Perhaps you use music as a mood enhancer? Right now I’m listening to ‘Neroli’ by Brian Eno. The piece, subtitled ‘Thinking Music Volume IV’, has clearly been designed as a creative tool. It seems to me that Eno’s ambient music is so effective because it suspends time, a characteristic of focused attention. By diminishing narrative in favour of texture, it helps pull our concentration into an absorbed, endless now. This fascinating review discusses how the piece colours the room like an aural perfume and how smell might offer a model of culture in future. This idea is fully developed in this great essay by Eno himself. (Incidentally, the 58-minute ‘Neroli’ is available on iTunes for 79p! I also recommend ‘Bloom‘, the iPhone app Eno developed with Peter Chilvers.)

Of course, Eno is also responsible for one of the most celebrated creative tools, the famous ‘Oblique Strategies‘. First created in the mid 70s with artist Peter Schmidt, this deck of cards offers ‘over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas’, each designed to break a creative deadlock. ‘Make a sudden, destructive, unpredictable action; incorporate’ is one I’ve just picked. The interpretation is up to me and depends on the context of my dilemma. The destructive action might occur within the story I’m writing or I could take out my frustration on the text itself, cutting out chunks more or less at random. The principle behind these cards is that your deadlock comes from a loss of direction. By trusting the card, you begin to move again. But what if the new direction is wrong? For Eno, all decisions are heuristic. You can only test the value of a decision by putting it to the test.

The other principle at work in ‘Oblique Strategies’ is what we might call the ‘Gestalt‘ notion: that the mind is compelled to make order from constituent parts. When we throw random, suggestive elements together, our brains cannot help but connect them. This often brings unexpected and generative patterns to our thinking. Our story shifts into surprising and thrilling new territory rather than coasting along comfortable, generic pathways. This is Lautréamont’s ‘chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table’. What’s more, our neural chemistry rewards us with a boost for such experimentation. Of course, the flip is paranoia, where we overdetermine the connections between unconnected elements in reality.

You can buy ‘Oblique Strategies’ at the enoshop. It’s a handsome pack but there are various free versions around the web, as well as widgets and at least one version for the iPhone. I must admit, I’ve attempted to use the deck on and off for years with limited success. I find my own interpretations disappointingly prosaic. For whatever reason, the cards do not spark with me. The principle is a sound one, though. Other creative agencies, such as IDEO, have formalised their creative processes into similar tools and I suggest you take notice of the ‘rules’, wants and discoveries in your own practice, which you can later draw upon in more frustrating situations. Blixa Bargeld here discusses his own experiments with such a system, emphasising the importance of trusting the process.

Similar tricks are well known to graphic designers, who often keep a library of reference materials close to hand. There is a whole industry of books and visual prompts. Writers use them too, but mainly to get started or for exercises. What I’m interested in is something more systematic, covering the entire writing process from start to finish. Emma Newman’s Short Story Club, for example, is an ingenious solution to many problems a writer faces. She’s effectively outsourced her motivation and created a system of inspiration on tap. This is a very clever tool.

A plumber is somebody who has the right tools for a specific set of problems and has learned how to use them. By simple analogy, we can define the writer’s toolbox. What are your recurring problems? Assemble a kit full of the right things to fix them. If concentration is an effort because you’re always thinking about what needs to be done later, lighting may be your answer. I’ve found a small, strong source of light in an otherwise darkened room creates an intense amount of concentration. Hide the clock and time dissolves. Tools to focus, tools to relax, tools for inspiration and anxiety. Once you have identified a problem, find a piece of kit to fix it.

We can be more specific. Writing brings particular questions to answer. For some, inventing plot is a joy. They tackle it like a crossword and get great pleasure from the mechanics. But it’s not always so easy. Luckily, there are resources to draw on. Rather than a supernatural tool of divination, the ‘I Ching’ is a profound taxonomy of change in human relationships — the very stuff of fiction, in fact. If you are stuck for a resonant scenario, I’m willing to bet that it has some excellent suggestions. This handy tool generates a random choice. Mine was ‘Chun‘:

Clouds and thunder:
The image of Difficulty at the Beginning.
Thus the superior man
Brings order out of confusion.

Reading the full entry, I find it incredibly suggestive not only of plot situations, but of an entire emotional landscape. It throws up visual images, places, relationships. There is the germ of a whole story in there. It’s fun to skip through these random suggestions until one strikes. It is full of little aphorisms that can even provide the premise of a novel. Working with this tool is an ongoing, patient collaboration.

Drama teachers will often refer to their toolkit, meaning a set of techniques. I’m suggesting something more corporeal than this. I’m talking about technological props. It’s grounding to consider it in these practical terms, as spanners and drill bits and leaking taps. Every writer’s toolkit will be their own, determined by the problems they need to fix. So, I throw it over to you. What do you keep in that red metal box and how do you use it for?

Scour junk shops for tarnished images and postcards. I found a bundle of love letters from 1908. All found things come with baggage, uncanny presence, a muffled ghostliness. The context of these things has rotted away. It’s up to the writer to prise it out. We’re looking for the spectral corridors around this room we call ‘the modern world’. Busted 78s and talking Action Men. Old objects retain the fingerprints of time — surfaces cracked or rubbed smooth, time made visible. The work of gasses, revealed as patina and sepia. A chemical narrative as slow as a river. We write of love and murder but time is the strange beast that lumbers around us.

These forgotten things are the dead trying to communicate with us, usually sad and desperate messages. They know they’re forgotten, they don’t understand why, and they are calling for help. Ghosts are plastic, shellac, with transistors for souls. Flesh perishes but these crackling voices endure. The forgotten and marginalized are important because they say more about today than the present cares to admit. Call it the return of the repressed. The past is much stranger than the future. But the present is strangest of all. One day your writing will be ancient too.

Near my home is Anna’s Museum. It is an old shop front, now a home, with a collection of found objects in the window. Like an archeological Bagpuss, each object has a spidery placard.

Found Magazine and Hurricane Jane might be good places to start. There are a thousand answers to every mystery.

You’re a writer. You’ve come so far with a piece. You have a friend who’s an illustrator. Send her the story and ask her to knock up a few images based on the work. Continue to shuttle back and forth, and see the work in a whole new way. The images will stimulate your imagination and open up the subject more explosively than polite criticism can.

Put the shoe on the other foot. You are an illustrator. You’ve a couple of images that need a reboot. Email them to a writer friend. Get them to interpret and fictionalize. Let’s spread the fuel around. Without a doubt, it will cleanse your dusty eyes. Both parties get some new material. You may even end up fusing two disciplines — image and text in solidarity.

This technique offers a way to critique the work from within, using creative means. From alienation to empathy, from objective to interpretative. The story shifts from a lump of concrete to a field of possibilities. It gets you out of the writers’ ghetto. All that fraught talk about the premise and conflict. Disobedience strengthens a discipline.

Artists often complain when critics misunderstand their work. I wonder how many authors pause to listen and are turned on to a whole new possibility by something a critic said? Do you know of any examples of how a ‘misreading’ (à la Barthes) was able to reveal what the writer couldn’t see? Or of any works that were positively influenced by a critical notice? Perhaps you’ve even done it yourself? All suggestions, as always, are welcomed.

And the point is? Those simple (yet tricky to find) ideas do not need to be bluntly literal. They can be flecks and shards, almost Lear-like in their disconnection. They hover in the lucid dawn. The point is to trust them, to take them at their worth and to unpack them. They are seeds containing the genetic blueprint of a work. From them, you can develop worlds, tracing their lines, ideas and suggestions. Ear-catching melodies work on readers the way beauty turns heads. Some phrases remain mysterious, even to their author. Their power is impregnable. When you find such a sentence, build a temple around it.

Poets, what phrases have stuck to your barnacled underside? I’m thinking of those that never fully give up their meaning — Fitzgerald’s famous ‘blue honey’ and much of ‘King Lear’ (’The worst is not/So long as we can say: This is the worst’). In a way, they are spells. Which ones do you recommend?

Luckily, writing coach Jill Dearman has distilled her classes into a Kindle-sized book. If you’ve missed your fix of Paperback Jack, I heartily recommend it. Jill has been teaching these ideas (along with journalism) for about ten years. I’ve mapped my thoughts below, having lived with the book for a couple of months. However, here’s a trailer which gives the most elegant insight:

Writing is a curious trade: half-monk, half-hitman (to quote James Bond). Dearman brings a lively jostle of Zen and pragmatic Judaism, shot through with some tried-and-true business sense. We’ve seen the spiritual mix in Natalie Goldberg’s celebrated ‘Writing Down the Bones‘. But, whereas ‘Bones’ evokes lazy evenings in Taos, New Mexico, ‘Bang the Keys‘ has a New York attitude, direct and very ‘can do’. When I read the narrative aloud in my head, I imagine a character from ‘Desperately Seeking Susan‘. That’s a compliment.

This book loves acronyms (my favourite is P.L.O.T.W.I.C.H). Accordingly, the title forms a four-point plan to define and manage the entire writing process:

• Begin with with your strongest idea
• Arrange your material into a concrete form
• Nurture your project with love so that others may love it too
• Get it done and let it go out into the world independently

Between these markers, Dearman squeezes a lot of shrewd thinking and exercises. My fear is that I’ll unconsciously rip them off when I return to regular posting.

Intriguingly, this four-step process is adapted from a Torah lecture likening the creative process to the creation of the universe. Renaissance poets had a similar conception of what they did. I’m fond of this idea because the acronym unfolds into a story, a larger meaning, almost a manifesto. It gives purpose to the writing. Not that there’s anything airy about this. For me, the ‘bang’ of the title is like a starting pistol. If there’s a key word here, it’s ‘ACTION!’ I’ve noted a macho tone enter writing instruction in recent years, inherited no doubt from business books. Instead, ‘Bang the Keys’ is firm and urging, like a good friend who wants to see you do well.

Dearman also inherits ideas from the business world. She is particularly strong on definition and structuring, the ‘mission statements’ of creative writing, with emphasis on ‘the calendar effect’ giving projects a clear scale of excecution. Incidentally, I’ve just read Professor Richard Wiseman’s ‘59 Seconds‘. It seems most of Jill’s motivational tactics can be scientifically verified!

Many writing books are oddly joyless when discussing cultural material, dissecting other novels on the operating table. Dearman is clearly in love with books, films, ideas and music. The book is dense with cultural fibre. Random selections discuss Sontag, Gladwell, Kerouac, Dead or Alive, and perhaps several hundred more. We might not agree on ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ but I’m firmly on her wavelength.

Writers should kick the habit of browsing for yet another how-to guide. It’s easy to over-prepare, deferring the ‘right time’ to get down to it. But a mentor is invaluable and ‘Bang the Keys’ could well be the one. You are nudged into action on every page and it’s never long before you hit an exercise to take you back to your ‘cahier’ again. Let all those other distractions gather dust on Borders bookshelves — there’s more than enough baked into this little volume. The rest is up to you. One of Dearman’s last tasks in to ‘create your own exercises’. This spirit of independence is both a point of arrival and departure. ‘The end is the beginning’.

Ultimately, there’s a veracity to this guide that could only have come with keen ears, empathy and experience. Yet it is still open to excitement, intelligence, possibility. If you’ve enjoyed this blog at all, I’ll wager that ‘Bang the Keys’ was written just for you.

Available here.

When I took careers sessions at my former university, I always encouraged students to have a story. The one question they would be asked over the coming years — guaranteed — was what they intended to do after graduation. They were taking part in arts courses which didn’t easily translate to the outside world and a lot of them weren’t clear about what they wanted. The question oppressed most of them and their response was usually a conversation killer, a mumble or a shrug. It wrecked confidence in their creative identities and others weren’t impressed either.

“You write essays about your creative writing and short films and artwork,” I’d remind them. “Extend that to yourself. What you do and why you do it. If someone asks you the question, they’re inviting you into a conversation. The least you can do is give an interesting reply.”

If you don’t quite know what you’re doing, make it sound as if you do. Indulge in a little creative fiction. It’s much better for your confidence. When I graduated, I told people I wanted to set up as a freelance researcher for artists. I would compile background data for writers, source materials for sculptors, help write funding proposals for filmmakers. I can think of worse occupations. People seemed interested in the idea and were usually generous with advice. I had no intention of doing this but as I explained it to my future employer, I almost believed it. He took me on researching news stories instead.

As I talked to students about this, six years ago, I could sense a conflict. There was the desire to believe but also genuine resistance. One of them actually said it: “I’m no good at networking”. “It’s not networking,” I assured him. “It’s just conversation.” Going back now, I imagine those attitudes have changed. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and dozens of other social tools mean everybody is having that conversation. Nobody thinks anything of it.

I have to stress, I read Seth Godin but I’m not a fan of our contemporary mania for marketing. Seeing every encounter as an opportunity to exploit is a corrosive idea. I still hang onto the idea that it’s conversation and not networking. There is a distinction which the infiltration of personal marketing is blurring. We do what we love regardless, everything else is a bonus. I’m uncomfortable with blag, bullshit and all kinds of sales pitch. The story you tell is an invitation to talk. The traffic goes in both directions.

As a writer, certain questions are inevitable. Have answers. Enjoy telling your story. It will shift and grow with every narration. Eventually it may even be true. What’s your book about? “The last boy alive who still knows how to read.” Can I see some of it? “Sure. I have it on my iPod Touch. I’ll email it to you if you like? There… done!” In your bag, you might carry a POD copy at all times. When somebody eventually asks if you’re published, you don’t have to tell a lie. Just hand it to them. It beats a calling card. Is this story a lie? Well, isn’t that the one question that novelists should always be asking anyway?

Objects are there to be used. They create action and transport the story. But objects are much more than just plot devices. As a novel develops, an object accrues meaning as it absorbs the values of the characters who handle it. Think of the satchel of money in ‘No Country for Old Men’ or the suitcase of cash in ‘Shallow Grave’. Objects narrate the secrets of a story without the need for exposition. In ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’, Dickie’s rings become increasingly resonant. They communicate ideas about class, taste, the emotional loyalties of the three characters and so on. It is sentimentality over the rings that almost catches up with Tom. To some extent, ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ becomes the story of those rings.

A photograph to be discovered, a car in which illicit lovers meet, an anonymous video of your home — what is the story of your object? If you can create this heft and history, you are more than halfway to making your writing pulse with significance. Objects clothe the abstracts of feeling and thought. There’s philosophy enough in the outcome of these objects.

You can do the same with writing. Jot down stray ideas in the margins of novels, choreograph a scene or some plot progression, a character sketch on a beer mat whilst you wait for a friend. Dump them in a shoebox. And, from time to time, when we’re dry and need something to work with, dip into the pot and see if there’s something you can use. Creativity thrives on time and chaos. Sometimes I’ll trip over a phrase I don’t remember writing at all. Sometimes it’s lost to me, incomprehensible out of context. I found three cryptic lines I wrote when I was 12 — I know because I dated them. Sometimes, it’s just what I’m looking for.

I like this approach over a linear journal because I can pull out the fragments and lay them side by side. I can build sequences and hierarchies — like rearranging alphabet blocks. Characters and landscapes wait patiently for the call, with all the little hunches I don’t understand or have the time for now. The rattle of rain on the skylight wakes me early one morning. I pull out the shoebox and begin to sift.

So, keep tucking those things away where you’ll find them later. You never know when their value will increase. Art is the process of collecting loose change, waiting for it to accrue and add up to something more than petty cash.

I’m interested in juvenilia. It is often earnest, has a guileless charm and I wish mature writers could recover its naivety. In a way, it is purer, unguarded. Once a style coheres, it rarely changes dramatically and becomes a case of diminishing refinement, often to the point of self-parody. As good as this style may be, it is usually accompanied by a loss of surprise or vitality. The cruel illusion of a creative peak is that one can fail to recognize it until later on. Because confidence is so high, creatives often feel on the verge of their greatest work, only to realize that the best is already behind them. It’s like those cartoons where the character runs off the cliff and hangs in the air, legs working furiously. Or those love affairs you never paused to appreciate because you thought they’d go on forever. After three dizzy months, things start to fall apart and you come back to earth with a bump. The planets have already moved apart, the moment of alignment is over. You might as well try to enjoy the pure, playful times before you get wise to yourself. Before you are too knowing to ask questions that will later make you wince.

There are always exceptions. Of course there are. Some get a second, even third act and there are rare examples of continuous longevity. To me, these are characterized by artists who find something of the adolescent within themselves again, who are willing to embrace the failure of ungainly experiments. I’m thinking here of Miles Davis, Lou Reed or Neil Young, great chunks of time in the wilderness before they find their way again. Perhaps it’s the unholy time it takes to write a book, but authors tend to play it safe.

Bowie, as always, provides a surprising take on this, explicitly embracing his ramshackle, formless roots on ‘Toy‘. The album remains unreleased but these Newley-esque characters and wayward vocals were ultimately revisited on ‘Heathen’. The result is the odd balance of an artist at both ends of his career, rediscovering himself through wider eyes, finally learning to love his former, gawky self.

Initially, it can be wise to dispense with sentences altogether and deal directly with words themselves. ’The Weekend Novelist‘ advises that we focus on strong nouns, active verbs and resonant objects. These build clear images in the imagination, grounding the writing whilst doing the heavy lifting. One exercise, borrowed from scriptwriting, is called ’spinning down the page’. It’s exactly as it sounds. You jot fragments, like stabs of poetry, breaking the line after each action or image, before moving onto the next. In this way, you can move at the speed of thought, too swift to stop and pull an idea apart. The point of it is to root your writing in the vivid details without getting bogged down in abstract discussions. It’s a swift way to generate a great deal of material. The bare bones of a whole novel can even emerge in this way.

It can also help to visualize what you’re writing using word webs or mind maps. Pick a topic that animates you. Pop it at the heart of the page and connect outwards. Set an alarm if you like the pressure of a time constraint. Three minutes is about right. Then, pick the most interesting development and continue to spin or use the best material as the basis for writing. The spatial element helps to clarify relationships and structures. As well as effective warm-ups, both of these exercises are useful to tighten up a project at any stage. Distilling the work from memory can really help a sprawling fiction to regain focus.

In ‘The Artist’s Way‘, Julia Cameron advocates daily work with ‘morning pages‘, a commitment to fill x amount of space with whatever happens to be on your mind. Cameron uses the creative process to help alleviate the hang-ups that often block it. It’s a nice idea and if it works for you, great. But morning pages tend towards therapy and it’s just my personal preference that I don’t write for emotional self-expression. Instead, morning pages actually diminish my appetite for writing because my habitual moaning and petty tragedies get boring very quickly. I even started to call them ‘mourning pages’. Similarly, automatic writing only offers me the usual humdrum thought patterns, rather than delivering surprises. I find blogging a far more engaging way of warming up. It keeps me (largely) on topic, gets me to enthuse about what I’m supposed to be doing and means that I don’t wander too far into confessional. I can be a critical person but my writing character ‘Jack’ isn’t like that at all. He likes to keep things upbeat.

Something that suits me is ‘writing through’. Setting aside any carefully structured plans, I’ll just keep going, flowing in and out of the fiction as required. Some sections will be detailed, others simply note what I’m trying to do. I’ll contradict myself, switch tenses and pronouns and points of view. It doesn’t matter. I’ll write a lot of bad dialogue, tons of exposition, much more than I’ll need. These will be fixed next time around. I’ll meander and jump cut where I’ve lost my way and need to get on the trail again. The point is to keep the energy and to foster a sense of plenty. It sounds time consuming but I’ll wager it compares favourably with more methodical approaches. A lot of time can be wasted trying to force an unwilling piece into a preconceived plan.

I tend to write the first draft of everything directly to my journal. Recently I’ve started to use a new technique called ‘bridging’ which uses each piece of work as leverage for further ideas. The idea is to dissolve boundaries between different projects. For example, I’ve just written about a book by Stasiuk and used the review to kick start a new story and a blog post. In turn, the story and post will serve as the basis for other ideas, and so on. I build this stage into everything I write. It creates a continuum and cohesion but also means that everything I work on is a warm-up for something else.