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Blogs by Pamela C Labud
Mama, where do ideas come from? 3/20/2006 8:21:38 AM
Some thoughts on imagination and babies. Hello everyone!
I'm taking a break from preparing yet another proposal, doing copy edits on my May release, THE HANGING BRIDE, from Wings ePress, and doing house stuff, to share a couple of thoughts about being creative.
To me the creative spirit is something that's really hard to describe. I don't know much except about my own personal experience. I think it all stems from when I was a child, and growing up in a middle class family meant that we only had one television, got most of our reading material from the local library, and only occasionally going to the movies meant that there was little enough to occupy my time. At least anything of interest to me.
My dad always hogged Monday nights for Gunsmoke, and other nights for cop shows and other popular westerns of the era. My parents weren't much for variety stuff, except for Ed Sullivan, (hey, I was very, very young, an egg, almost), so that left me lots of time to read and think, imagine and play.
One of the things that authors get constantly asked is 'where do your ideas come from.' Like most writers, I'd have an easier time explaining where babies come from to a five year old.
"It starts with the seed of an idea. A tiny thing, just like what a farmer plants into the soil. Then, mother earth, uh your imagination, that is, fertilizes it, uh feeds it, and it grows until it is ready to come out and be seen by everybody." Or, something like that.
An idea may come from an image, or a voice you hear that has a certain quality. I love voices. I like just listening to the radio and television sometimes. You hear dialoge, cadence, and emotion. There's a lot of emotion in someone's speech. Even the most deadpan voices can convey a lot in the way they sound.
Later, when I entered the working world, like most young people, I was forced to do mindless labor. The kind where you work with your hands and your back. Like mowing grass for my dad or slicing swiss cheese at a cheese factory. One can separate from the task in that sort of work. It was fun, too. I could let my imagination go, invent people and places, new situations.
Not being a beauty queen helped, too. I was definitely not focused on the outer me, so much as the inner me. My thoughts and my dreams were born of the characters I'd read about and seen in movies and books. I would write new endings for them, I would create worlds while I whittled away the time.
Of course times changed and I went into the field of nursing. Other skills came into play, ones I had to develop like observation and communication. A nurse's job involves many things, but a lot of it is assessment of their patients, documentation of what they see, and communicating it to the physician. So, even when I wasn't writing, I was preparing for my creative process.
For me writing a book is much like childbearing. Nine months of hard labor and though it's born, it's no where near ready to be released on its own. If you're a new writer, it takes lots more work of revisions, critique groups, contests and so on for that first sale. Your writing has to mature. If it doesn't then you will never be sold, and if you do sell before you're ready, it'll be too early, and chances are that it be much harder to make the next sale and the one after that.
So, in a lot of ways, even for a published author, the act of writing must be its own reward. It must fulfil you like nothing else does in life. That is the fertile ground for ideas to take place. You also must have the need to write. Ask most writers and they will tell you they simply can't 'not' write. It's like breathing. You stop--you die.
Of course, we all want to be best selling authors. We want the spotlight and the fab reviews. But, don't kid yourselves. It takes a lot of hard work to get there.
But, no matter what, it all starts with an idea. For the genre of romance, it means two characters facing life changing conflicts that lead them to a committed relationship. There are millions of people in the world and at least a bazillion ways to write that story and I am totally fascinated with the process. That's where ideas come from. At least for me.
