Ever tried googling “the scientific method”? You get over 12 million hits including Wikipedia pages, articles, definitions, images, beginner’s guides and introductions.
If you google “the creative method,” on the other hand, you get less than 100,000 hits; that’s 8% of the pages dedicated to the scientific method. (Many are dedicated to - note the caps - The Creative Method, a Sydney-based design agency.) Why the difference? The characteristics of the scientific method have been established for nearly 500 years. You have a hypothesis which generates logical predictions. You then test these, gathering evidence. The experiment must be replicable and peer-approved. You arrive at a greater understanding having deconstructed something. But the creative method is about construction, not deconstruction. Moving from having nothing, to having something you have conceived of, crafted and built. And the trouble is, when it comes to method, every creative seems to be doing something different. Some writers aren’t sure where their ideas have come from, or how they arrived where they did. Some ascribe spiritual significance to them. Others claim to ‘hear voices’; some explain that all we have to do is ‘listen to the characters telling us their stories’. Not everyone has the same level of awareness. Case in point: one of my favourite film-score composers is Thomas Newman. But can Thomas Newman give us a cogent and replicable insight into how his creative process works? Hmm. I very much enjoyed this interview. He's a charming, honest and up-front bloke. I'm just not sure I got a strong sense of - y'know - how the magic works. Idea for...: a novel
Condition: semi-complete pitch Price: £15.99 inc p+p Contact: mossfletcher@gmail.com Deuces Wilde are the kind of edgy game-dev company where every kid wants their internship. Run by Kate Wilde (late twenties, notorious gambler and restless entrepreneur, voted one of the ‘Top 20 Influential Women in Tech’ by Forbes), Deuces Wilde are characterised by unfettered experimentation, PR stunts, all-night design sessions and cool, addictive AR and VR games. For Ella MacFarlane, 16, principled, ambitious and determined to one day work at Google, the internship is a dream come true. She’s one of only two students to get it; the other, Cameron Fencer, 17, is an uprooted Australian design-genius who’s taken a year-out to run his own online gaming channel. Wilde takes a shine to her new recruits and gives them a project; a live-action game in early play-test called Hammertown. Hammertown is a chase-and-collect game; players use GPS to locate hidden caches of virtual gifts and compete to amass their collections. There’s a nascent Bitcoin market for these virtual prizes (called ‘glyphs’). Under Ella and Cameron’s enthusiastic leadership, the game is expanded, completed and goes live. The two of them review and oversee player behaviour, modifying the game for each evening’s live session. Night-on-night membership grows and the glyph-market explodes. Soon, everyone’s playing Hammertown and rare glyphs are trading for huge amounts of money. The game becomes a monster that requires constant feeding; improvements, updates, competitions. Then, the first Hammertown murder. A player is assaulted and killed during live-play and his glyphs stolen. The tragedy happens at the same time as a hostile takeover changes Deuces Wilde irreversibly. The Hammertown database has become a priceless resource for behavioural science (an account of thousands of people’s decisions and actions under-pressure) and a mysterious Cambridge Analytica-style tech company acquire it. Kate Wilde is replaced. The game gets nastier. There’s only one way to stop the monster they’ve created: Ella and Cameron will have to sabotage Hammertown… from the inside. Hey Bay - or Hey! Bay, I haven't decided yet - is like Ebay, but for ideas. That's right folks, a trading post for concepts.
Ideas are priced according to their (i) specificity and (ii) replicability, thus: "You could open a kebab shop?" Can be had for only 1p plus postage and packing. But: "Hey! Bay: an eBay for ideas, where contributors buy and sell ideas depending upon their specificity and replicability. See attached pdf for fully costed business plan." ...would set you back £49.99 plus P+P, a steal I'm sure you'll agree. The sub-pages for writers would be boss, let's face it. A friend of mine shared an interesting exercise. It's called ‘future writing’ and is one of those activities requires us to scope out the limits of our hopes, dreams and ambitions for a period of time. Let's say five years. Here’s what you do: write as freely, confidently and honestly as you can for a short period of time about all the things you want to achieve; your ambitions, objectives, aims and dreams. Don't limit your thinking and record the wonderful life that could be yours. Capture everything.
Affirmations like this are pretty much the standard stuff of positive psychology, right? Here’s the interesting bit. The activity then requires you imagine what might happen if you were to take no proactive steps at all towards making these goals reality. You’re to consider that, for an extended period of time obstacles, perhaps of your own making, prevent you from doing anything purposeful or useful towards achieving your goal. Then you’re to consider what your life might be like as a result, and record what you see. Tough love, huh. Some time ago now I was wrestling with the business of quitting my full time job to give writing a go. Amidst all the psychological noise, one signal came through loud and clear. It was this: if the alternative is carrying on like I am for another twenty years, there is no decision. I have to do it. Negative visualisation has its place. Earlier this summer I went to see Angry Birds 2 with my eight-year-old daughter. If juvenile jokes about wee are up your street, you're going to have a great time. I certainly did.
It did make me think, however, about how impossible it would be to make juvenile jokes about wee work in prose. Some things operate well only in a visual medium. Newman and Mittelmark’s How Not to Write a Novel is a great exploration of what doesn't work in prose. (Is the cover a visual gag referring to Snyder's Save the Cat? Guess so...) Sharing it with students, you can see very quickly how, for example, though slapstick might work in a TV sitcom or dumbass Will Ferrell vehicle, it looks and feels pointless on the page. There are some examples shared - very funny ones. Working with young writers in workshops and lessons, I've discovered there are other things better avoided as well. Consider the impossibility of trying to write a compelling story containing a blow-by-blow account of a tennis match. Or how hard it might be to entertain the reader with a detailed description of a game of football or poker. Literal descriptions of sport just don't translate on the page. Next time you're running a workshop, kicking off a creative writing session or putting pen to paper on a project of your own, How Not to Write a Novel might be just the resource to use or share. On the other hand, you might want to try Griffin and Mayhew's Storycraft, out now. Ahem. |
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