It’s fascinating to see what happens when an idea takes form.  Initial concepts seem free, and there’s a lot of fun to be had in generating them, but a completed script is all about grounding that burst of energy with constraints that allow it to appear the story could happen in the world we share, or one that we can imagine.  Every phase after that first rush of enthusiasm for something new is a choice that shapes and directs what further choices can be made, until one inevitable final structure is arrived at.

That’s the way it seems a lot of the time, but it’s useful to remind yourself that the choices you’ve made are merely one possibility among many.  I liken the process to using stepping-stones to cross a river.  The river itself is in flux, seen from the stone you’re on, but move to another and as well as having a new perspective on the passing waters, you now realise that the stone you were on was merely a temporary perch, and not the fixed thing it seemed to be at the time you were on it.

The dance of improvisation and form is a fascinating one.  Its path is determined by choice points and whatever temporary certainty you may hold about the story you’re writing.  Believing a character to be such a type of person; organising a story so that it conforms to someone else’s concept of a three act structure; finding the genre that seems to fit your story; all these are attempts to convince yourself that you know what you’re doing.  Which is no bad thing, but shouldn’t be mistaken for actually believing it yourself. 

It’s one thing to pitch an idea confidently to a producer, another to have that same sense of the absolute when you’re actually shaping whatever raw ideas you’re given and working them into something that…feels right.  Because ‘feeling right’ is about as close as I get to being able to describe what the process of actually writing a story is like in practice. 

When I’m actually letting the ideas flow, notions of acts and genre and character and so forth are a million miles away.  What matters, at least at that point, is the state I’m in.  Many people recourse to the hackneyed phrase ‘trance-like state’ to describe their creativity, but let’s be honest: it’s LIKE a trance because it IS a trance, pure and simple. 

And that’s fine: we’re expecting the stories we create to alter the states that audiences are in, whether through making them laugh, cry, wanting to know what’s in the box, or whatever.  So it’s only fair that we get to test the altered states we’re working with ahead of time, to see if they’re worth serving up to anyone else; a lick of the spoon before the cake goes into the oven.

We watch film and television and read books and comics and listen to music and go to galleries and lap-dancing clubs precisely because they shift our state of consciousness in some fashion that we find interesting.  You won’t go to see a horror film if you don’t like being scared.  Action films get the adrenaline going.  Humour is great for raising serotonin levels.  And anything involving any kind of characters gets the mirror neurons engaged and allows empathy and learning to take place.

Knowing that we engage with different art forms in order to get what amounts to a side-effect free high, what can we do to heighten the effect of the stories we’re creating?  Well, for one thing, as laid out here, learn to get into strong states yourself that allow stories to flow from you naturally and without hesitation. 

How to do that is perhaps a subject for future pieces, since it takes some people a while to get there with ease and we can all benefit from learning more about it: but creativity is an innate ability we had as children, when play was what we did most of the time, and can be readily tapped into again.