At every turn in your writing, you will be faced with choices, decisions about the direction you should go, what someone should say, what a character might do. And when you back yourself into a corner, it will be your creativity which gets you out of it. More than one writer has enjoyed and excelled in the game of "How do I get Out of this?" where you specifically get your characters into a jam, and then see if you can write them back out of it. Keeps you alert, that's for sure!
At any rate, as long as you have the quality of focus, the more creativity you have, the better off you are.
Specifically, the structure of creative breakthrough has been pretty well broken down. The ability to design "Ah Hah" moments, moments of unusual clarity, is an incredible boon to those of us in the arts.
Basically, the process works as follows:
You clarify the problem. Define as clearly as possible exactly what the difficulty is.
Do massive research. Swamp yourself in every possible piece of information which might contribute to an answer. This is done both to give you raw material to chew over, and to keep your conscious mind occupied.
Brainstorm every answer you can come up with.
When you have reached the absolute limit to what you can come up with, take a complete break. Exercise, take a nap, make love, go see a movie, etc. IT IS WHEN YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND IS TOTALLY PREOCCUPIED WITH ANOTHER TASK THAT THE AH-HAH! MOMENT WILL OCCUR.
The key to brainstorming is that you MUST give yourself SPECIFIC permission to come up with absurd answers. Otherwise you will think only in a direct, linear path, and miss the chance of genius-level breakthrough. For instance, you're writing a scene in which a character faces certain death--surrounded in the kitchen by vicious escaped bank robbers with a dozen guns. How do we get out of this? You start brainstorming. Could your character be a karate expert. No. She's 67 years old, with one leg, and you don't want to change that. Can she appeal to their humanity? No, you've already established that one of them killed his OWN mother for taking a piece of his Juicy Fruit. Well, then...could God reach down and take her out of this freaking situation? Well, no, but...(the image of the roof being lifted up, and God reaching down suddenly strikes a nerve). What if something ELSE lifted the roof up? A T-Rex? No, Speilberg's cornered the market on Jurassic carnivores. How about...a tornado? Or a hurricane? What exactly IS the weather in this scene? Could it be that I never considered that? Even a bad rainstorm could wash out roads, trap criminals in the house, kill power...
Hmmm. Kill power? If this was built up properly, would the audience go for that?
Maybe not--but what if the power outage created the crisis in the first place...and it's the power coming back ON that changes the situation? Eyes adjusted to darkness don't like light... So maybe there aren't a dozen guns. Make it two guns. And the light comes on, and they shield their eyes, and she wrenches herself away and runs out into the storm, where the fractured electric lines flap about in the yard, sparking...
Hmmm.
This is the way brainstorming works. Give yourself permission to think of the absurd, and go from the impossible to the improbable to the possible to the YES! THAT WORKS! moment that we all love.
This is another place where the dream diaries come in useful. It is quite valuable to specifically exercise your creative muscles. Looking at the Goal-Conflict-Disaster-Reaction-Dilemma-Decision model, you can see that virtually any image you have can fit into this cycle somewhere.
If the image of an object comes to you: Is it a Goal? (Does someone want it?) Is it a Disaster? Does it pose a Dilemma? If so, to who? Why? How might they want to resolve it, and what kind of goal might result?
If the image of a person--who are they? What might they want? What might their inner demons be?
What about if it's a place? Or an action?
Practice playing with these pieces, specifically stretching and twisting your mind. Such mental gymnastics are the tools you will need to build a career.
NEWSPAPER CLIPPING EXERCISE
Another exercise, one which I recommend heartily, is to open the newspaper and give yourself one minute to find an article upon which to base a story idea. You don't have to write the story, but DO block it out using the tools we have detailed. Once again, this kind of exercise gives you absolutely invaluable skills. It is important that you have absolute confidence in your ability to think yourself out of any corner you might back yourself into, that you can generate a hundred ideas an hour for days at a time. And the only way you can do that is practicing to generate creativity on demand. These exercises work. I would suggest that you try them, and devise others of your own.
Other Techniques:
The science fiction game. Science fiction is specifically a game of "What-if". There are actually three basic questions:
What if
If Only
If this goes on
"What If" is used in questions like: what if someone invented Time Travel? What if someone resurrected his dead children? What if it turned out that Santa Claus was real?
"If Only" is a wish list. If only we lived for two hundred years, what might we accomplish? If only human beings weren't jealous, how much more sex might we enjoy? If only health food tasted more like ice cream, and less like puree of bat shit...
"If this goes on" Observes a phenomenon, and says "whoops! this could be trouble" or "this could be fun". Overpopulation, pollution, inflation--all have been fodder for many many science fiction stories. And will be for many more.
Although these tools have been most specifically developed in SF, they are invaluable in other genres as well.
How might you adapt them to your work?
Mastermind Groups
When you have a problem, try getting together with two or more other writers or friends, and see how many ideas you can come up with in an hour. Once again, AND THIS IS MOST IMPORTANT--give yourself permission to come up with silly answers. This is the core key to breaking writers block.
WRITER'S BLOCK
Writer's block is, specifically, the confusion of two separate states:
Flow State
Editing State
Flow state is where you are just drifting, coming up with ideas, writing raw text, whatever.
Editing state is where you are judging the ideas that you came up with.
THESE STATES MUST NEVER BE CONFUSED.
If you don't mix these two states, you will NEVER suffer writer's block. You may be writing drivel, but you will ALWAYS be able to write. And it is a great truth that if you write enough, and read enough good writing, and stay focused on your goal, you will begin to improve. I believe it was Ray Bradbury who said that a writer has "A million words" of shit in him, and that after that, he begins to be a real writer.
So get going! Write scenes, and scenes, and scenes. Edit and plan one day, write raw text the next.
You may need to experiment to find the environment which best supports your optimal flow state. For many people, soft Jazz or classical music works well. I like ocean sounds and Vivaldi. But you must experiment, until you find what works best. Trust me--if you will pay attention to what I said in this paragraph, you will have five times your money's worth. Frankly, I am shocked at the number of people who go brain-dead for ideas. I am NEVER blocked. Sometimes I write lousy, but I can ALWAYS write. And I guarantee you--a hundred thousand words of lousy writing will teach you a hell of a lot more than six months of empty pages.
HOMEWORK
Identify the core "what if" questions in five of your favorite movies.
Chose a favorite crisis moment in two of your favorite films, and describe how the plot might have spun in another direction.
Chose a news story from your local paper, and briefly detail the movie which could be spun out of it.
Describe some of the things you can do to optimize your creative environment. What is your ideal daily output? And, even given your current sched, what are you committed to producing?
