The Golf Club and the Sponge
Jeremy de Quidt, a fine new author in the David Fickling stable(1), approached me on behalf of a colleague. Would I send him a picture of me with a sponge on my head?
The colleague in question (Jeanne Birdsall) wanted lots of pictures of authors with sponges on their heads for a lecture tour she was making. Her point was this - that an author’s mind needs to be sponge-like. It needs to suck up lots and lots of ideas from all the things with which it comes into contact, in order to be able to put them into that novel. To reassure me that I was not being set up, Jeremy included a couple of shots of himself and another colleague looking extremely handsome while balancing large yellow sponges on their heads (actually I think Jeremy’s was a cake).
Now, I’m afraid I suffer from a high degree of self consciousness. I did not feel capable of being photographed with a large yellow washing aid adorning my scalp. I begged to be let off. I claimed that my creative process was entirely different. It was not so much like being an omniverous sucker, I said, as being the victim of a lightning strike. If I were to balance anything on my head it would be a long metal object like a golf club.
Authors are always being asked where they get their ideas. And to answer the question truthfully I think we need both the golfclub and the sponge. Yes, ideas can come from anywhere and everywhere, from thoughts, meetings, books, conversations, radio or television, from going to new places or pursuing new hobbies. You need a lot of material to write a book, chapter after chapter, scene after scene, trying to make that world real. We suck it all up from our surroundings, transform it and spew it out into another universe. Perhaps another image for the author’s mind might be a very very small black hole. A shot of me balancing a black hole on my head, however, would pose a photographical challenge.
But that first idea - the one that says “hey, there’s a novel here” is sudden and, well, electrifying. It can come from the strangest places - two of mine have been from dreams that woke me in the middle of the night. One (although I haven’t tried writing this, yet) was even from playing a computer game, in which I saw my ship suddenly boarded and captured by a pirate. I was outraged - and inspired. I spent much of the remainder of that day in a daze, thrashing out the plot of how my unfortunate merchants would get even with their vile enemies, even to the extent of experiencing the “voice” of the story in my head, and beginning to write down key lines and phrases. That’s a lightning strike.
And like the mad scientists of horror movies, we need them to make our creations live.
(1) Stable. As in an array of magnificent but neurotic beasts on whom the publisher spends a certain amount of money in the hope that one of them will turn out to be a winner. I find the comparison very apt. And I think he’s onto a good thing with Jeremy, whose book The Toymaker comes out in September.
Tags: Creative Writing