Topiary and Writing—M.G. Sondraal
Waiting for the Muse to appear can be longer than you’d imagine, and inspiration is never there when you desperately need it. You simply cannot rely on that spark of creativity arriving on schedule.
These droughts of imagination are excruciating experiences for the creative person. It feels as if you have inexplicably lost an essential part of yourself and the more you search for it the faster and further it retreats. I’ve never found desperation an effective enticement for creativity. It’s supposed to be, isn’t it? The mother of invention? Perhaps invention to solve a practical problem is different from the abstract concept of creating an imaginary world with fictional characters experiencing fake life events to inform our reality. It must be.
To keep desperation away, many writers carry notebooks with them always when living their non-writing life and scribble down random thoughts, snippets of overheard conversations, a particularly marvelous phrase, and pithy observations. These notebooks can be examined for those story seeds later when seated at your computer with a blank page or a stalled word count. The younger writer dictates these things into their phone and foregoes the illegible scrawl (or print more likely since cursive writing is a fading practice) but the product is the same. A curious mind gathers disparate information from many sources and mixes it all together to create a compost of potential story lines. This is our daily practice. As writers we cannot stop ourselves.
Recording these small tidbits of life is effective for those of us with mundane, humdrum lives where nothing too exciting or unusual happens. (I exclude AT Bennett from this category as weird happenings occur to and around my writing friend frequently enough that story ideas are plentiful just by living life.) The rest of us rely on travel and special events to escape the monotony of sameness that characterizes our workaday lives. News stories, television programs, books and music can all provide tiny tendrils of plot and character to take root in the subconscious and slowly emerge over time, grafting on the snarky comment of a co-worker and the fragrance of the coffee shop to nurture the growing story. We research strange occurrences and mulch those details into our subconscious to enrich the story.
When robust and ready, it bursts from subconscious to page and the ideas come quickly. They grow chaotically, one idea after another as more of the tale is realized. It’s exhilarating. It’s demanding. It’s satisfying.
It’s a hot mess.
Once the last unruly sentence is out, it’s time to prune…hard, without mercy, but judiciously. I’m now comfortable hacking out words, sentences, paragraphs, characters, and occasionally whole chapters in service to the story. (Comfortable is the wrong word. I’m resigned.) It must be done, and it strengthens the story when extraneous bits are clipped, and a sharp-edged story shape revealed. And it looks like you wrote it with this exact image in mind. Ha, fooled you.
All those discards from this story go back to your subconscious (and computer files never to be looked at again) to feed the next crop of story ideas. They are churned regularly with new political events, documentaries, concerts and works of fiction you continually add. By chance, some ideas will bump together and stick. A potential scenario is born. Sprinkle in that odd character you saw on the bus and there’s a scene seed. Don’t force it. It will wither and die. Let it sit and gather strength. When the conditions are right, it will flourish.
I now think of those times of dreaded drought as merely fallow periods, times to recharge, not to panic. With preparation (staying curious and observant), the writer within will have an unending supply of ideas. With patience to wait until a tender idea can be transplanted into the harshness of story development, growth will be abundant. With resolve and editing, a glorious topiary emerges to be appreciated.
Happy gardening.