“Help! I Want to Write a Novel But Don’t Have Any Ideas!!!”
“How do I come up with an Idea for writing a novel?” comes up sooooo very often on the writing forums that… well, that I am writing this.
On the face of it, the question sounds silly; how can you aspire to write if you don’t have any ideas?
Actually, the questioner usually does have ideas. However, they are (1) expecting a Novel Idea to stand out because it has a choir of angels flying around it singing Vode An or (2) sense that their ideas are too vague to lend themselves to story building.
However, let’s assume the rare case #3, that the wannabe writer’s mind is actually blank. They love the idea of telling a story, think they would enjoy the process, but can’t think of what to write about.
Their problem, then, is how to Be Creative.
There are, of courses, lots of workshops on freeing your creativity. You can also buy all sorts of self help books. Most of them come down to, Stop Self Editing/ Switch off your internal editor.
There is truth in this. The book The Midnight Disease shows that there really is both an Internal Editor and an Internal Mad-as-a-Hatter-Creative. The idea is that you tell the Editor to shut up and just let the Creative splurge out whatever falls out of your brain. Only once you have a whiteboard/notebook/screen full of jottings do you unmuzzle the Editor and pick the ideas that have legs.
In this model of creativity, only this filtering process is what distinguishes professional creatives from people… well, in need of a different sort of professional help.
