People sometimes assume writers just have ideas come to them fully-fleshed and waiting to be written. And, sometimes, that’s the way it happens. More often though, there’s process and strategy involved: tricks that individual creators learn to kickstart their creativity. Which is why I pay attention to interviews with creative people, for insight into what they do and how they do it.

Case in point. Comics writer Ed Brubaker was recently interviewed by the Newsarama website to discuss his forthcoming series Incognito. Here are a couple of pieces that captured my attention:

“I was wondering what the flipside of that story (Sleeper) would be like, because you never know what you’ll find when you flip something around and look at it another way.”

“…as the story developed, it was influenced by what I was doing on Captain America as much as anything else…what could I do in Incognito that I could never do in Cap?”

There. Perfect. In a nutshell, two creative strategies that can be adopted for your own work. So, let’s have a go. Let’s take the premise of Eden Lake, reviewed in the last entry here, and apply Brubaker’s processes to it…

So, if Eden Lake is about good folk tormented by teens, how about we turn the tables and do a story about teens tormented by Middle Englanders? Works for me, and gives us two audiences: teens who like a good scare, and reactionaries looking for a vicarious thrill. What we need is a motivation. Perhaps the opening of a new school for kids with learning disabilities in a curtain-twitching suburb. Rumours that the kids have ASBOs, premarital sex, and speak Polish abound. But what triggers the action? Something innocuous and misunderstood. A Polish teen whose English is poor grabs a tea towel from a shop to bind a friend’s wound, who has been knocked down by a nearsighted OAP, and is accused of shoplifting. It’s enough to stir local residents to form a vigilante group, dusting off shotguns, sharpening bayonets, and revving up 4×4s. I’m liking this already.

OK, so that’s the inverse of Eden Lake. What about the second of Brubaker’s nuggets, doing in this version what you could never do in the original? Hmm, trickier territory here, given that Eden Lake is so free with its invective and violence. Maybe the answer is to take a different approach structurally and stylistically instead. Eden Lake is linear, so let’s make its oppo non-linear. Perhaps structured as a series of incidents from different perspectives that first make it appear that the teens are guilty, before it becomes apparent that the oldies are to blame for the escalating violence. And who are these different accounts related to? Why not the local police?

Right, so we now have a Rashomon style tale in which incoming teenagers are blamed for the disruption of life in a suburb, only for it to become apparent that conservative locals are the primary culprits, lashing out at behaviour that exists primarily in their imaginations. Sounds good to me.

If you want to get fancy about it, you could call Brubaker’s approaches heuristics, that is rules of thumb. And as you can see from how this little thought experiment has played out, keeping your eyes and ears open for useful heuristics can be a valuable way of expanding your repertoire of creative strategising.