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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.