Where do you get your ideas from? How do you write? How do you overcome writer's block? - asked by Ani via MySpace.com Does what you write depend on your mood? - asked by Ani via MySpace.com

These thoughts are the author's own and are provided solely to give an insight into his thought processes and to (hopefully) be of help to other writers. If you have any questions, please feel free to email Marcus Lyndale Please find the author's answers to the following questions below Where do you get your ideas from? How do you write? How do you overcome writer's block? Does what you write depend on your mood? As a writer, I am often asked: where do you get your ideas from? It is a good question. A perfectly natural question but one which probably requires a master’s degree in psychology to even attempt to answer. A qualification, I may point out, that I don’t have. There are many flippant answers to the question: ‘Oh, they just come to me’, ‘as a side effect of copious amounts of caffeine and nicotine’ or ‘I guess I am just inspired by the things I see around me’. But are any of these really true? Along with probably a hundred other simple explanations, there is an element of truth in each and every one of these answers but not one of them, fully encapsulates the entire truth. Perhaps we need to look at just when the ideas actually materialise. For me, it is usually during moments of restful tranquillity. Times when my brain is not occupied by the rigours of daily life. Sitting on a hillside staring out over a stretch of water, watching a bird soaring effortlessly on an unseen thermal, whilst dozing in the bath or when I am just feeling comfortably numb. I have never yet been inspired to write anything whilst watching the Arsenal play or partway through a business meeting or even whilst making love to a beautiful woman. These are all activities which require my full attention, there is no room left in my simple brain for my creative side to kick in. The basic idea for my first Scottish based novel, Eternal Knowledge, came to me during one such moment of tranquillity. I was lying in the bath, confident that I had removed the day’s accumulated grime from my body, when my cocker spaniel suddenly scratched at the door. The following series of thoughts popped into my head: What does he want? What’s he got? What’s he got in his mouth? It was as simple as that. Obviously, in my mind, he clearly had something that ordinarily he wouldn’t have had. Something he shouldn’t have had: A hand, a human hand. Whose hand? Where had the dog got it? What the hell was he going to do with it? These secondary thoughts crashed in on me but I forced myself to push them aside. At that point in time they were unimportant, things that could be explored at a later date. What was important, was the image of the dog with the hand in its mouth. Head cocked slightly to one side, he stood there wagging his tail at me as if expecting praise and probably a Scooby Snack for having apparently discovered one of the world’s greatest treasures. By concentrating on this picture, other details revealed themselves. The hand had been chewed off some three or four inches above the wrist, a cheap Timex wristwatch was still in place around the stump of the arm. It was a simple image, a bit on the quirky side granted, but just a simple image all the same. It was up to the writer in me to extrapolate this image into a novel. A week or two later, a family holiday provided the setting for the horrors and fifty six days after my return, the story was complete. Once a story is underway, an author draws on their own experiences, feelings and thoughts to bring the tale to life. Characters are developed, usually from amalgams of people we know and plots are often dictated by logical extensions of the ‘what happens next’ syndrome. But these are not the ideas that give birth to the story; these are just things that happen as a consequence of the story being born, things which occur naturally following on from the original concept. As much as we’d like to be able to, it is just not possible for us to force these basic story ideas into being. You don’t just wake up in the morning and think to yourself: ‘Yeah! I’m going to come up with a great idea for a book today’. I wish we could, wouldn’t life be all the more simpler. No, the best a writer can hope for, is to have a stock of these basic ideas so that he or she still has something to work on after the completion of each book. A quick look at my own ideas file, shows that I have basic concepts outlined for a further thirty seven books. I, apparently, have no worries of suffering from the dreaded writer’s block. This is not me bragging, I only mention it here to illustrate the importance of keeping track of these ideas. Like dreams, and in a way that’s exactly what these ideas are – gossamer threads of thoughts that flick into your brain and are equally as likely to flick out again just as quickly – these all too infrequent basic concepts can frustratingly elude you again almost as soon as you have glimpsed them. I cannot stress the importance of getting them down on paper, on your laptop, on the back of a cigarette packet – it doesn’t matter where – just get them down, get them out of your head and make them solid. It is all too easy to think to yourself: 'Oh yeah, I must remember that one' – the odds are that you won’t. So, put down all your initial thoughts regarding your idea, any emotions you feel and anything else in your head at the time. Most of it will end up in the bin, to be recycled into the great scheme of things, and will probably never make it into any story that you might later write but, take it from me, if you don’t capture the entire contents of your brain at this time, in a format that you will be able to recognise at some point in the future, all you will have is a group of words which will, over time, completely lose any significant meaning to you. The essence of the idea, the exhilarating feeling that you had on having it in the first place has to be encapsulated or else the story will be lost. The words ‘Man gets eaten by tree’, provides an image but also leaves an awful lot of unanswered questions. The image is much enhanced by the accompanying feeling that the ‘tree is older than time itself and that it was responsible for the very creation of the universe’. This is the basis for a story and it shouldn’t be too difficult to start from here. I strongly believe that everyone has the sort of ideas that us writers recognise as being the seeds of our crop, but many of these ideas are usually lost forever by simply not being recognised for what they are – concepts that are simply ploughed back under by the simple expediency of their owner’s inactivity. A writer will recognise them for what they are and, without them, would not be able to continue to attempt to make a living from his or her craft. Before I even think about putting my metaphorical pen to paper to create a story, I develop my characters. Starting with a blank sheet of paper I start by finding an image of the character I want - often by typing random words into google and scouring the resultant images until I find one that resembles the character I want to create. Faces are important to me and I extrapolate what I see in a face to encompass other general characteristics. I fill the page with vital statistics; height, weight, hair colour, hair style, eye colour, etc, etc. I follow this up with any unusual characteristics or manerisms that I envisage my character having. Then I get to know them. I climb inside each of my character's profiles and see the world through their eyes until I know just how they think on any given subject and how they will react to any given situation. Only when I know my characters inside out do I start writing a story. I usually work from a mental image (see Where do you get your ideas from? above) and have little or no real idea as to what the story is really about. By climbing inside each of my characters in turn, I tend to write from their point of view and therefore the story goes where the character goes. I like this approach as by not knowing the ending of a story when I am writing it means that the reader will be as surprised as I am when the end is finally reached. Of course this can have its downside. When I was writing the Light and the Dark, I developed a character whom I thought would take the tale through to the end, only to find her die unexpectedly on me. Believe it or not, I was in mourning for days - it was as though I had lost my best friend. With adversity comes... something else! Needless to say I got over her death and managed to find another way to finish the tale. In my experience, if you tell yourself that you have writer’s block, then you will have it. If you want anything badly enough, you can make it happen. Every author has moments when he or she is sitting there without a clue as to which key to depress next. This is not the time to give in to ‘writer’s block’, this is the time to open up a fresh page and start something new. We all have ideas about other things we could be writing about and this is the time to get them down on paper. It doesn’t even matter what the new writing is about, or even whether it’ll ever see the light of day again, what is important is that just by doing it we can prove to ourselves that we can still write: we have not been struck down by an exotic disease that renders us incapable of putting our fingers on the keyboard - we have just come to a phase in our current work that requires a bit of thought. Like that name that sits on the tip of our tongue but refuses to be spoken, the best cure is to forget about it, get on with something else and sure enough that name will come. Our minds are curious things, they have the ability to work very well on their own and it is quite often our own impatience, in trying to make them come up with things when we want them to, that slows the thought process down. Computers often perform tasks in ‘background’ and our minds are very similar. As with computers, if we attempt to speed things up, all we end up doing is to slow the process down and sometimes even cause the machine to crash. Whilst you are away from the place where you are momentarily stuck, writing something else, walking the dog, reading the paper or making love to your partner, your mind will be working on the problem in ‘background’. To prove the point, try doing a crossword first thing in the morning (pick one that you know you will have trouble finishing). Complete as much of it as you can, making sure that you have read all of the clues and then put it away, forget about it and get on with your day. Just before you go to bed – assuming you’ve nothing better to do! – glance at the crossword again and be amazed as you find that you are able to fill in at least a couple more of the answers. Although you may not have consciously been thinking about the puzzle, somewhere in your brain the problem has been worked on and you get that ‘why didn’t I see that before’ feeling. You didn’t see it because it needed the extra work on your behalf and the very act of concentrating on the problem actually hindered your solving process. Left to its own devises, your mind got working and sorted out the problem for itself. So, my cure for ‘writer’s block’ is, firstly to deny that you even have it and secondly to move on to something else. Sometime later, it may be a matter of hours or even days, but sometime, you will suddenly know how to proceed. The more you worry about a problem, the bigger it seems to get: if you can convince yourself that there isn’t a problem, then it will disappear. (PS This approach does not seem to help with household bills!) Very much so! As I have said before, I usually have several stories on the go at any one time and it very much matters what mood I’m in as to which one proceeds. With regards to what I actually write, I would have to say that my moods definitely do influence the directions of my tales. When I climb inside my characters to write, my mood obviously rubs off on them: I become my character for the duration of the writing and it would be extremely difficult for me to completely divorce my feelings. It would, for example, be very difficult to write about how happy someone is when I was feeling totally cheesed off with the world and therefore I would postpone the task, and leave it for a time when I was in a better frame of mind. As an aside, and maybe because of the subject matter I write about, over the years I find that I have actually been more productive when my ‘real’ life was not a bed of roses. I guess that I was able to channel my angers and frustrations into my writing and I know that how I was feeling at the time definitely showed through my work. I am talking specifically about my book the Light and the Dark which was written during a period of immense stress in my ‘real’ life and I know that I used my feelings to help the story. It was almost as if I was taking everything out on my writing – but it seemed to work, I still consider this book to be amongst my better works. Now that I am experiencing a much more settled lifestyle, I have to use my imagination much more to come up with how my characters are feeling; it is something that I have to work on, rather than being something that was already there. Just being in a good mood is not enough to make me want to write about good things, or at least things that most folk would probably consider as good. I am naturally drawn to the darker side of things and people, and no matter what mood I am in I shall probably always write in this direction. It’s just a part of me, it’s who I am!

MARCUS LYNDALE