Inspiration

Inspiration's a funny thing.

It can come from anywhere, but only at unexpected times. When you search for it, it's nowhere to be found. And when you need it the most, it finally arrives... for something entirely different.

I've got at least two unfinished Farther Room posts right now waiting on the fickle ministrations of inspiration... but instead I'm writing this.

Like I said... funny thing.

Take this dream I had the other night...

Wait wh-- awww, where's everybody going...?

Don't worry, I'm not going to go into detail about it. I'd much rather turn it into a story... which is sort of my point.

Every so often, my slumbering mind will spit these vivid scenes out at me. I'll see a person on the run from an army, or fighting giant robots in hidden corridors... I'll see a tender moment between two people, while a jealous third person watches from the shadows... my brain puts on little movies for me...

(this one time I dreamt Johnny Depp and Wynona Ryder were running away from a cross-dressing Meatloaf...)

(...but that's another story entirely...)

...and then I wake up wondering who those people were, what their story was, what their lives were about. And, whereas once upon a time I used to just let that creative charge dissipate into distracted nothingness, now, I grab it. I harness it. I turn on the computer, I grab a pen and paper, and write it all down.

And that's probably the most difficult part. JUST WRITING IT DOWN is something you learn. It's not the first instinct. The first instinct is to sit back and enjoy the mental movie... not cannibalize and plagiarize it for your own fictional pursuits. Turning creative thought into actual words can be the most difficult process this side of childbirth. It kind of IS childbirth, if you look at it a certain way.

I had this dream once (about that aforementioned quiet little love triangle), and the scene was so powerful to me... the feelings of fear and surprise and excitement and jealousy mixing in that moment were so potent... that I couldn't stop thinking about it for an entire weekend. I was in San Diego with RC, and I didn't have a laptop at the time, and I had no notebooks or pens. I could have bought one, but I wasn't as disciplined as I am now... and... something else... I knew that if I wrote it down, my mind would ease away from it. And I didn't want that.

It was my first time in a new place, and this dream -- this idea -- just would not leave. So, I nurtured it. Every new sight I saw added to the story. Every random musing triggered by every passing fancy became a scene, regardless of how disparate the elements. Every new setting, a place for things to happen. "Creepy parking garage... what if somebody just found a dead body right here." Boom. Somebody does, in the story. Like that.

Between the music we were listening to while driving around and the influx of new visual information, I had an entire setting, all the main characters, their back stories, their personalities, their relationships, their struggles, their arcs, their entire lives, from beginning to end. I knew what the first three issues -- oh, yeah, it's a comic -- I knew what the first three issues of their story were, and I know what the last three issues are... and I've got about ten different stories to tell about them in between.

In two days.

And when I got home, THAT's when I wrote it all down. It was a pretty unique experience that I've never quite been able to duplicate.

(I still don't have a title yet, though.)

(I suck at titles.)

Anyway, my point is... the inspiration... the muse... it's like a wild thing. It's a force of nature. It's like...

RARR! MUSE!

And the only way you're going to get any good out of it... the only way it becomes more than just a fun little show your brain puts on for you... is to harness it. Write it down. Think about it. THINK ABOUT IT. Every second. Ponder, rerun, explore, expand. Because once you get that fucker moving... it's like a snowball rolling downhill. It just builds! In ways you never would have expected.

And I swear to you... I SWEAR to you... the shit my subconscious has given me is ten times better than anything I've ever invented while awake.

Dreams are where our best ideas live. We're just too damn distracted when we're awake to come up with the really good stuff. Most of us are, anyway.

Hell, even Twilight was based on a dream Stephanie Meyer had! And look how that turned out!

(...well...)

So, that's how it is. For me, anyway. On a lucky day, that's my process. Every other day, I try my damnedest to artificially recapture that creative hotspot. Sometimes I'm successful, sometimes not so much, but I just keep plugging away. You gotta! And when the spark comes, you follow it wherever it's willing to take you.

Which is how posts like this happen.