Just watched Finding Neverland on BBC3, which featured Johnny Depp as J.M. Barrie and told the immensely moving story of how he came up with Peter Pan as a result of his friendship with a widow and her four young sons. Lovely stuff in all kinds of ways, and it addressed some interesting aspects of creativity and people who choose to follow it as a way of life.

Barrie tells one of the boys that the trick to writing is simple. All you need to do is listen to the talking whale in your head, and write down what it says. Which is a delightful and fun way of saying something quite important: that whether we think of it as a whale or otherwise, there’s something within us that has stories to tell.

The trick is, nourishing that something. Stories may seem to come from nowhere, but as far as I can figure they’re very much influenced by the diet of experiences and information that we sustain ourselves on. One of the reasons I stopped writing prose early on was that my influences showed up too readily. One short story walks in the footsteps of J.P. Donleavy too closely for me to be comfortable with it. A faltering attempt at a novel foolishly tried to ape Thomas Pynchon. And so on.

Scripts, being leaner constructions, are less prone to such echoes. Besides which, I’ve made a point of getting a better balance between living and writing since those days. Now, however busy I am, I make sure I still find time for a coffee with a friend, a trip to a cinema, a listen to some new music. The thinking being, the greater your input, the greater your output.

Now, I can’t graph that theory for you. But I can tell you that I used to suffer a lot more minor illnesses than I do these days, and that since becoming an infovore more conscious of the data I’m grazing on, my health has improved and I’ve been writing more. Hmm.

Here’s the thing. In order for you to come up with ideas that could become stories, you need to expose yourself to a wide range of stimuli. People, books, films, websites, music, cult organisations, whatever. It all gets absorbed and integrated, and the more of it there is, the less likely connections you can make between different aspects of your internal world to use as the basis of stories.

In the past week, I’ve seen a defrocked vicar improvise a blessing for friends celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary, made a fish pie for a dozen people, spent a lunchtime getting to know a neighbour whose parents saw fit to christen her Virgil, tracked down Ken Campbell’s introduction to the Robert Anton Wilson memorial show in London and Alan Moore’s contribution to same on YouTube, and watched a policeman keep a straight face while someone told him about how his mother had stolen the robot he’d invented. If I can’t concoct something out of all those experiences, frankly I’m not trying. And that’s where proper care and maintenance of a whale comes into it. They’re extraordinary creatures, and they need to stay happy in the sea, with all the nourishment and exercise they deserve. Washed up on the beach, they’re just so much blubber and sushi.