One of the greatest insights into the creative process comes from that legendary story teller Olga da Polga via the wit of the late Michael Bond:
One Morning Olga woke early knowing that she had a story coming on. She couldn’t have said what it would be about … Sometimes it just happened, but more often than not it had to do with lots of tiny things that she had heard, all coming together at one and the same time. (Michael Bond, Olga Follows her Nose, 2002)
And Olga the guinea pig is not alone. CS Lewis certainly saw his fictional work as a process of stringing together mental images into a coherent plot – and as a writer I can readily identify with this process. For Lewis, his allegorical fantasy The Lion the witch and the Wardrobe began with an image of a faun carrying a parcel through a snowy wood, with an umbrella in his hand. In his own writing he clearly confessed a sense – which many creative people have attested to over the ages – that such ideas came from beyond himself. JRR Tolkien likewise clearly felt the same sense, noting in a letter to WH Auden that The Hobbit began life during a mind-numbing session of marking, when the words came into his head: “ ‘In a hole in the ground their lived a Hobbit,’ I did not know and do not know why.” (A. McGrath, CS Lewis A Life, 2013).
Lewis certainly attributed this to divine inspiration, and I find it interesting that Philip Pullman (a virulent critic of Lewis and his intellectual standpoint) similarly feels the creative process to be not so much an act of creation – of making things up - but nearer to a process of uncovering something which is out there already – an act of discovery. I like Lewis’ idea that Narnia, his fantasy world, is not imaginary, but imaginative: no mere misleading made-up fantasy, but a deliberately creative method of the human mind searching to explain ideas far bigger than itself.
Many of the scenes and ideas in my own work spring from similar ‘beyond myself’ moments. Often a string of little observations (as Olga da Polga has) will trigger the visualisation of a scene, as my mind begins to wonder how my characters would react to those event or sensations. And like Lewis, as this train of thought begins, it just seems to run-away naturally as if there is another reality downloading itself into my mind. Somehow, as I begin to think what a character would do in a given circumstance, the dialogue and actions begin to write itself.
Writing fiction is, in short, a voyage of discovery.
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