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LIFE-WRITES: Start an Ideas Book

In order to begin searching for the key to accessing these new ideas, we need to start on a practical level by keeping an Ideas Book. As Secret Step One tells us, there are more ideas locked away in our unconscious minds than we could ever write about in a whole lifetime. What we must discover is how they can influence our short stories, novels, poetry or non-fiction to the very best of our ability.  Instead of relying on memory, the Ideas Book should be used to record snippets of conversation, great one-liners, quotations, reference books, locations and characters.

The aim of Life-Writes is to encourage you to open your ears and eyes, to view things differently with your mind and heart. In other words, to free the inner voice so that you’re not afraid to trust your imagination and take a few risks with your writing. Become an observer and develop a willingness to see people and the world around you in a completely different light. By expanding those powers of observation, you will continuously build on the entries in your Ideas Book, which in turn will help you re-explore existing plots and themes, and generate new ones. Try to be honest but above all, do not be afraid to push against any restrictions imposed by current thinking or political correctness. No one is going to see your Ideas Book – its contents are for your eyes only.

To set the ball rolling, the first entry will be to give five examples of what you consider to be ‘things that arouse a fond memory of the past’ and here we need to reflect on why we consider them to be ‘fond memories’. The items on my list will probably be far removed from those on yours, while you will probably be completely unmoved by those ‘things’ that are important to me. What we also need to consider is the way that language has been devalued and how some words can take on a completely different emphasis when used in contemporary conversation. We are talking about perspective or viewpoint, and this is where we begin to access those ideas that are locked away in our unconscious minds. So let’s begin with …

A collection of old family photographs

Images of a life-style that can never come again because the people from that time, and who made it worth remembering, are all dead. The family home, long since demolished to make

way for a ring road. Childhood recollections of summer holidays, and family mealtimes. Pet dogs. Days at the beach. Haymaking and harvest. A childhood friend with whom we still keep in contact.

Many of these ‘fond memories’ will re-surface throughout this book because we are writing from Life, and drawing on happenings that are unique to one person. Your first collection of ‘things’ will probably prompt some rather serious thoughts but even these can be extended and expanded to encourage you to plumb the depths of your own ‘ideas’ and explore their possibilities. Keeping a record of your own ‘things’ in your own Ideas Book should eventually lead to dozens of ideas for fiction, articles or poetry but first we need to explore ways of making them exciting before turning them into submissions. On a day-to- day basis, our conscious brain registers the ‘facts’ or the most obvious impressions about a situation; for creative writing it is necessary to dig deep into the subconscious to locate the ideas that have been compressed into the brain’s equivalent of a

computerised ‘zip-file’.

Remember:  Our past is a mine of good ideas for future use.

LIFE-WRITES: Freeing the writer’s inner voice

Because Life-Writes is about drawing on submerged inner resources, it means that I’ve chosen to share many of my own private thoughts and family memories to illustrate many of the points made in the text. As a result, this has become a very personal book, because the examples, stories and anecdotes are real-life revelations, not fictional ones. Drawing on our inner reserves means that we have to be honest with ourselves about how much we are actually willing to give, or reveal, to a general readership in order to further our writing career. Where, we must ask ourselves, does reality end and creative writing begin?

The original idea for my book, Creative Pathways: Freeing the Writer’s Inner Voice, came after reading The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a sort of personal journal of a lady-in-waiting at the court of the Emperor of Japan towards the end of the 10th century AD. Today, a pillow book refers to an illustrated manual of erotic advice but Sei’s book was a mixture of diary, gossip column and ‘commonplace’ book that showcased her literary observations off to perfection. History tells us that both her father and great-grandfather were both noted poets and scholars and, were Sei Shonagon alive today, she would probably be one of our leading literary lights. In this capacity, she can quite easily fill the role of ancestral spirit, or kami, of creative inner thought.

Unlike Julie Andrews’ ‘Favourite Things’ from The Sound of Music, however, the ‘things’ that Sei Shonagon commented upon were not always pleasing. Nevertheless it is her wide-ranging observations that set the pattern for some of the exercises for my creative writing workshops, combining Zen-like word-pictures and contemporary commercial writing ambition in order to free
the writer’s inner voice. The age-old categories were Sei Shonagon’s own – the ‘things’ in Creative Pathways were mine.
For example:

The Pillow Book:
Things that arouse a fond memory of the past

Dried hollyhock. 
The objects used during the Display of Dolls. 
To find a piece of deep violet or grape-coloured material that has been pressed between the pages of a
notebook.
It is a rainy day and one is feeling bored. To pass the time, one starts looking through some old papers. And then comes across the letters of a man one used to love.
Last year’s paper fan. 
Night with a clear moon.

Creative Pathways:
Things that arouse a fond memory of the past

A collection of old family photographs
Old theatre programmes
A particular piece of music
Wood smoke
The smell of hawthorn or bluebells in blossom

Here we have two collections of memories (or, from the writer’s perspective ‘ideas’) that immediately spark very clear images in the mind’s eye despite the fact that eleven centuries separate
them.
 
Make a note of your ‘things that arouse a fond memory of the past' in your Ideas Book