Creative Process

When I was brainstorming blog posts topics a friend of mine, who helped me with Splendificent, asked me to write about my creative process. And I thought that would be super easy. So I thought long and I thought hard on what exactly is my creative process. Then I started to question if I even have a creative process. Most of the time I just sit down and start writing which isn’t a process at all.

There’s no linear path I follow to be creative. I don’t have steps or stages I need to do to get into the creative mind. Actually, I’m always creating in my mind. Even if I watch a show on CW or play a game my mind is still partially focused on telling a story. Because of that, I can never ever understand how a noncreative mind works. What do they think about? How do they make it through the day? What goes through their minds? I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t have a creative mind, but I certainly wouldn’t be me!

In an attempt to find something resembling a creative process for me we must start from the beginning. Literally at the beginning. The beginning of what I’m writing. I find that to be the hardest part of writing anything. My lone goal in the beginning, is to hook the reader/audience. Because if I don’t hook them they won’t consume the rest of my work.  Throw the paperback in the trash, delete the ebook, and leave a nice one-star review to crush my ego. So in books, I try to do hook them immediately. Like crack. But less mind corrupting! Just a little mind corrupting. So when I say immediately I mean first paragraph immediate. For a script, I try to do it within the first 10 pages so the first 10 minutes of the movie. Haven’t you ever watched HBO and seen the first ten minutes of the movie and you were all “this movie is god awful! Never mind the other eighty minutes. These ten minutes are enough to tell me this movie is awful!”  To me writing the beginning of a brand new work reminds me of when I learned to drive. I’m nervous, I have only a vague idea what to do, I almost hit pedestrians, I know my destination but just starting to get there is mentally taxing.

Thinking more about the creative process I’d say the practice has long been part of it for me even before I realized I wanted to write professionally. At a young age, a very young age, I wrote little comic strips about my favorite cartoon characters. As I got older I started writing short stories as well as plays in French while I was in detention. And I was in detention a lot! I’ve gotten a lot of practice over the years so I’ve basically shaped my mind into a creative mind. But, that wasn’t intentional.

Another part of my creative process is just reading books. I typically stay in the fantasy and science fiction range for fiction and historical books and books on mythology and the occult for nonfiction. The historical books and nonfiction books serve as research also for my writing. There’s plenty of wonderful ideas in humanity’s past. Sometimes reading a nonfiction book is like reading about a whole other world.

As for fiction books…I believe it was Stephen King who said good writing is good reading. For me that means reading things, or even watching things, that will inspire me to create. More than that it shows me the craft of writing, how other people put together their stories, how they build their worlds, and how they simply approach the structure of their sentences or dialogue. As a writer, there is a lot I learn simply by reading.

So there you have it. My explanation of my creative process. Which wasn’t much of an explanation at all. Oh well!