How to Make Stuff Up in 8 Easy Steps
While I’ve only interviewed four artists for Wild Minds so far, I’ve noticed they all share an apparent lack of writer’s (or creator’s) block. Jane talked about keeping folders of reference photos for her illustrations; David reflected on the endless amount of piano repertoire he has to choose from; and Lisa and Laura said they get their ideas from “everywhere” and keep files of them on their phones. Developing a trove of ideas means there’s always something to work on—it’s a constant gift to your future artist self.
But don’t ideas have to come out of nowhere? Ugh.
When I envision Myself, Lillie, as a Writer, I picture something like this: entering my sunny office before nine a.m., totally well-rested and energized, sipping a lavender tea latte, sitting down to my beautiful creative passion projects, and … that’s where the image stops. The reality is that it is often not sunny, I’m not usually to my desk before nine a.m., I rarely feel well-rested, I have never tried lavender tea, my creative passion projects are actually just work, the entire image is over in five seconds, and then there’s the part I didn’t picture: Sitting there with the blank page. Staring out the window. Feeling chilly. Checking my email. Getting up to adjust the thermostat. Staring at the blank page. And I am far from the first person to reflect on this.
Legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp begins her book The Creative Habit with the same scenario:
I’m in a room with the obligation to create a major dance piece. The dancers will be here in a few minutes. What are we going to do?
To some people, this empty room symbolizes something profound, mysterious, and terrifying: the task of starting with nothing and working your way toward creating something whole and beautiful and satisfying…Some people find this moment—the moment before creativity begins—so painful that they simply cannot deal with it. They get up and walk away from the computer, the canvas, the keyboard; they take a nap or go shopping or fix lunch or do chores around the house. They procrastinate. In its most extreme form, this terror totally paralyzes people.
Tharp argues that routine and habit are essential to avoiding this terror: “In order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative.”
Well, I’m very good at preparing for things. With the intent of training myself back into a generative habit by applying external pressure and accountability, I’m in two month-long fiction classes. Every class session consists of prompts for writing on the spot. Because of these prompts, I’ve started writing multiple short stories—and even a couple of short scripts—in the past few weeks. I’m all about somebody else telling me what to write.
Prompt-writing is a strange mix of hand-holding and forcing yourself to do something scary. It’s mostly about feeling supported in pushing yourself to an uncomfortable place, like you’re a kid up on the diving board who doesn’t want to jump in the pool, but your smiling swim teacher is down there waiting to “catch” you, and this makes the jump doable. (Although, I wouldn’t know, because seven-year-old me quit swim lessons after a long afternoon of standing up on that diving board thinking, Heck no.)
Writing from a prompt means you do not, in fact, have to pull an idea out of nowhere.
I’m hoping to keep prompt-writing in my daily creative process after my classes end. You might ask, Isn’t giving yourself a writing prompt the same thing as pulling something out of nowhere? You have to invent the prompt, after all. No! Because, really, there is no such thing as nowhere. Everywhere you go has plenty of something in it. You just have to practice being decisive.
All this was to say: I came up with a few prompty tips for myself and for anyone else who needs a little idea-generating boost.
1. Write every day. Boom, a prompt. Writing every day is the easiest prompt. It means you can write one sentence or three words or five pages if you’re feelin’ it. This one kept my writer-self sane during my five years of piano-self graduate school. I had a notebook and a daily goal to fill one page with writing. It had to be unrelated to the previous day’s writing. I’d start something new and roll with it until the end of the page. I didn’t always get it done, but the notebook (plural notebooks, over time) was always there for me and the goal was always doable (they were small notebooks). Now, it’s years later, but I still have these notebooks of ideas—ranging from terrible to less terrible—ready when I need them. Also, try to let go of the notion that everything you write down has to hold the promise of eventually becoming publishable. Writing every day is about exercising a muscle, not being a perfect fantasy version of yourself.
2. Force yourself. As a piano teacher, I know the word “force” is generally not a good one, but I find myself having to force myself to write just about daily. The “force” part does not last very long; it’s maybe the first few minutes of writing, just to get the ball rolling. It can also come from an external source if you arrange it. Set a timer, try going Pomodoro, or tell a reader/friend you’ll send X to them by Y date. Well, maybe ask them if that’s okay, first. (You can force yourself on yourself, but not on others.)
3. Use resources. Want more specific prompts? Have you heard of the internet? There are so many resources, it’s silly to feel like you have nothing to write about. Writer’s Digest has a useful list of prompts. A Google search turns up thousands more. I like fun small prompts like Narrative’s iStories or the Tiny Truths over at Creative Nonfiction’s Twitter.
4. Don’t get overwhelmed by resources. If you’ve spent over three minutes trying to decide which resource to use, you are now procrastinating by trying to control your prompt.
5. Maybe just stay in the physical world, actually. On the internet, you have to know what you’re looking for. This does not lend itself well to relying on prompts generated outside of yourself. A quick internet-free warm-up I like to do is to randomly open a page of a baby names book (yes, I own a baby names book for this purpose; no, I do not have a baby) and write about a character with the name I land on. I also love flipping open random pages of art books and writing for 10 minutes on whatever image I land on. This is wonderful, because it’s like being productive and going to a museum all at once. Remember, the key is to roll with it. Write about the thing you land on. If you go searching for something “better,” you’re now doing the work of creating the prompt yourself, i.e. jumping off the diving board alone. (And when I say that, it’s supposed to sound scary like it does to me.)
6. Send yourself on idea errands. I haven’t had a respectable running habit in a while (thanks to being sick with COVID-19 some months ago), but when I used to run a few times a week, I’d give myself the assignment of finding something on the run to write about when I got home. This made me extra aware of houses I passed, people I saw, things I overheard, feelings the weather gave me, squirrels, sweat, whatever. You can do the same thing with grocery store trips, or … whatever other places you’re leaving your home for during the pandemic.
7. Love notebooks. Notebooks are my friends. If I don’t write in one for a while, I feel sad that we haven’t spent time together and this motivates me to work on the relationship. When I’m writing on paper, I have to commit to whatever I write. I write in pen for the same reason. Generative writing does not happen for me on a computer screen. The delete key is the perfectionist’s easiest addiction.
8. Write without writing. A lot of the work of writing is not in the literal writing process. Thinking is really important. Lying around spaced-out on the couch and letting your brain float to where it floats does wonders. Talking gets ideas flowing. If you can’t get to a writing-on-the-page goal every day, maybe just task yourself with coming up with an idea. It doesn’t need to be on the page to be a thing you accomplished.
Also: remember that an idea is not the same thing as an answer. When Toni Morrison was asked if ideas came to her “in a flash,” she said: “No, it’s a sustained thing I have to play with. I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don’t have any answers to.” If Toni Morrison let her ideas be boring, you can let your ideas be boring. Let them be questions, let them be bad, but let them.
If you feel so inclined, add your own ideas for idea-making in the comments (Non-writers, do you ever generate from prompts? Non-notebook users, care to defend the blank Word document?) and we can have a nice little resource here for writers to procrastinate with.
I highly recommend Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life to all human beings.
Here’s a lovely take on prompt writing by Leslie Pietrzyk: “…with rough, unpolished writing, we focused on potential and underlying ideas and the simple bravery of writing something in 15 minutes.“
I’ll leave you with Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) struggling to come up with the opening scene of Adaptation. (P.S. Kaufman’s 2011 BAFTA lecture is amazing.)