Developing Your Curiosity – Refilling the Well 3

 “Where do you get your ideas?” is a question almost every writer has been asked. This week, an agent asked me about a specific question, and I had no idea. The best I could do was reach back to college to explain a fragment.

We accumulate ideas, often in haphazard ways. Since most writers experience curiosity as an overwhelming drive, they have huge and strange collections at the ready. Given how universal and familiar curiosity is, it is surprising that its definition, “a desire to know,” is less than helpful.  

David Beswick, a social psychologist and professor emeritus, University of Melbourne, points to the origins of the word in careful attention or scientific or artistic interest. Curious is from the same root as accuracy, curate and care.  

According to Beswick, "People who readily assimilate what they experience to what is already known will not experience very much curiosity."

Curious people balance openness to new stimuli with a concern for orderliness. In fact, a person experiencing curiosity is suspended between the two. He or she has a sense of how the world should be, a real framework that supports experience, interpretations and conclusions. But the curious person also respects the input from the senses. The state of curiosity is a state where things don’t add up.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable. While many people will deny the data, force the fit or move on to something else, the curious person “will be loathe to either assimilating or accommodating” the new information. Curious people can tolerate living with uncertainty longer than those who are less curious.

Curious people:

·      Take in new data,

·      Ask questions,

·      Test hypotheses,

·      Doubt their worldviews,

·      Tweak their frameworks and

·      Spend time wondering about new possibilities.

They invest in the time and effort to put the pieces together in a new way. They make sense of things.

Beswick says that highly curious people tend to have exceptional investigative skills and techniques for integrating information and creating order out of chaos. They also tend to have confidence in themselves or at least feel secure about everything turning out okay.

Why should writers develop curiosity?

Curiosity provides a different way to see the world, remaking us into the kind of explorers we were as children. This often creates new understanding and new perspectives. Curiosity can also be a starting point for creativity, motivating the actions that produce great stories and works of art.

Here are some elements tied to curiosity to consider:

·      Presence – The practice of living in the moment and paying attention to what your senses are telling you opens new doors.

·      Anomalies teach – And anomalies tend to be more visible when curiosity is engaged. They are harder to ignore because they may lead to an answer.

·      Asking questions – Curiosity does not tend to stay around as an unarticulated gut feeling. It generates questions that need answers, and often this leads to both action and new questions

·      Questioning the status quo – Unlearning and suspension of disbelief seem to be curiosity’s natural partners. A “fact” that doesn’t fit, no matter how deeply cherished, has a difficult time standing up to the assault of a curious mind.

·      Basic (not applied) understanding – Curiosity is more concerned with truth than with practical concerns.

·      Engaging others – Curiosity may force those who are less social to approach others, building trust and socializing questions ideas, and questions. Developing curiosity about people can be an important stimulus to networking for innovation.

In addition, interested people are interesting people. Cultivating this interest in others promotes conversation, listening skills and being really present to others, rather than thinking about other things.

Where do I get my ideas? From wherever curiosity leads me.

This entry is derived in part from an article I wrote while at IBM, Need to Know: How curiosity drives innovation.

Bigger 4 - Creating Endings That Buzz

Songs that won't let you go are called earworms, but I'm not sure what they call great endings that buzz around your head. Like earworms, the only way to get rid (temporarily) of buzzing endings is by sharing them with someone else.

Of course, this is exactly what you want people to do with your stories. You want those final words to hold onto people and force them to start conversations. But how is this done? Here are a few things to try:

• Delicious ambiguity - Spoiler alert for Inception. This movie ends with a spinning top that might be on the verge of falling - or might never fall. The sense of the entire story depends on what happens next, and the director does not let you see what happens. Which has led to endless discussions.
• An image - I think first here of the freeze frame that ended Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as they rushed to take on what looked like the entire Bolivian army. That shot was much imitated (diminishing its punch), but I think it worked because it showed action, but did not complete it. The audience could imagine the likely (hamburger heroes) or the unlikely, one more daring escape. I read The Grapes of Wrath decades ago, and I still can see the image of Rosasharn trying to save a starving man with the milk meant for her stillborn child.
• A mixed ending - One of my teachers called these bittersweet. The hero wins the race, but he loses his love. This is somewhat expected and isn't guaranteed to stay with readers, but it beats a pure happy ending.
• If only - Somehow a tragedy that happens only because nineteen things go wrong can get its hooks into you. You  keep going back to see if one of those wrong turns might have been avoided. Were they all inevitable? Were some less inevitable? What would have happened if any of them went the other way?
• A good joke - This is a dangerous one because it can trivialize the whole story. Caper movies use this approach, and I think immediately of the ending of The Sting (I must be in a Newman/Redford mood) where the trick is turned. (Interestingly, Ocean's Eleven turns its trick, but has a powerful image ending - the almost religious assembly at the fountain.)
• A revelation - This may be the most powerful and difficult. If you can have an ending that reveals how society works, how people work - how WE work - in an elegant and satisfying way, people will hold onto that ending with both hands. To Kill a Mockingbird does this for me.

Bigger stories deserve great endings. First and foremost, satisfying endings that are wonderful because of everything that went before.  But if that ending can start a buzz too, the story is more likely to find the audience it deserves.

Also of Interest:

Good Endings 1 - The four essentials 

Good Endings 2 - Satisfaction testing

Writing Prep 6 - Decluttering Your Brain

Putting yourself in front of the keyboard doesn't automatically put your brain into your writing space. Good (and bad) conversations may still be running through your head. There may be the lure of a donut or the worry of a bill. You may have aches and pains of the body or the heart.

Distractions that are in you mind may be the hardest to counteract. One reason why I like to write first thing in the day, to begin by completing yesterday's sentences, to cue myself by setting a timer, and to put on (wordless) music is that these provide rites of passage from the mundane world to the world of my imagination.

But it doesn't always work. Reality can be pretty intrusive. This is why I have brain decluttering exercises in reserve. If you have the same problem, you might want to give them a try:

• Make faces at yourself. No. I'm serious. Go to the mirror and change your expression to one that is intense. I understand that smiling actually releases chemicals that make you happy. Frowning, scowling, sneering, or looking wide-eyed in amazement seem to have similar effects. Make a face, and you will feel something different. This pulls you away from the distraction in your brain. For extra credit, put the look on your face that you imagine your protagonist has.
• Take a deep breath and clear your mind. This is classic, and it becomes easier with practice. Meditation lowers your blood pressure, too, so you get a bonus.
• Get it all on paper. Force yourself to write out everything that is whizzing around in your mind. I call this the chocolate sundae solution because a friend of mine used a similar technique when she was dieting. If she felt an overwhelming urge to eat a chocolate sundae, she would eat sundaes until she had an aversion to them. This is a twist on Oscar Wilde's quote, "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself."

I will point out that I don't count ANY of this as my writing time. Do that, and you face the risk of decluttering until the timer goes off. You don't want to lose a day of writing this way.

How to you declutter your brain?

Bigger 3 - Take Me to Monte Carlo

Is your setting big enough for your story? Middle-earth or Manhattan, you need to give the same consideration to where your character fights his battles or duels over cocktails as you do to their dreams and desires. If you don’t, you risk two things:

First, the story might suffer. This is obvious for survival stories, where nature is the antagonist. But it is also true for To Kill a Mockingbird, where both the heat and the social constraints press the characters to reinterpret their values. Too often, writers take setting off the table, and they lose the potential for conflict. West Side Story would not have been as effective in the suburbs.

Second, the story is less attractive. The people who make James Bond and Mission Impossible films know this. Most of the locales for their stories are places where people visit in droves. In fact, those movies take advantage of millions of dollars invested in promotion and in giving visitors wonderful experiences once they get there. Why shouldn’t your story take the same approach? Why go to Des Moines (actually, a lovely city in Iowa, but not a vacation destination) when you can go to Dubai?  

Of course, a story can take place in horrible places. I do not want a holiday in Shawshank Prison or the Alien-infested Nostromo. But I don’t mind watching characters in these extreme environments. Those settings will repel as many people as they attract, but they will attract enough to make me happy.

Bigger does not need to be outrageous. Even modest locations, like those in Jane Austen, can make a story bigger if they are keenly observed and play an important role in the story. Her civilized locales in England may not have high concept going for it, but there is enough detail so readers feel immersed in the reading experience.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to create a bigger locale:

• If I wrote a travel brochure for this place, would it attract any visitors?
• Can I change the location to one that will make people curious about my story?
• Can I imagine a setting that will put more pressure on my characters, forcing them to make difficult and irreversible decisions?
• Have I imagined my story’s location so deeply that I can describe it completely enough to immerse my reader?

Of course, conflict and emotion are what a story is about, so the setting (usually) should not overwhelm these. But attention to setting and deliberately making it bigger can become a vital part of enticing and holding a reader to enter into the world of your story.

The Curiosity of a Writer - Refilling the Well 1

Research, experience and living are the source waters of storytelling. If you make these part of your life, you'll always have something to write about. I'll talk about in in future posts, but first a word about curiosity.

I've written about curiosity in terms of Practical Imagination and in an article “Need to Know: How curiosity drives innovation” (available upon request). These look more at invention and creating change than at writing, but a writer needs to actively nurture his/her curiosity, too. Ironically, this is even more important in an age when answers are available within a few clicks. Answers that lead to new questions nurture curiosity, but answers that don't, kill it. So here are three practices to keep your curiosity alive in the age of the Internet.

1. Speculate. Before you click that button that will tell you how clams survive the deep-ocean pressure of the hyperthermal vents, think of what the answers might be. Consider which one is most convincing and why it is most convincing to you. Then, when you see the "expert" answer, you have a few tools to challenge it and are more likely to say "yes, but..." than "uh, huh." This can work for the hard sciences, but it is even more valuable when you explore softer, more controversial subject like society's distribution of wealth.
2. Put it out there. I am always suspicious when I stumble upon an article that is too convincing. Sometimes this triggers my search for propaganda techniques. (It is amazing how often these show up.) But, at other times, I need help not to swallow the answer whole. In these cases, I just post the link to Facebook and ask for comments and verification of facts. Over and over again, I have been surprised by the responses I get from my circle of friends. They enthrall, illuminate and challenge -- which is just what I'm looking for. (The proviso on this one is the friends need to have different perspectives that they feel free to express.)
3. Dig deeper. Curiosity can be trivial. It can go and search of novelty that doesn't matter much. Tabloid headlines may add color to your stories, but they do not refill the well of imagination. The trivial can be fun, and I'm a big believer in having fun. However, a writer needs to probe more deeply and to have a higher proportion of his/her explorations dedicated to those things that go beyond titillation -- meaning, honor, caring and the sacred. Does that headline screaming about Brad and Angela have anything to say about the people you love, fostering kindness, personal responsibility or what you will leave as your legacy?

These are just a few ways to open your mind, fill the well and find something of value to write about. Perhaps I've raised a few questions. I have one for you. What do you do to nurture your curiosity?

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