The Random Musings of a Turbulent Mind.

[Simud]

PS. To demonstrate the humble-ness of the beginning of the 50, the first one was "Jaws with a cat".

My question would be, how did you come up with that? What (if anything) prompted that idea? What where you thinking of or looking at, or trying to get to?

[mygrimmbrother]

What a wonderful thread. I often find that my best stuff comes from not thinkingat all, or from just stumbling blindly from one sketch to another without pausing for breath. That said, I do tend to get great ideas in the bath, which I think is when I'm most detached from the actual physical creative process (aside from being asleep, but that's another matter). Wonderful ideas occur to me quite a lot in the bath - whether I can bring them to life on the page in a manner that is even 10% as wonderful is also another matter.

Then yeah, there's sleep. I do tend to have some fucked up dreams/nightmares, and they've always provided great fodder for weird pictures. Unless they're truly horrible, in which case I don't talk abou them.

[Simud]

Well, yes, yes, I happen to have some terrific dreams I wake up from telling me 'Oh, what a great idea for a story!' That really happens way too often. Still, aside for a couple of more than valuable cases, most of these 'ideas' end up being impossible to make sense as a plot. I keep them in my mind for future use though.

[Noisybast]

I once woke up from a dream in which I'd been reading a Future Shock. "Quick! Write it down!", I thought.
It was only when I'd scribbled down about two-thirds of the synopsis that I realised it was, in the cold light of day, utterly shit.
Turns out it had only seemed amusing at the time because I was, in fact, asleep when I read it.

[Lady Festina]

My question would be, how did you come up with that? What (if anything) prompted that idea? What where you thinking of or looking at, or trying to get to?

I'd been thinking about "high concept", particularly the 1980s / 1990s action movie vogue for "Top Gun in racing cars", "Jaws in a sewer", "Christ on a bike" (OK, they never made that one). I generally despise that form of cultural shorthand, but I just wanted something to start me off on my Big Long List, seemed an easy way in.

To be fair, the process isn't normally that organised. There are some tricks of my attempt-at-trade:

- Scrapbooks (real or virtual) - I collect pictures of things that I find really striking - buildings, bombed-out cities, amazing landscapes, bizarre animals - and look at them every so often for a starting point. The National Geographic website is amazing for inspiration - eg, what would be the story of this: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/teenager-timbuktu-mali/

- Words - sometimes I'll just pick up any random book and stab it at a word. That word becomes the catalyst for some ramblings. Having a theme or a launching point always makes it easier than a purely blank page, even if the story moves away from that original theme before you get to the bottom of page 1. For a while, I used my other half as a Random Word Generator - every so often I'd ask him to say the first word that came into his mind. http://tinyurl.com/ydu87mm was the result of one of those, maybe not the finest story but it was a lot of fun to write. I won't tell you the word as it gives away the story, but my instinct was "where's the last place you'd expect to see one of those?" (ahem).

- Ramblings and rantings. Actually a lot of the time, I'm just sitting writing random bobbins on a piece of paper and my mind will start to wander on something and there's a story.

- Going to the pub. Go and talk shite to people in the pub (or alternative social venue). At some point someone will tell an anecdote or come up with a random idea or invent a world-saving technology and you'll just go "Yes! That's a story!". Then write it down before you get too pissed to remember it. And (hopefully) before you're too pissed to write legibly......

- And ENTER THE STORY COMP!!!!! http://forums.2000adonline.com/index.php/topic,33966.0.html

[Simud]

Lady Festina - Interesting how similar people's strategies can be.

What still amazes me -I couldn't see this a couple of years ago- is the fact that there do exist concrete strategies that anyone can use when going through the task of creating. The inspiration shit has been for ages the excuse to treat creativity as the arcana of chosen, out-of-the-world minds. However, creativity is the product of everyday mental processes. It's just a questions of knowing how to use them.

[Lady Festina]

What still amazes me -I couldn't see this a couple of years ago- is the fact that there do exist concrete strategies that anyone can use when going through the task of creating.

Yep. Keep it quiet though.... Gotta pretend there's *some* mystery....