Creative Plunder: Drawing on your own life

Creative Plunder

Sometimes the inspirations that we resist most in our fiction writing are those from our own lives: they seem too specific or mundane to include. But what if we investigated our own lived experience in order to become more creative, treating it as a treasure trove? How would that change our approaches?

Start with freewriting (or stream of consciousness writing). Why? Because many practitioners, such as Cameron and Goldberg, advise using this tool, in order to bypass the ‘judge’ that tells us we can’t write, and to draw out interesting phrases or ideas that can be developed later.

You might also want to use mind mapping, which is an accessible way to get ideas down on paper. Writing lists is another seemingly simple form of idea generation that frees us from ‘the judge’. In brief, here’s what we did:

• Mind mapping, lists, freewriting
• Jobs, disjunctures, everyday places, travel, memories, knowledge from experience, buildings.
• Close specific detail – all the senses
• Close observation – looking at the world with writer’s eyes
• Creative visualisation
• Rites of passage

And here’s how to expand it:

• Rites of passage x 3
• Jobs – specific details on everyday lives.
• Trajectories and stories
• Draw it (making connections).

Exercises

1. Create mini mind maps all about you. (This exercise is adapted from Tony Buzan’s The Mind Map Book.)
2. Freewriting on a building that’s important to you. Or a building you’ve noticed recently.
3. Freewriting on a rite of passage that you’ve experienced or observed.
4. Create Creative Plunder mind maps. Include jobs, disjunctures – moments when your thinking or experience shifted, everyday places (incl. buildings), travel, memories, tacit knowledge from everyday experience.
5. Take one of these and think about the detail, using all the senses deliberately. Picture it. (If you’re doing this with students, work on getting them to picture the place in their minds.)
6. Write for 5 mins. Focus particularly on the ordinary, the mundane, but be as specific as you can. Read it to a partner or discuss how that felt.

Exercises that extend this work:

Whichever aspect of the Creative Plunder Mind Map you chose (and you might have done places of course) it has a place associated with it. Focus on the place. Hone in on somewhere in particular. If you’ve already done place, move to a different room or adjacent space or have the narrator walk somewhere, or hone in on the detail even more. We’re talking: from the POV of someone in the room looking at the detail, not someone in a helicopter flying overhead. Remember were deliberately using the senses.Some kind of rite of passage happened in this place: fictionalise entirely or adapt. Change what happened somehow or make it up. But it has to be a rite of passage.

Of course, a rite of passage could be formal and public – wedding, funeral, or informal and public – buying your first pint, or intimate and personal (but also culturally significant) such as a young woman’s first period. This is ripe for discussion with students. Rites of passage also work as hooks in a plot.Use a notebook. What are the trajectories, narratives, stories, pathways these ideas suggest? (How could you join them together?) Get all of your ideas down in the early stages. Try not to discount an idea because it’s silly. When you’re sifting them later, circle the simpler ideas but don’t cross out the others!

• Go back to JOBS – try to think of unusual or specific roles. Create characters’ everyday lives this way. I do this as a whole group discussion with students, writing ideas on the board and trying to avoid stereotyping.
• Now go back to the mind map and repeat by writing about a different place. Start with mind map subheadings again: jobs, disjunctures, everyday places in your life currently, travel, memories, knowledge from experience, buildings.
• A different fictionalised / adapted rite of passage will appear later in the novel.
• Repeat this again – another rite of passage will occur towards the end. How do these rites of passage connect? This is a good point to stop and discuss.
• Draw the plot using a large sheet of paper – find ways of linking these rites of passage together on the paper by drawing the connections.

Resources

Buzan, T. (2009) The Mind Map Book. London: BBC Active.
Cameron, J. (2006) The Sound of Paper. New York: Penguin
Goldberg, N. (2010) Writing Down the Bones. New York: Shambhala Press.
Tondeur, L. (2012) ‘Small Steps to Creative Thinking’. Creative Teaching and Learning Magazine. 3:2, 35 – 38. Available from: http://bit.ly/1qGpVu6