Sometimes you just can’t see the wood for the trees.
Story beginnings seem to be the most treeful area of writing. Creative writing ideas are there, but elusive. You grab hold of one and write, and within a minute or two another crops up. Do you abandon the first creative idea to jot down the second and risk losing track of idea no. 1, or do you plod on and let idea no 2 slip into oblivion?
Worse, you get caught up in the inner debate between the two ideas and find you’ve lost both of them. The trouble with imaginative, creative writing is that ideas seem to breed off each other, and before you know it they’re coming so thick and fast it seems impossible to hold onto the best ones.
Over the years I’ve found the best way of holding onto ideas is through brainstorming with clusters. It’s not foolproof, and some of the things that occur to me as I’m writing still get away, particularly the ideas that relate to story structure. Still, since I’ve been using the cluster method of developing stories I find I’m holding onto more of my creative ideas than I did before.
Here’s how it works for me.
My central idea goes in the middle. It might be a character, a theme I want to explore, an event – whatever it is that sparks the chain of muse pitches that I need to get hold of.
From this central idea I jot down anything and everything my trusty muse throws at me. Some of it is good, some of it is relevant, and some is just plain crazy. It all goes down, and sometimes it’s the crazies that spark off the neatest twists when I refer back to the clusters during the actual writing.
Once I have a few ideas jotted down I don’t need to juggle so many balls in my mind. I can let go of ideas knowing they’re caught in the net and can’t get away.
Sometimes a starting point suggests itself. Other times a definite structure emerges.
And now and then I realise a story is going nowhere before I’ve spent hours writing, and can ditch it and move on.
Best of all, very often I’ll get a whole new story idea from one or more of my cluster branches – and again, the crazies are a fertile breeding place.
Brainstorming, mindmapping, clustering – whatever you want to call it – isn’t new. In fact there is so much written about it that it’s in danger of becoming overworked and through that losing it’s value. People who’ve never tried it dismiss it just because it seems to smack them in the face at every corner.
But it’s good.
It’s liberating.
It’s productive and inspiring.
Whether you use a pen and paper or go the high-tech route and download some software, once you get into the habit of exploring ideas through clustering you won’t want to go back.
I use both paper and software, but the thing I really like about clustering on the computer is the way I can move ideas around the map. By making the map look different, and seeing my clusters of ideas juxtaposed against different ideas gives a whole new perspective that often is enough to make a breakthrough when I’m stuck.
