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Katherine has been being creative over on her blog. Please check out these two posts before you continue reading all of this: http://kathall.co.uk/blog/2009/10/are-monsters-creative/ and http://kathall.co.uk/blog/2009/10/the-wonders-of-pritt-stick/. I wrote a comment on her site that got a bit out of hand. So here it is – it’s the creative process, writ large.

I am not sure I agree about the creative process. But it is hard to know. I write in two different ways depending on the context. Sometimes I just keep writing sentence after sentence with little idea of where I am going and hope that will get sorted in the edit. And that works fine in a short thing, and you imagine that when you are going to go and write a novel you are going to do it properly – come up with a plot and fill in the details.

However… That doesn’t seem to be the real truth. Sometimes I write and I find myself coming up with the whole story. Sometimes I know I want to write, but I have no idea what is coming next. The sense of painting oneself into a corner is hugely exciting and motivates you through the slog of writing, and it is a slog. I would say that I always find writing less exciting when I know the end before I get there. But the question is – does knowing make the end result a better or worse thing?

It is hard to know whether the excitement of keeping you guessing distracts you. Does it stop you from seeing the wood for the trees? Do you end up with something hideously unbalanced? And yet the question remains – does it matter if, on the other hand, you enjoy the process so little that you can’t get to the end?

The issue with this is that the process of creation is somewhat mechanical. This is like parts of the edit for me. The sad news is that you can’t have creativity without hard work and a bit of boring mechanical processing. Other people don’t do it because of the hard work, and that’s part of what makes it worth while.

Just think, you could imagine monster, would that be as good as holding monster? I make up a story with every spare five minutes I have. But it is the ones I turn into reality that satisfy me.

Sometimes, you have to overcome your enjoyment of the process to achieve results. My novel, when it is in my head, is perfect, writing it reveals the faults. In my head, nine years ago, it was a perfect story I told myself one rainy evening. I loved it, and now as people read it, I’ll realise the faults and I’ll have to be told about them, because, at the end, the achievement is worth it. Maybe we will see more of monster around the house than your collage?

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do collage, of course, but that part of all creative work involves the horrible difficult part where you have to learn all the new things, create rubbish, fail and learn. And part of that is challenging yourself. Making a collage out of materials you’ve never used before, knitting with a new material, writing a much longer story.

In some ways, if the impending sense of doom and failure are absent, the process isn’t going to be exciting. That’s why to me, here, the collage is more interesting because you had to do something, and publish it, and that’s scary for you. Maybe the next thing is constructing a knitting pattern for yourself, or maybe it’s just pushing the boundaries of the scary and knowing that whatever you did, four things are true:

1) You did it
2) Not many people do
3) You started, which is hard enough
4) You finished

Proud isn’t enough of a word, for what I feel about you. Now keep starting and finishing.

P.S. If you would like to suggest a topic for Katherine to be creative about then send in your ideas here.

Christine asked two important questions in the comments on the Draft Dodgers post:

I’m curious who you select to read your work along with you – friends, family, perfect strangers?

Is it hard for them to be brutally honest?

I know how I chose the set of people I am using but I’m not sure how to advise anyone anyone else to find people like this in their set of friends. So maybe I’ll describe them and that might help.

Reviewer 1 – Nick Ollivere

I’ve known Nick since we were 12. We were also flatmates for around 4 years. So we have a secure friendship. Nick is also a writer. During most of the time we’ve known each other we’ve worked on projects together. Writing with somebody else means, to a certain extent, having to try and get your bit in ahead of what the other one wrote. And part of doing that involves being able to criticise the other. So we have a long and secure relationship, and because he’s a writer he tends to read it in a slightly different way. Brutal honesty is guaranteed. We’re used to it, because I guess when writing together we are making something together and so he’s used to changing my writing to make our project better.

Reviewer 2 – Katherine Hall

Well most people in a relationship know where their best critic is – their partner. Fair, balanced, truthful and unwilling to let you get away with cheating yourself. The only problem is that while you imagine you don’t write with your own voice, of course it’s all in there – and Katherine has to hear my voice a lot! This is going to make reading something this long a bit tricky. I mean Katherine is editing this
article before it is published too. But on the other hand that familiarity means she is used to giving me the feedback I need. So brutal honesty – check, secure relationship – check.

Reviewer 3 – Adrian Lightly (fourstar)

I spend a lot of time with Adrian as we are friends and we work together for about 11 hours a day, and we have been doing so for about 5 years. We don’t write together but we do create software together. This means that a large part of what we spend our days doing is a kind of critical creativity. We are finding problems and solutions together. When you hear the word criticsise you imagine it as a horrible slight to the receiver of it. Constructive criticism is such an abused phrase by people who want to dress up their mean criticism. But constructive criticism is our
trade I guess. “This button should be blue and be over here because when people press it they are thinking of the kind of actions that go with these other blue buttons, rather than these orange ones over there”. There is no malice in there, it’s making the whole thing better, and how was I supposed to remember the users were that crazy? So brutal, practiced honesty and long-term secure friendship.

Side note

The group so far are the reviewers who helped with the Book with the Missing First Page. We got the band back together. But because of the length of the novel I have decided to bring in some new eyes.

Reviewer 4 – Dei

Another friend and colleague, Dei is an actual editor for a living. Even though I have known her for less time than the others, it is her job to tell people the truth for a living. So this should be pretty easy for her.

And two others who haven’t reviewed for me before, are both good friends, but I haven’t asked – so I can’t really announce. It will be interesting to see if they will be able to tell me the truth as well as the others, but they will give me a fresh perspective.

I totally subscribe to the Elizabeth Gilbert theory that it is much healthier to act as the Roman and Greeks did and imagine that genius and inspiration are seperate to yourself. Obviously we know that this isn’t true in reality. We know that when we sit down to a piece of work we sit down on our own. But it’s hard to deal with what happens when things don’t really flow. Who’s fault is it? Well it’s obviously some internal thing. This is the same mind that was able to produce ten pages yesterday. But is it helpful to go down that avenue? You may have had a glass too many of wine last night, you may have just got some bad news on e-mail this morning. You are out of the zone.

I’ve always felt that it’s better to just pretend that it’s nothing to do with you. I’m not saying that it’s okay to have that extra glass of wine. No there are some things that are in your control. Try and have the same breakfast, the same order of things before you start writing. You create little rituals which can get you in the zone. But be careful with these. You want to be able to write standing on your head if the inspiration hits. Remember these things are to help the inspiration hit. Once it has hit you are supposed to drop everything and go for it. Don’t get these things mixed up. If you start saying that you can’t write without your 2B pencil you’re going to miss things – and have very hard to read writing.

I’ve always felt that my muse was like Sharon Stone in the pretty poor Albert Brooks film – The Muse. She goes off and runs around the world picking up inspirational things. She’s that part of your mind that daydreams the fantastical. That part of your mind that hates the practicalities, the harsh realities of drudgery.

You have to entertain your muse. You have to take it out and experience things you don’t normally experience. You have to allow it its flights of fancy. But there are two reasons your muse will leave you, if you’re too serious, or if you’re not serious enough. Remember your muse is here for you to do your creative thing. You can’t just daydream you have to start.

I am a rational person and the muse is of course a part of your own mind. But just like Feng Shui works in some regards because imagining how a dragon would flow through your living room will stop you making the design mistake of parking something in the middle of your living room. This is the same, imagining your muse like a person who needs entertaining but wants results will give you what you need without feeling like the formal drag of a system. It might feel a but silly, but a willingness to embrace a feeling of silliness is a big part of being creative.

Last thing – for reasons I don’t fully understand my actual muse might be like Sharon Stone in the Muse but she looks like Jenna Elfman.

Okay so this is the dumbest thing I could possibly do, but I’m probably never going to make my millions from a web startup. So I’ll give you my idea here.

Here are the facts:
I like to go on holiday
I don’t have any children

So travel websites don’t work for me

Why not?

Because it doesn’t matter when I go on holiday at all.*

I also don’t really know where I want to go on holiday.

What I want, and there must be other people like me, is to be able to say:

“I would like to go on holiday in the next three months, I want the average temperature to be between 25 and 35, I would like to be on holiday for around a week and to have at least 9 interesting museums / art exhibitions / monuments so I can do something each day and have the illusion of choice. One of the points of interest should be a modern art gallery. We won’t go there but it’s good to know that it is there. I would like my hotel to have wifi and to be nice but not fancy. I want to have a choice of fancy restaurants but also know that there are enough at the lower end that are decent – so I can eat for the rest of the week once I’ve been to the fancy one.”

The point is I don’t want a package holiday. I don’t want you to sell me that experience. I want you to show me all of the places that fit those criteria. And then rank them by price or number of fancy restaurant choices or whatever I want to rank them by.

All of this informaion exists in guide books, and in theory a travel agent in a shop might know this. But you want me to talk to somebody? Urgh!

But I don’t know where to go on holiday and don’t mind when. Go to any travel website and look for a holiday. If you don’t know the start or end date you can’t start. What do you mean you don’t know where you are going?

You can, of course, browse but you can’t search. All of the existing travel websites fail because they work based on the easiest way to present the data out of the database. They don’t represent the way that everyone actually thinks when they decide to go on holiday.

Come on – tell me it already exists and I’ve missed it.

* As long as it’s not during the Formula 1 season, obviously.

I think we have another language problem on our hands here everyone. I think we’ve gone and broken the word “argument”.

I think it’s happened because we’ve all decided that “debate” is too pompous. It might well be too pompous, as it goes, it sounds a bit high falutin’, doesn’t it? Would you like to enter our debate? Will we be using the Chatham House Rule?

But what’s the word for what you do with your friends, or your partner, when one of you kind of takes up one position and the other takes the opposite one? Not in a forced debatey kind of way, but in a natural conversational kind of way. Debate is probably the word really. But it isn’t what people say nowadays, oh no…

“So Susan, are you going to lay that patio?”
“Well, funnily enough, Paul and I were having an argument… well… discussion about it last night.”

That’s right, the new word for this situation is, “argument… well… discussion”.

“Discussion” isn’t the word by itself because it implies that you might well agree about it, “we were discussing it and we both think we should go for it.”

And “argument” sounds too strong. It sounds like you might have been really cross about what you were debating. “Argument” has a frisson of emotion to it. And goodness gracious me, it would certainly never do to entertain the possibility that you have an emotional depth thicker than a sheet of paper.

But isn’t there already a word for the times when an argument goes a bit too far? Yes, it’s “row”. “Row” sits nicely between “argument” and “fight”.

So it would seem we are too squeamish to use “argument” now. We don’t want to admit that we are passionate about our point of view. When we say “argument”, we think other people think we’re saying “row”, but being nice.

And I know why – it is nice and polite. I know I’d say, “bit of a debate” probably to avoid saying “argument”. But my characters, who are hopefully more realistic than I am, will probably say, “argument… well… discussion”.

What would you say?

“Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
Why do people say this? Does it make any sense to you? Really…

…

…no, it doesn’t, does it? First of all, why would you want to sleep tight? That sounds awful. Sleeping loose is clearly the first requirement of a good night’s sleep. You can almost imagine this person sending you to bed by saying, “sleep tight and don’t forget to grind your teeth”.

No sleeping loose is right at the top of my bedtime agenda. So that’s at least 50% of this phrase that plain doesn’t work.

Let’s look at the other half. “Don’t let the bed bugs bite.” Maybe this is why you’re sleeping tight? Because you are supposed to be keeping ever vigilant for these bed monsters who are coming to devour you.

Bed bugs – the actual things – don’t actually bite you.* So why lie? Is this just to scare children? I mean, if we’re going for that then we can surely do much better. We’re clearly just allowed to make up anything.

How about:

“Good night, oh just before you go to bed, just keep an eye out and let me know in the morning?”
“About what?”
“Well, when I was in your room earlier, I thought I could hear your duvet breathing. And I swear it finished making the bed itself. I was probably confused though. Let me know in the morning.”

I am sure you can do even better. Do let me know in the comments.

* Look, let’s be all non-squeamish about this – but don’t read the next footnote if you don’t like that kind of thing.**

** They eat the bits of skin you are no longer using.

A few years ago, I was driving towards Castle Howard when Katherine started reading from the guide book. She explained that Castle Howard was built in 1712 . “Oh,” I said, “so it’s not as old as my dad’s house.”

This has become a bit of a trope. Things get mentioned as being older or younger than my dad’s house. It’s a defacto standard of measurement. I’m surprised that those crazy cats over at SI or ISO haven’t been in touch.

So the other night I was at the theatre with Mick Jagger. He was there in the row behind me, minding his own business. Afterwards we all trudged out. There’s nothing like being stuck behind people. It doesn’t matter if they are mega famous or if they have loads of people in front of them – it’s easy to become antsy.

“Excuse me, Mick,” I said.

After we were out of the theatre, Katherine and I compared notes. He was a bit short, very wiry, he looked like he was almost dancing – at all times. These were all part of his cool.

“Well I dropped out of the London School of Economics faster than he did, that must mean he is less cool.” I said.

It was Castle Howard all over again.

Maybe Mick thinks he is cooler than me. But as I said to him, “excuse me, Mick”!