeded twelve more novels (and two short stories).
Enter Nytho.
Brief History
Nytho is my prized child. It’s not the first novel I wrote or even the first I seriously queried, but I feel like I truly found my voice as an author when I wrote Nytho. It was the first time I got utterly sucked into my writing. Every night and every weekend was devoted to writing it. But let me back up and talk about where the seed of the idea for Nytho came from.
I was already querying my first “real” novel, delta t. I hadn’t had much luck getting representation with a literary agent, and my partner suggested I take a creative writing class. To be honest, I was pretty offended at first. He had been an English major, and so I interpreted his suggestion as him saying my writing wasn’t very good. To be fair, it was still a little rocky. Not awful, but it did need some work. In any case, after the initial blow to my ego faded, I realized that he had a solid point. I had never taken a creative writing class. My background is in the geosciences, so the only English courses I took in college were the required ones—English 101, 102, and an English literature class. If I wanted to up my game, I needed to learn the basics.
Fast forward a few months, and I was in an introductory creative writing class at the university I worked at. It was such a useful experience. I learned tons and definitely improved my writing. I went on to read Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway, which was immensely helpful.
The “Ah Ha” Moment
Going back to my creative writing class. We had a prompt for one of our assignments which was something along the lines of “write a prose piece from the perspective of an unreliable narrator.” Who doesn’t love unreliable narrators? I was stoked about the assignment. I remember sitting at my computer after class and staring at that prompt. I thought about the types of unreliable narrators I might make use of, and somehow Keza came to me.
I saw a younger woman who was a borderline fanatic. She was locked in a cell, somewhere between a prison and an insane asylum. She was talking directly to someone and recounting what led up to her getting imprisoned in the first place. The song We Appreciate Power (Grimes feat. HANA) came to me. It’s about a sect of pro-AI women who want an AI to be their overlord.
That was it. That was the short story right there. Keza fell in love with a rogue AI and tried to break him out of the digital prison she was tasked with maintaining.
I wrote the 17-page (double-spaced) story over two days. I posted it for my classmates to review. One of the other students said it sounded like the beginning of a larger story. He was spot on, because at that point, I had already envisioned that short story as only the first chapter in a full-fledged novel.
Fleshing it Out
I went on to plan the novel that became Nytho and finished the first draft of it in three months. I wrote it in what felt like a fever dream. It was wild. I won’t go into more detail on Nytho in this post and will instead close out with a hint.
I have big news about Nytho that I’ll be sharing soon!
My Advice
If you’re a writer looking for inspiration, my best advice is to write. Try creative writing prompts to get your juices flowing. Read. Listen to music (I can’t tell you how many ideas I get from music). Take in the work of other creatives because, yes, creativity is like a muscle, but it’s also infectious in all the best ways!
Have you ever had a spark of inspiration? Share the details in a comment.
Leave a Reply