Where Did THAT Come From?

Ever wonder why something pops into your head?

Researchers call these pop-up thoughts “spontaneous cognition,” and we tend to notice them when our minds are idle. They can be anything from the creative impetus for a story to downright obsessive or depressive.

I think just about every writer has heard some variation on “where did you get your idea?” The answer, apparently, is the amygdala, a part of our frontal lobe where emotions get their legs. But it didn’t accomplish it alone.

Francois Richter, a Canadian professor of neuropsychology writes in The Conversation, that “[s]pontaneous thoughts emerge from long-term memory, unconscious pieces of phrases, images, actions and ideas that also give rise to dreams.” They are set off by a variety of triggers arising from emotion, and these emotions determine whether the thousands of thoughts our gray matter cycles through each day result in simple urges, obsession, or creativity as the brain sorts through our moods and competing needs. While anxiety may trigger a subset of troubling ruminations, Richter writes that positive emotions tend to lead toward the unusual and creative, and some of the most random come from “microemotions” we may not even be attending to.

Random Inspiration

But what is the “process” of turning some random thought into an idea and then into a novel? The short answer is …It’s complicated?

Some writers say they outline the plot then start writing, maybe deviating a little or a lot as subplots arise or characters force a new direction.

Other writers say their first drafts pour out and the story sort of finds its own plot and their characters evolve to drive it forward.

Some have a character who finds their story. Others have a story that finds its character.

I think for me random thoughts tend to inspire story and I just start writing, but that inspiration doesn’t always evolve effortlessly into a complete tale (consider the source!). When it works, how does it work?

The “Vignette”

If it’s the idle brain and microemotions that send our minds back into long-term memories to trigger those random thoughts, then it’s in these vignettes of resonant experience that I find the spark of story. Those sparks then attract the emergence of a character to meet the needs of that story. I’m a visual thinker and often I “see” story like an internal video, hearing sounds and visualizing settings and interactions. I don’t think I’ve ever successfully pre-plotted a story. I may outline, map and write character studies after people and events emerge and I need those notes to ensure continuity and consistency. But think ahead? Not so much. When I’ve tried, I’ve felt like I’ve lost the spark.

I don’t say, “today I’m going to write a story,” either; I can’t just “idle” my mind to find inspiration. It’s never that idle. Nonfiction, is different. I have a topic, or a point I want to make and it falls into place. With fiction, I may initially be ambushed by a thought that somehow resonates as a starter. Reflecting on that moment, that vignette, then writing it seems to generate subsequent scenes and action drawn from other resonant moments to meet the emerging narrative.

The Starter

For example, my initial inspiration for Black River emerged from a rustic campsite on Potter’s Flowage in West Central Wisconsin where I spent many a weekend with my late husband. I remember one night by the campfire, a bright moon silhouetting a flock of geese flying overhead, and it was so absolutely quiet you could hear their wings and the chirr of frogs and the occasional throaty croak of a bullfrog. It made those tamarack-stained waters with their long-dead stumps reaching up to unsettle canoes feel that much more mysterious.

That memory was an ambush. It was only a starter, a way to begin writing where all the other imaginative trappings of story emerged from, which is some nexus of the hippocampus, our memory retrieval system, and the amygdala. The hippocampus, by being our conduit to memory, helps us order the logic of what can be imagined by sorting our learned experience and may even combine information from random associations to create new possibilities. At least that’s what the research tells us.

So, some filing system in my brain proposed that an important plot point in Black River would be derived from a memory vignette from an empty Northwest Pacific Coast beach full of massive chunks of driftwood, black sand, and one tiny white rock that appeared incredibly out of place. I blame the hippocampus and amygdala for giving the stone its power. These resonant memories seem to be filed in my head by whatever emotion I attached to them at the time. And I think sometimes what draws the vignettes together is a thematic thread that isn’t always clear as it’s being written. Maybe.

Sometimes Starters Fail

The vignettes don’t always find their way to an endpoint. I have a stalled “maybe novel” WIP that emerged from reflections almost a decade ago while walking the dog along our quiet country road.

While working over some idea in my dissertation, I stopped in the shade of an old burr oak. It was a steamy August late afternoon. A haze of corn sweat rose in this shallow valley that stretched away west. I found myself mesmerized by the way the late sun burnished the haze to butter, and softened the edges of the woods fringing the fields. The sky north and south began to blush a little peach.

I reached into a pocket for a dog treat and felt my “good luck” stone in there. I picked it up in a river in northern Wisconsin that played a role in my research. For some reason when I contemplated that water-sculpted black basalt stone with its white streaks in odd geometric shapes, it helped me focus and cement my thoughts.

My good luck rock made me think of a stone my then almost-3-year-old picked up more than a decade earlier at the place we “scattered” his father’s cremains in a beautiful valley along the Klondike Highway in Canada. On his own, he chose to leave the rock at the site of his father’s memorial back home in Wisconsin. It was a striking connection for such a young child to make as his way of remembering his father. (Unfortunately, those memories fade fast and I doubt my now 20-something son remembers this).

The Random Ambush

This all occurred to me as I walked the dog in a golden mist of corn sweat and sunset some decade-plus later, while holding my stone in my pocket. A random ambush. And since I used to drive by that spot almost daily, I wondered, perhaps a little from the anthropologist’s perspective, about what kind of sacred site would it become if one left a stone each time they passed.

This idea of a memory stone for the dead inspired the WIP, where a woman struggles in a male-dominated world in which most of the men died in a battle against a ruling elite. They leave their stones at the site of the battle, remembering their loved ones, daily, as the mound and their bitterness grows. She is placed in an awkward role of leading and convincing her people to abandon everything they know for survival, including their memorials to the dead …

And there the story sits, some four or five chapters in, too long to be a short story, and not yet complete.

Another nine years have ticked on and I keep thinking about picking it up again. But I await that next random ambush to tell me what’s next.

What’s your creative process?

 

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