Warning: This post is likely to be very meta (err, and somewhat crude as it turns out). I will be writing about what I’m writing as I write it. Or, in other words, I will be doing the written equivalent of an advanced driving test, where I’ll be explained what I’m doing, as I do it, so as to illustrate the thought processes that go behind each decision. This may mean I end up doing the equivalent of running over two puppies, three nuns and a hospital radio disc jockey, before crashing into an orphanage and causing it to burn to the ground, all because I’m too busy talking instead of driving, but Hagelrat has insurance and I’m sure that’ll cover any damages.
This week’s post is on creativity. I asked for suggestions for opening and closing lines to a story and Hagelrat has picked out the following:
“Hold my beer and watch this.”
And:
“It was meant to do that.”
My plan for the rest of this post is simply to plot out a story that fills the gap in between those two lines, explaining what I’m doing as I go, and also to explain why Deep Blue really is a dumbass. Beyond that, I have no clue what’s going to happen, so bear with me, because it’s entirely possible garbage will follow.
The idea behind the opening and closing lines arises from [goes to fetch Edward De Bono book on lateral thinking… fails to find it, comes back] the notion that the brain is a pattern-matching machine. In the grand chaos of life, if we recognise elements of a pattern we’ve experienced before, we can make a guess about what will happen next. Thus, the chaos is given meaning.
Unfortunately, we’re so primed toward seeing meaning in this way, we can conjure up patterns where none exist.
Fortunately, we’re so primed toward seeing meaning in this way, we can conjure up patterns where none exist. In this case, dreaming up a connection between “Hold my beer and watch this” and “It was meant to do that”.
You can try this for yourself by picking two random words from the dictionary. You will always be able to find some way of connecting the two, even if that connection is long-winded and tenuous, or brilliantly surreal.
But let’s start at the beginning.
“Hold my beer and watch this.”
Okay, so the obvious scenario this plays into is a pissing competition between a bunch of blokes. But maybe they’re not pissing up a wall, they’re pissing off a roof, onto the heads of passers-by. Or maybe the guy saying “watch this” has just been fitted with a brand new cybernetic penis that can expel urine at great speed over distances up to three miles. Or maybe it’s not a guy – it’s a girl who’s spent all her life trying to compete with the boys and now she’s got the cybernetic penis and finally she’s going to win this contest hands down.
That was pretty simple association. Start with a fairly obvious concept and then keep twisting elements of that premise into new shapes. The objective here is simply to come up with lots of ideas. Worry about which are good later. However, what’s always telling when you undertake this exercise is that the further you take things, the most interesting the ideas you get. Most stories you’ll come across are the result of a writer going:
Wouldn’t it be cool if I did this?
A smaller proportion has the writer then going:
But what if I did it like this instead?
Fewer still ask that question a third time, or a fourth, or a fifth…
Of course, asking more questions takes more time. It takes more effort. It’s why so many stories have obvious plots and obvious characters and rely on cliché and stereotype.
“Hold my beer and watch this.”
We’re in a foreign land. A beer here is a kind of small, legless sheep, bred in a battery farm and force-fed nutrients to ensure its golden fleece grows lustrous and thick. However, this one is the pet of a rich socialite and has just been placed in the arms of her new manservant, Hugo. The ‘this’ he’s been told to watch is the socialite’s son, while said socialite minces off into a boutique to have her eyeballs botoxed.
Hmm, that’s a bit strained, but a fair attempt to veer far away from the obvious interpretation of the opening line. It would also suffer from requiring a dose of exposition up front – why a beer is not a beer. The strength of this opening line is that it should allow you to go straight into a dramatic scene with the reader already keen to know what the ‘this’ will be. That impetus is lost if ‘this’ turns out to be a person, rather than an action.
So, for the sake of keeping this article from exploring possibilities forever, let’s go back to that earlier idea:
“Hold my beer and watch this,” said Annabelle.
Tony dumbly obliged, too busy watching to see who of Gavin, MacCauley and the Fredster could piss highest up the wall round the back of the Wetherby Arms pub. They did this every Friday night and every Friday night Annabelle was left the butt of the joke; whoever came last claiming that at least they did better than she could ever do.
“Christ, Anna, what are you doing?” asked Tony on seeing her start to unbuckle her belt.
She just grinned as she reached a hand into her knickers...
Once again, we have options. The obvious option is to go with the guys expressing shock, disbelief and embarrassment, but we can also step beyond the obvious to something a little more interesting.
… and drew out a gleaming cybernetic penis.
“Err, guys...,” said Tony, drawing the attention of the other three, who had been arguing about whether that line of mortar was straight in relation to the ground and providing a fair measure of whether MacCauley beat the Fredster or not.
“Blimey,” said Gavin, staring at Annabelle’s appendage.
“Wow,” said MacCauley.
“Is that a Ronson Cyber-Prick 500?” asked the Fredster.
“Sure is,” said Annabelle.
“Self-lubricating shaft?” queried Gavin.
“Yep.”
“They didn’t have that on the 400,” said MacCauley.
“Yeah, could have gone with the 400,” said Annabelle, “but I thought it’d be worth paying that bit extra for the newer model.”
“Good job too,” said Tony, “the 400 was infamous for rusting up at inopportune moments.”
“Did you get it with the vibrating option?” asked the Fredster.
“I did,” replied Annabelle, “but I tried it and after five minutes I was knackered. The salesman said you’ve really got to eat like fifteen Mars Bars beforehand or the drain it puts on your blood sugar levels just knocks you flat afterwards.”
“Ah, that’ll be why they don’t let diabetics buy these things.”
An audience will never complain about you confounding their expectations provided the decisions you make fit within the context of the story. Most of the time the audience will actively appreciate the fact you put effort into coming up with something they haven’t already second-guessed. And most people are smart. They will guess the obvious and often the next-to-obvious. You have to work hard to be creative.
As I’ve still got to explain why Deep Blue is a dumb-ass, let's cut to the end. We’ve got the opening to our short story and we have our closing line:
“It was meant to do that.”
Our options have narrowed now if we want to hook things up to that ending. It has to involve the cybernetic penis and it probably has to involve it doing something bizarre or unexpected and Annabelle pretending it meant to do that.
Okay, so she’s going to try pissing up the wall. What if the vibrating function switches on by accident and she ends up flukily painting the Mona Lisa in piss across the wall? What if the penis launches free of her crotch and downs a passing passenger plane? What if the cybernetic implant expels urine with such force that it blows out the bricks in the back of the pub and leaves the quartet standing with cocks exposed in front of the people inside?
I’ll let you decide which to go with or whether another idea would work better.
It’s an alluring fallacy that creativity is some mystical force that arrives only on the back of unpredictable inspiration, but inspiration is simply the mind having a melting pot of story ideas whirring around, into which something new drops – an incident seen on the street, a piece of dialogue heard on a TV show, a random thought gleaned from watching paint dry – that allows our pattern-matching machine to make a new connection, joining the dots in our story where previously there was a gap.
But you don’t have to wait for inspiration. There are tricks and tactics for generating new ideas and these can be learnt and practised. When a story’s not working, you can wait for inspiration or you can apply brute force thinking: what if I do this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this… over and over until you make that breakthrough.
But don’t for one second think it’s easy.
Chess is generally considered a fair test of brainpower. There is little that is artistic about it. It involves studying the positions of up to 32 pieces on a board and considering the consequences that arise from moving each piece. If I move this pawn, what moves can my opponent make in reply? For each move he makes, what moves can I counter with? How will he counter those?
The greater the grandmaster, the further they can think ahead; the more possibilities they can analyse. To aid them in this task, they will learn patterns – strategies that others before them have used, so they can shortcut the calculations behind the move of that pawn and recognise it instead as the second step of ‘Bobobobski’s Opening Gambit’, which usually leads to checkmate thirty-eight moves later, unless blocked by ‘Jefferogersky’s Bloody-Minded Ploy Number Seven’.
But, when it comes right down do it, it’s only chess. It’s those 32 predictable pieces on a 8 x 8 board against one opponent, with the number of legal positions roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (give or take a few zeroes).
I haven’t counted up the characters in other people’s books, but I know the last one I finished featured over 100. Some were naturally more prominent than others, but each of them had to be distinct, with their own behaviours and attitudes. When something happened in the story, I had to plot how each of them would react and what the consequences of those reactions would be, how those reactions would interact with each other and thus affect the next event in the story.
Then there were the action scenes, which not only had to consider character motivations but also physical space, dramatic imperative, cause and effect. If my hero runs this way instead of that way to escape that shotgun wielding farmer, where will it lead him? What possibilities will that open up or close off?
And this book of mine was set in the contemporary world. I didn’t have to make up whole new worlds. I didn’t have to establish new laws of physics or reality. I left that for the one I’m writing now.
Anyone can become a chess grandmaster with sufficient time and practice (probably 10,000 hours according to the best guess of relevant research). If you manage it, you will probably be considered right brainy and to have poor social skills.
You can become a good writer too with sufficient time and practice. If you manage it, you will probably be considered mentally unstable and to have poor social skills, but the key difference is that creative storytelling requires far more brainpower than a chess grandmaster has to muster, because it involves calculating the possibilities of entire worlds and simulating the behaviour of countless characters and that - is - hard. Variation and complexity on that scale turns 10 to the power of 45 into a very small number.
Which is why most writers stop at ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…?’ and take shortcuts with cliché and stereotype.
That is also why Deep Blue, the computer that beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov, is a dumbass, because coming up with a decent story is far, far beyond its capabilities.
