How self discipline failed to motivate me, but freedom did.

Although discipline is extremely important when it comes to writing a novel I often find that forced self-discipline is more detrimental to my writing than it’s supposed to be. Sometimes I set myself goals on how many words I should be writing a day, I figure this is one of those that a lot of writers do because it enforces a strong sense of work habit which is essential in any job. Even when you don’t feel like writing something, you should still do it, especially if it’s something very time consuming like writing a book or an article. It makes perfect sense but unfortunately that doesn’t mean it works well for everybody. Some of us, I guess, just aren't very good at self discipline. Either way, I had a good crack at knuckling down and organizing myself. I decided to start with small goals as a sort of confidence boosting exercise; 500 words a day seemed a pretty reasonable place to start even though I knew I was more than capable of writing well over 3000 a day. I decided to set myself 500 words a day because it was an easily achieved task that wouldn’t dampen my spirit too quickly as I knew I was well within my own ability to meet that goal. Looking back, maybe that was the problem; I was being too soft on myself and not providing enough challenge. Rather than pushing to get it done it was kind of a 'eh, it's only 500 words, I can do it whenever'. Despite it being an overly easy task the idea was was that it allowed for a continuous progression of the story. Previously I'd been working on a stop and start mechanism of hours upon hours of writing followed by two weeks of not even sniffing it. So the goal made sense, didn’t work though.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, really, I don't, but as soon as I have to do something I subconsciously refuse to do it out of what can only be stubbornness. I guess I do know what's wrong with me... I’m pretty sure I've become one of those irritating people that likes to do things when it’s their idea but will be resistant towards it if it’s somebody else’s. In this situation, the ‘somebody else’ was actually just me, or rather a ‘past me’ completely separate to ‘current me’. In the least sense of dissociative identity disorder way possible, this is how I see stuff. ‘Past me’ had unfairly forced my creativity onto a factory belt whilst expecting me to meet my daily quota and I just wasn’t going to play ball with this new state of affairs. It kind of reminded me of being in the call centre where, if you didn’t meet certain specifications and quotas, then you were in big trouble.  “Treat me like a novel writing machine, will you.” I silently seethed, playing video games, “fuck you, I’ll write when I’m ready to write.” This went on for a couple of days before I felt the all-encompassing guilt of being a lazy low-life so I reluctantly opened up the document and had a crack of writing my quota. It was uh... awful, actually. I swear, I have never struggled so much to string together a few decent sentences in my life. Apart from when I was doing my Philosophy degree, that was all struggle, but creative writing is my turf and it's always been a fairly productive past time for me. Even though in this little session I wrote well over the 500 word quota, reading back, it wasn’t great. Ok, it wasn’t just ‘not great’ it was crap; dull, uninspiring gap filling drivel that desperately needed to be destroyed. So, after taking a break to get my act together a little, I spent at least two hours that essentially consisted of repairing the literacy mess I’d just tagged on the end of my otherwise acceptable chapters. When it was all over, I didn’t open the book again for another few days. I haven’t been writing blog posts because the same sort of situation applies to most things in my life, if I’m not enthusiastically inspired then I struggle to get the cogs turning and I end up burrowing myself in a rabbit warren of… oh, I don’t know, procrastination and mud, and twitter.

What actually solved my severe case of writer’s block didn't involve opening up my novel or doing flow charts on paper, rather, just thinking about it. Surprisingly, when you’re unable to write down your thoughts by keeping yourself away from pen and paper it means that your ideas and thoughts can come a lot faster and everything gets a little ecstatic because you have to work harder. By thinking up some conversational, plot driven scenes that I thought would it well it got me excited to write again because I really wanted to get to that point where I could tie everything together. I had one opening sentence in my mind, a spoken sentence by a character and an hour later when I got near my pc I sat down and I wrote that sentence in an empty, new document. After that, everything flowed. 2000 words later I had a new scene to be inputted at a later date and a whole host of ideas on how to connect A to B. Even better, I just completed my word count quota for today by writing this blog post. Happy Valentine’s day folks :D

Are we able to write anything original?

Maybe it’s a sweeping generalisation but I imagine that every author out there wants to write some original content. If all you are doing is essentially re-writing or rehashing the same stuff that people have seen a million times before then you would start to wonder what kind of writer you were. After all, creative writing is supposed to be… creative, not unimaginative, repetitive drivel. Unfortunately it’s fairly likely that everything you’ve ever written has already been thought of and is out there, somewhere, just waiting to jump out at you and knock your confidence down a few notches. Is there anything we can do about it? I’d argue that there probably isn’t.

Coming up with a new idea is rather like imagining what emptiness is like. Imagine what existed before the universe, or after everything has long since gone, maybe you’re imagining a big, blank, white slate or an empty black void. This is not emptiness; these are colours, it’s a horrible thing to put yourself through because we simply lack the capability to imagine what nothing looks like. We’ve never experienced it before and our mental capacities are severely limited if we try to think outside the human-body box. I’d argue that completely new, original, literally never thought of before ideas are also beyond our mental capacities; we need to build up ideas with pre-existing building blocks. Unicorns are made out of horses and horns, dragons are from pre-existing lizards and then there are several creatures inspired by twisted and unnatural versions of humans. 

Now, there is no rule out there which states that original bits of work by people; novels, poems, film scripts and so on, need to be, well, entirely original. Plagiarism has always been a big problem but it doesn’t have any actual legal grounding other than a vague sense of stealing. Copyright infringement is a whole different bag, plagiarism tends to be limited to somebody claiming that what they are saying is theirs is something that they themselves authored. Problem is, it’s rather difficult to prove as actual ‘never seen before’ ideas are hard to come by. 

Is 'creative plagiarism' common?

Here’s some examples of what I mean. I’ll do a quick summary of a book and you see if you know where it is from:

“A young boy discovers he is a wizard and heads off to a magical school to learn more about the craft. Under the guidance of an elderly and wise tutor he trains and improves his powers, his best friend is from a modest background and his enemy at the school is a complete snob.”

Harry Potter? Surely, Ron and Draco are in there, also Dumbledore and I mean, he discovers he’s a wizard and he goes to a wizard school for Christ’s sake. But, actually no, it’s not Harry Potter. It’s instead describing “A Wizard of Earthsea” published in 1968. Sorry, maybe I tricked you a little there, here you can have another try: 

“A young boy discovers he is a wizard. He must engage in a long and dangerous wizarding competition where he must solve clues also, at one point, rescue hostages which are imprisoned by half human, half animal creatures in order to become the winner of the competition. The wizarding world thankfully has its own wizarding hospital but, when not participating in the competition, he can kill time with wizarding chess or reading the wizarding newspaper.”

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire! Surely, the tri-wizard tournament with the weird mermaids who kidnapped the contestants buddies… nnnoo.. this one is describing “The Adventures of Willy the Wizard” from 1987. This one actually had a lawsuit attached, serious business.

Harry Potter aside there are plenty of books and films out there which build upon long accepted groundwork ideas. Modern day vampires are not a patch on what they used to be but, even in Bram Stoker’s era they weren’t new concept. John Polidori put those fanged guys down a long time before Stoker did but, even Polidori could also have easily read the short German poem written by Heinrich Ossenfelder and nicked the idea from him too.

There are, of course, modern examples of creative plagiarism but it never stopped them from making any money. The Hunger Games has a very similar idea to Battle Royale and the 2009 film Avatar has been noted by critics as being extraordinarily similar to Dances with Wolves, or Pocahontas, or Princess Mononoke… or some other stuff. It’s a fairly cruel business to go around accusing directors and authors to be taking ideas as they please and rehashing them into something that has become popular as, chances are, that ‘original’ idea wasn’t ever original. After all, none of us live inside a vacuum of space whereby we are totally unaffected by the surrounding world. Most of us, I hope, read as well as write and as we read we’re going to be consciously and unconsciously picking up bits of ideas. It’s a natural process and it’s also fairly likely that you’ll end up writing down combined bits of stories that you had previously read without even realising what you’re doing.

Totally different films. Honest.

Does it matter?

So, if there is no such thing as new and original ideas then then what hope is there? Is this the end of creativity and imagination as we know it? Does this explain why every single film that comes out at the cinema seems more and more familiar as the years go by? Actually, maybe that last one is correct, but as long as it’s an enjoyable film who gives a damn. What makes a good idea, even if it’s not an original idea, is that it adds a different perspective to a pre-existing story. As long as you’re bringing something new to the table then your idea is worth writing down as contained within something old is a kernel of originality that is provided for by, you; a unique person. 

Creativity doesn’t have to be about coming up with completely new, miraculously created you’re your little writer’s vacuum. Instead, simply looking at something in a different way and getting that down on paper is, in itself, worthwhile. Perhaps you hold a perspective on something that nobody else has held. Perhaps you can put things together in a unique manner by combining components into something that is, if not completely innovative then at least a bit novel. 

We’re often tempted to discard bits of work because we realise how similar they are to pre-existing pieces of work, either by ourselves or somebody else, have you ever done this? Do you think you can have entirely new ideas, not formed from pre-existing concepts? Let me know!

How to find inspiration and banish writers block (temporarily)

So, first off, I should start by breaking the bad news to you; there is no formula. Sorry if I led you on there. If there was a formula then writers block would be a legend of old and everybody would be releasing incredible, deep and moving stories, films, songs, poems, you name it; it’d be out there. The second thing to remember is this: everybody suffers from a lack of inspiration sometimes. It’s not a sign that you can’t write a good book or movie script and it’s certainly not a sign that you should just screw it all and take up another hobby. Inspiration doesn’t tend to come when you tell it to come, but, there are things you can do to ease the creativity in a little.

 1. Stop trying so hard

Have you ever had that feeling of desperately trying to think of what something is called, but no matter how hard you think you keep coming up with the same two words but then, later on, when you’ve forgotten all about it you suddenly remember what it was bloody well called? It’s that ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon and it’s caused by a form of mental blocking where once you’ve thought of a wrong word then it’ll keep blocking out the correct one and stop you from accessing your mental lexicon. Remove the blockers – stop trying to remember it, and it’ll come to you. Inspiration works in a similar way and if you strain, stress and force it then it’s not going to come. Great ideas don’t come to people in designated slots and you’re more likely to block out something good than encourage it in. By rushing into matters you may also end up with sloppy, incomplete ideas that were not properly thought out so as a starting factor I’d recommend you relax and not go looking for something so hard. If you find yourself looking around at objects and things around you that are generally uninspiring and you’re trying to make them more interesting; then stop. You want something that’s already interesting; something that could have a deep meaning or that stirs an emotion within you. That is true inspiration.

2.  Get a change of scenery

So nothing around you is very inspiring, it’s all rather flat and boring actually. Well, I’m not suggesting you should start putting up new wallpaper (though that may have worked for Charlotte Perkins Gilman) or jet off around the globe to search for that one, amazing story that’s out there just waiting to be found. If you want to do that then that’s great, it sounds fun, but let’s be a little more practical for now. If you spend all day inside the house and you’re sitting there chewing off the end of your pencil then maybe you should just get up and go for a walk. I mean it; get the hell out of here. When you’re out and about your mind is going to be significantly more stimulated and that’s a great start; stimulate your mind, enrich yourself, experience as much as possible and inspiration will almost always hit you as long as you keep an open mind. A negative atmosphere such as one of frustration and monotony contained generally around the designated ‘computer and coffee’ region is going to keep you in an uninspired, featureless rut and you should do your best to break out of that.

If you do the same things over and over again you're limiting your experiences and limiting your options when it comes to finding something inspiring. A new perspective on life will guarantee you something new to write about and, failing that, you'll probably enjoy yourself along the way. As an additional note I'd also recommend to try doing things on your own as it is usually solitude that bares fruit (thank you William Penn) due to the tendency to retreat into your own mind and allow things to come naturally to the forefront. A lot of social interaction tends to push that away as you're more concerned with who you're around than yourself and, unsurprisingly, this isn't a good environment to try thinking up some good ideas.

Hey, we all fall out at some time or another.

3. Read everything with words on it, listen to everything that produces sound

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”  - William Faulkner

A change of scenery isn’t just limited to your physical surroundings. I mentioned just now that you should stimulate and enrich your mind and this is probably the most important thing you can do. You need to read as much as is humanly possible and to not just limit it to the genre that you’re writing; you should be reading everything and anything. The more knowledge you hold within you then the more opportunities and doors you’ll be opening for yourself which will lead to not only a greater understanding of life, people, whatever the hell it is you just read about, but also a greater understanding of language, thinking and mental processes. ‘Mental processes’ is an odd thing to recommend you to improve on and I’m not accusing you of being unable to form coherent logical thoughts or simultaneously breathe and pump blood around your body, it’s more, a way of thinking. 5 years of Philosophy has beaten this into me and I recommend some Plato to get you started, it's fabulous stuff.

I also get a lot of my inspiration from music; there’s a lot of emotion within it that I otherwise cannot describe or express and it’s very easy to connect with. I don’t know why us humans love music so much but we always have done and it’s usually down to the general sound or lyrical content of the songs. My general theory is we appreciate music that we can understand, connect with or feel represented by. Since music isn’t always a story it’s also quite open-ended in how you’d like to interpret or continue it on in the form of prose and this open-ended-ness is always very beneficial when you’re looking for inspiration. Listen to music, whether that's music with or without lyrics, and imagine what it is expressing in the form of a story, scene or event. If you are able to connect with the emotions expressed within music, films or books then you're halfway there.

Lastly; I like to read the backs of shampoo and body wash bottles. It’s quite amazing how creative people can make those 100 odd words and frankly I don’t think I could ever write as emotively as Herbal Essences or Original Source. In all seriousness, nothing is beneath you when it comes to reading as it will teach you what is good writing and bad writing whilst simultaneously expanding your awareness, vocabulary and, hopefully, your creativity. If you find yourself reading a book and then thinking ‘I wonder what would happen if…’ then you’ve done it, go grab a pen and write that shit down.

4. Write something – yes, really.

It seems rather mean to tell you to write when that’s what you’re struggling with but, honestly, it works. When I lack the inspiration to continue with my novel I go and write something else for a bit; a short story, or the beginning of one, or some non-fictional things like an article (even if I never submit it) or maybe a small scene that I’d like to use later on for something I’m not quite sure of yet. Watch a film you’ve seen before and sit at your computer or take a pen and paper with you; now describe what’s going on on screen but in a nice, creative, descriptive manner. Watch something emotional happening on screen and write the facial expressions as people break down in front of you. Describe the view outside your window. Write down the feeling of hunger, of coming into the house from being out in the cold wind, of something beautiful and of something ugly. This is called freewriting and people like to recommend that you don’t stop or edit or do anything of that sort. I don’t think I could not edit if I tried but that would still be after a good 400 words or so. Bare in mind that everything you write down is golden as it can stay forever on your hard drive to be summoned open again whenever you need it. Once you’ve written down the sensation of banging your head against a wall; a sort of dizzy numbness, then you can use that later on if one of your characters ever has a frustrating lack of inspiration.

Once you start writing again you’ll rid yourself of writers block. It’s important to remember that writers block is partly accidental partly self-inflicted and you need to be kind to yourself to get rid of it. Like I said earlier; you need to remove the blocking atmosphere to help ease you out of it and writing just anything is good for that. As you write you may get little titbits of inspiration and you can jot those down as they come; however small they may be. There’s no need to get a little idea and then overthink it and try to turn it into some incredible storyline or scene, of course, if this all comes naturally then by all means write it down as quickly as possible before it goes again.

One day, if you work hard enough, you'll be as greater writer as this lady.

                                                  

These are just a handful of ways that I find to be really beneficial in simultaneously finding inspiration and overcoming a bad case of writers block – there are many more which I may post in the future but for now these are the ones I find to be most important. Of course I’ll add in a silent no. 5 which is quite simply; don’t give up after you’ve tried for a bit, even if you stop writing for a month, as long as you come back to it; as long as you think about it and keep that notepad relatively close within your reach then you’re doing just fine.