Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

L. Darby Gibbs

Creativity: Using your own experiences to authenticate your writing

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 My last post was about brainstorming with my writer pal Marcy on a novel idea involving dementia and Alzheimer’s.  Much of what is going into the book is based on my experience with my mother and my father-in-law who are both suffering from this kind of memory loss.  Every phone call I have with them or chat with my mother-in-law or my sister, who also keeps contact with our mom, is a source of inspiration and information. But it is also disheartening because it will only get worse.

I tell myself that as painful as it is to watch and keep up with the changes they are going through, it is part of life, part of loving someone and part of the truth that must be in what I write. What we experience is our greatest source of originality and authenticity.

I know this book is going to tax me and pull hard at my heart, for every wall my character must climb will echo a difficulty my mother is going through. I have long since given up having those chats with my mom that always left us laughing. For many years I would unload my disappointments through the receiver of my phone, and my mother would be on the other end listening.  But it was never a sad event for I would find myself giggling over those troubles because she brought that out in me.  They were fodder for humor instead of tears or anger when I shared them with her.

But I cannot do that any more. She cannot hold onto the same conversation for more than a couple of minutes. Sometimes she thinks she is talking to my daughter or worse me back when I was in high school.  It is much harder to make her giggle and much harder for me to find the humor in the troubles that come with the changes she is going through.  Nowadays, she is sharing with me her difficulties, and I am the one hoping to bring humor rather than sorrow to her experience.

What life experiences feed your writing and give you hope that you will find peace in the effort?

#creativity
#Alzheimer’s

Creativity: round robin brainstorming can lead to strong writing

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Talking the story into life

Partner and group brainstorming: I use this technique in my creative writing class. We gather around the table and discuss ideas. After we settle on one, I step back and write down each plot point or character decision as they work through them and build a consensus.

Now and then I read through what they have so far, and then the group is off again revamping, adding, changing.  Epiphanies fly about their heads, like those crazy fireworks you set on the ground and dodge as they zip off in random directions.  My students ram through half-baked thoughts as quickly as their mouths can speak them, making connections and changes to enhance emerging motifs.  And each student adds more flame and fires-up another idea.

Brainstorming

That’s brainstorming for strong writing.  That is the achievement of more than one mind reaching for development, precision, cohesion. I love those moments because they don’t just make for great writing, they make for the truly creative moment. If you have ever been a runner or done any kind of exercise that demands individual focus for more than half an hour, you may have felt the sensation that makes you feel as if you could go on running forever; the pace is perfect, the weather, the degree of breathing.

You float along without really feeling your feet hit ground or the sensation of running at all, almost an out of body experience. Time seems to stands still.  When two or more people are on the same run through an idea, it’s like that glorious running experience.  It feels as if you could create forever and you do not want to stop.

Very recently, just this past weekend, I felt like that.  I shared an idea I have been mulling over for a few months.  Soon my writer pal, Marcy Peska, and I were digging into the characters, their concerns, histories, families, questions, possibilities and my idea took on more life, seemed to breath a few halting breaths each time Marcy or I sent off another email between us.  The characters that had been slipping into my creative moments stopped being just skin deep. 

Sharing with Marcy and gleaning tidbits from her knowledge and experience made for development I would have taken much longer to come around to by myself.  What I love most about brainstorming with Marcy is that her questions are framed so that my characters are real people.  “Does Joan have Alzheimer’s in her family?”  Now I have to sit down with Joan and find out about her family history and for very good reason.  Colleen in a matter of seconds became even stronger because she is the type of person Marcy likes.  That alone added considerable depth to what was already a strong-minded woman.

Brainstorming with another writer or an interested friend is my kind of idea development. I am sure many of you use this same process. Is it a major factor in your process?  What others benefit idea development?

+Marcy Peska
#creativity
#brainstorming

Creativity: reading, thinking, and occasionally sunflowers are components of the process

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 Since I am often inundated with numerous obligations I cannot put off because they are important aspects of my income-producing job, I need a few tricks to galvanize creativity.  I have already written about several of them, but my most trusted approach to getting off the pot and onto the page is very simple.  I read what I have already written and/or read other writers’ work and think.

This post is a definite example of that.  I post every Wednesday pretty reliably (unless life interferes with unreasonable demands I must give in to).  But I don’t often come to the page with an idea ready to zoom from my finger tips.

Today I started by diddle daddling around reading my old posts, posts that landed in my mailbox, posts I came across on Twitter, and posts I know my friends have written recently.

Somewhere along my diddling about, I dropped in on a blog or two by other writers (Jane Friedman for one, on ironically “What should authors blog about?”  Seemed rather apropos.)

Reading makes me ask questions.  It also makes me stop and think, and thinking leads me to wandering and wondering, which can on occasion produce a thought worth writing about. 

Of course, this approach does have its downfalls.  I may be planning to write a post and I get curious about sunflowers and then think about My Antonia by Willa Cather. In the book was a long description of the sunflowers which often stretched far into the distance on hills and along road sides in that part of Nebraska. Thinking about this image, will remind me of a neighbor I had in Oregon who grew sunflowers along one side of her house. From across the street and several houses down, I could see those enormous orange/yellow bobbing heads.  They stood in a long narrow line along the garage wall like tall garish soldiers.

They made me want to grow sunflowers one day. Years later when my daughter was about eight years old and wanted to grow a garden, we bought sunflower seeds and planted them along a fence line just the other side of our neighbor’s garden. I imagined them leaning over our fence and gazing with smiling sunny faces at his squash and pumpkins and benefiting from his soil preparations.  We had one of the wettest seasons that year and my daughter’s foot-tall sunflowers were leaf deep in runoff.  We made numerous attempts at building up berms to hold back the encroaching flow, and dug channels to move the sitting water. But it just kept raining and raining.

We finally moved them to higher ground while rain ran down our necks, and the pooling water spilled over our low boot tops.  Either they never quite recovered or the seeds were only distant cousins to the spritely blooms my neighbor had grown.  We had a rather sickly crop of lean seeds to harvest.

That’s the thing about creativity, it’s like an unexpected rainy season when you’re trying to grow sunflowers: one thing leads to another and you just have to go with the flow.

What flows have you had to ride along that guided you to a writing moment?

#creativity
#sunflowers
#thinking

Creativity: one drop, one twist away from completion

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My mind is full of words, but none of them are clinging to each other and the few that bump and hold together, however briefly, are whispering, and I can barely hear them over the din of all the phrases sloshing against each other in garbled conversation.

It is not a creative day, not even one to press into a chain gang of little efforts: organize, sort, and summarize.  My thoughts are lethargic and oddly cantankerous when shuffled about in search of meaning.

I am resolved to putting one word in front of the other, simply letting whatever rises to the surface for a spot of air be sacrificed to expression, going down on the page. So be it.

Yes, one of those days.

I don’t have them often, maybe once a year. But here one is, planted firmly in my available writing moment.

A stagnant field under a swelling of greasy water.

I try to imagine the kind of flooding river that relieves a serious drought, but my inspiration is not buying it. This is swamp, this is bog, this is puddle, and I did not remember to wear my boots, not even the ones of brilliant pink broken up with splashes of yellow ducks.  My feet are cold.

luck and the trick play equal part

Look at my hands. On one index finger is a puzzle ring.  Such rings are lovely metaphors for writing.  Characterization, description, setting, conflict — puzzle pieces that when brought together create a story.  Today I slip the ring off and gently separate the four circles of fitted silver shapes, but I don’t allow them to drop away fully from the others.

I know how to put it back together.  It will take me anywhere from two minutes to two hours.  Luck and the trick play equal part in the creation of a whole ring.  I have not mastered the trick enough to rely entirely on it. Much like writing, I am still twisting and turning, thinking it through, watching for the sudden drop into place, ease into fitting as if I was in control of the results. 

Does any book, short story, poem, essay, article ever slip into place no longer tricky, just trick.  I hope not. Part of the joy comes in the struggle. This is writing, sifting through the slough, the remnants of both memory and meandering, the slithering together of parts and a bright, shiny unexpected whole that whether seen from the beginning or cobbled together reaches completion.

Do you have such days? Are they in the end successful?

#creativity
#writing

Time travel: returning to the best of times

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Revisit yesterday.

Never mind focusing on what terrible thing would come out of going back in time. Just what if I could? What things would I want to just observe. Imagine being able to cherish an event without worrying about all the other things that drag attention away because of worry or fear or weariness.  This is my list of “If I could go back.”

  • definitely hide where I could see my mother painting in the backyard
  • see the day my mom and dad where washing the car and he turned the hose on her and she doused him with  the sudsy water from the tin pail
  • the night my dad brought my mom home from a date and stood beneath her parents’ window tossing pebbles until her dad pulled up the sash and demanded to know what they were about.  It was midnight and he had asked her to marry him and she had said yes. Her father said, “About time,” pushed down the window and opened a bottle of champagne.
  • my dad coming off a destroyer in Boston Harbor mid WWII for shore leave
  • when my dad was a boy and he and his best friend stole apples from a neighbor’s orchard, got caught and had to work the season harvesting those apples
  • my sister and I when she told me my dolls were actually alive. How was she so convincing?
  • the day my dad took us to meet our grandparents who hadn’t seen us since we were babies. How did I know Grampy’s lap was the best place to take a nap?
  • the day I crawled under the porch to retrieve inner tubes, knowing that dark, web-draped place was infested with spiders, and I returned triumphant with tubes for my sister and myself to go float on the lake with.  She was older than I, but for that one day, I was heroic in her eyes.
  • watch my husband march in Ozzie’s Band when he was a clarinet-playing boy
  • the day we drove up to the house with our baby girl for her first day at home
  • my graduation ~ Oh heck, all three of them
  • watch me on skis for the first time tumbling my way down the mountain. Maybe this time I’ll laugh.
  • that first dinner date with my husband. I want to know if it was visible how much my legs were shaking
  • the first time my daughter walked all by herself was at the daycare center. I really wanted to see that.
  • see my grandmother on her stone stoop on that tiny island in Sweden: a young woman who couldn’t wait to come to America
  • my mom at one of her photo shoots
  • see my face when my dad told me we could just turn around and walk away, and we were in line behind the bridesmaids ready to enter the church where I was about to get married (I stayed ~ 34 years now. One of my best decisions)
  • my father flying search and rescue missions for a Maryland CAP unit
  • lazing around on the shores of Lake Powell or my husband’s outrageous skiing technique in the side channels while other campers whooped and yelled their praise
  • hear my daughter’s three-year-old version of umbrella just once more
  • the day I walked home from the university clinic with news I was pregnant and didn’t realize I was grinning ear to ear until I was halfway to the house
  • that crash landing my father walked away from that curled the tips of his plane’s propeller a good foot
  • my father-in-law dancing with my mother-in-law before he knew she would one day be his wife

What would you want to go back and see. Splurge, name three.

#timetravel
#favorite*memories
#what*if

Creativity: How do you gather your bits and pieces?

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Organize the bits and pieces.

I’m brushing my teeth and an image comes to mind. It’s intriguing, and I feel the need to race for my computer, but I have to get ready for work. There is no time to pursue this image and the possibilities it offers.  So I head for the library catalog box I bought on eBay and take a blank index card out, and scribble the image and the beginnings of what I thought it was opening up to. I throw it behind the label marked with an “I” (for “idea”: I’m into simple).

Next day I’m putting on makeup.  A conversation begins in my head (no, I’m not crazy. They’re characters in a book I’m writing). Another card tossed behind “I.” Then I’m getting ready for work again.  Back to the study, the index box, a blank card, scribble, toss behind “I.”  Sure there is a pattern showing up here:  I ridiculously creative when I’m getting ready for work.

But you get the picture.  It’s getting pretty full behind that letter. When the weekend comes or grading lets up and there isn’t a multitude of todo’s on my list, I’ll rifle through that stack, see who has been partnering up with whom.  I’ll work on a story or develop another scene.

I decided to gather these bits and pieces of subconscious rendering into something more searchable.  I have two sets of organized ideas in that drawer, those used and those waiting to be used.  My old habit was to write them in notebooks, record them to my memo app, fit scraps of notes in a pocket folder or a manilla file in a rack on my desk, wherever I could find a place to mark down my moment of inspiration.  My ideas were all over the place (some still are).

The new ones and a number of those already noted somewhere are now landing in one place ~ that old library card index box.  I have to admit I did not come up with this idea.  It is Robert A. Heinlein’s.  When I read his biography by Patterson, there was mention of how he needed a system to keep track of his ideas and his published works. So he and Ginny Heinlein came up with organizing the index cards he scribbled on. He would wander around with those jottings for his current book on cards stuffed in his pocket. He’d take them out and shuffle through them when he sat down to write.

I thought if it worked for him, I might try it. I am a reasonably organized person and this simple approach fit my style. So far, it seems to be working out.  One description of an end of a story went in to the drawer.  About a week later, I went in search of it and added some details. Then two days later, I was able to sit down and work on the story.  The original note had been residing on my phone on the notepad app for more than two years.  I would recall it now and then, and forget where it was.  Gathering the bits and pieces and writing them onto the cards to place in the box dug up lots of scribbles I had forgotten, mislaid or remembered but had not been able to find. But now they are gathering in one place.

I could have entered them all into a digital organizer, and I am pretty computer savvy, but I like the tactile effort of going through them.  There is something much more intimate about the shuffling of the cards that inspires my creativity so much more than the occasional digital attempts I made to record my creative tidbits.  And my squirreling them away in all manner of places wasn’t helping.  My card file seems to be working.

Do you have a way of keeping track of your inspired bits and pieces. If so, please share it.

#creativity
#Heinlein
#organization