September 2002 Meeting

Baiting the Muse

How to get those brilliant ideas...and how to spot the clunkers!

Bruce was the speaker and moderator at the meeting

Bruce Tailor, our president, presented the interactive program with the audience tonight, and it appeared that all had a good time. Below is a summary of his talk. Following that, there was an exercise of timed writing, where a random topic taken from newspaper clippings or magazine articles is the starting point of a scene. Many participants who chose to read their works aloud after only ten minutes of writing demonstrated some quite interesting results!

Avenues of Inspiration
1. Reading in your area of interest
2. Taking a walk
3. Talking to friends about a subject
4. Photographs
5. Music
6. Meditating on creativity
7. Travel
8. Taking classes in your areas of interest
9. Talking to other creative people as to what inspires THEM

INSPIRATION

Oftentimes, it isn't inspiration that is the issue, it's how to continue on from inspiration to creation. If you have trouble creating after being inspired, then it's time for THE ARTIST'S WAY by Julis Cameron. This is a combination of inspiration and how to follow trhough with it or to start dealing with that which gets in your way of creating - usually called "blocking" - this usually has its origin in families where there was little permission or support to be creative, much less, inspired. In such cases, one has to go back to deal with the association of creativity and inspiration equaling pain, not joy.

This can be dealt with by going through the book and doing the exercises and the morning pages. You can also do it in a group setting, for example with the class I teach at North Seattle Community College ("Smashing Crative Blocks"). What is very important about this process is that one not "beat up" on oneself for lack of creative follow-through.

This is a call for healing and compassion, not self-hatred or self-rage at not "being inspired or creative enough." One must go back and give the "inner-artist" or "inner-youngster" the praise, support and love for being creative - that which was withheld, more often than not, in dysfunctional families. Without doing so, one remains "stuck": one part of us wants to go forward with our inspiration and to create, the other, fearful that the family abuse or criticism will somehow be repeated by going forward, pulls us back into safety and - despair.

SPOTTING THE CLUNKER IDEAS

There is no such think as a really clunker idea. There are only ideas that haven't been executed well enough to be "fresh." This means that if you're writing, say, science fiction, if you haven't done all the reading you need to do in that area, you may risk doing the "Adam and Eve" story that has become a cliche, unless you have such a different "take" on it that it doesn't appear so. That goes with all forms of writing and art.

How to see things as if, for the first time, new. If you can do that, you can get away with just about anything. So, as far as ideas go:

Rule 1:
Read voraciously in your area of interest so you don't risk repeating that which has already been done so many times that editors can smell it a mile away.

Rule 2:
If you have questions about language usage or mechanics, take a class.

Rule 3:
Have at least one person read your prose back to you out loud so that you become the audience to your own work. If you can join a critique group where this is done, so much the better (i.e., classes at North Seattle Community College or through a SWA critique group.)

Rule 4:
Write your butt off as much as you can. The more you write, the better you get. It's that simple. And as you do so, your build-in "clunk detector" will get pretty well honed.