The now cancer-free John Brown joins us again, this time for a discussion of the creative process. John has presented a seminar on this subject in the past, the focus of which is to teach people to unlock their creativity. At the core of this is the problem-solving we all engage in at some point. You have a problem, so you sit down and try to solve it. BAM. Creativity.

With John’s help we set out to de-mystify creativity, showing how everybody has to be creative on a regular basis, and how this skill set can be broadened through certain types of behavior, and immersion in particular domains. We explore strategies for developing what feels like a good idea, tactics for getting un-stuck when we’re bogged down, and finally figuring out when we’re done.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold, read by Marguerite Gavin

Writing Prompt: A person gets surgery so in order to imitate He Who Never Sleeps…

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: How do you get ideas? Everyone can be creative. When you have a problem, you ask questions, and you come up with answers — that’s creativity. An important part is asking the right questions. To get answers, be on the lookout for zing! Then ask questions, and answer them. Immerse yourself in situations that interest you, and look for tools there. Ask the right questions. For story, think about character, setting, problem, and plot. Look for combinations. Be on the lookout for zings, ask specific questions, then come up with solutions. Make lists and see what’s interesting. What are the worst ideas I can think of, and how can I make those ideas really attractive? How can I transform this scene? How do you develop ideas? Ask the right questions. Look for conflicts, look for interest. Look for defining moments. How do you know when to start writing? Freewrite, and see if it’s ready. Watch for the click. Watch for the spin. Try to tell it to someone.

[John] And I’m John.
[Brandon] We once again welcome the cancerous John Brown to join us…
[laughter]
[Brandon] The cancer-free John Brown to join us on our podcast. This is actually a topic that, John, you know a lot about. I’ve seen your seminar you give on the creative process. So we thought we’d ask you a few questions about the creative process and kind of how you come up with stories and how the creative mind works and that sort of thing. So, I’m just going to throw it at you. The number one question authors tend to get is how do you get your ideas. How do you generate ideas? How do you get them, originally?
[John] Well, I want to back up and just say that this is one of the things that was killing me when I first started writing.
[Brandon] Other than the cancer.
[laughter]
[John] Other than the cancer.
[Howard] For those of you not benefitting from the video, every time John makes this noise “ow,” he’s holding his face where the stitches are trying to pull open as he laughs at us.
[John] Ow, yes.
[Howard] Yes. That noise, right there. We’re so sorry, John. So, start again. What were you…
[John] Well, ah, this is something that stopped me for many years because I didn’t know what the creative process was. So, luckily, it was in an Orson Scott Card bootcamp that all of a sudden I figured it out. So it’s been important to me. After that, my productivity went up literally 4000 percent. So this is kind of one of my little things that I think is important.
[Brandon] Okay. So let’s talk about it. How do you generate your ideas?
[John] Well, the thing that I have to remember is creativity… the first thing is creativity is not mystical, it’s not reserved for people with certain personality types, it’s not anything special. We all do it all the time.
[Howard] [distorted Heresy! Burn him!] I agree.
[Brandon] No. I mean, this is a serious thing. A lot of people come up to me on tour and say, “I just don’t know where all this imagination comes from, all this creativity.”
[Howard] I could never be that creative. You’re so creative.
[Brandon] Right. I think that’s completely wrong. Human beings are creative creatures. This is what we are built to do.
[John] Because I think… this is it. This is creativity. This is it.
[Brandon] This podcast?
[John] Yeah, this is it, this is creativity. So creativity is nothing more than you have a problem, you’re asking questions, and you’re coming up with answers. So, somebody who does computer coding, they can be incredibly creative. Accountants… with a certain problem, they can be incredibly creative. Anybody can be creative in what they do. The key is… one of the keys is… what are the questions that you are asking, right? And then, how do you go about getting those answers? Part of that is what I call looking for, or being on the lookout for zing. So, that’s kind of… that’s just…
[Brandon] Zing? Z. I. N. G.?
[John] Z. I. N. G.
[Howard] Zing.
[John] Those are those ideas in writing where there’s just a little zit, a little zap, it sparks some interest in you, it… sometimes they’re these gigawatt monsters that leave you breathless, but most of the time they’re these little things that you’re like, “oh, cool,” or, “oh, wow.” There’s just something there. There’s a lot of different ways we either generate those or find them, but that’s what we’re on the lookout for. The way that we develop it is just question-and-answer.
[Howard] When you describe it in terms of metaphorical sorts of electrical monsters, you sort of undermine the argument that there’s nothing mystical about creativity. I’m just letting you know.
[John] No, no, no, no. Because, see, what this is, is it’s just what sparks my interest. You’re going to feel it, everybody is going to feel it.
[Howard] Can I call it an epiphany instead of a gigawatt monster?
[Dan] No.
[John] An epiphany could do that, yeah.
[Brandon] Well, you know… um, what did Asimov call it? The Eureka factor? His famous essay about the generation of creativity and…
[Howard] The moment at which you jump out of the bathtub and run naked through the streets.
[John] But it isn’t always Eureka, an epiphany. It’s mostly oo.

[Brandon] Well, one thing that I want to mention in conjunction with this. I like how you mentioned that an accountant is creative when they’re searching for solutions within their problems. I think one of the things that can help people with this is the idea of immersing yourself in situations where you are given tools. What I mean by this is, if you read a lot of fiction, you will naturally be given tools, you will pick up on tools that authors are using to problem solve. These plot archetypes that we use, these character archetypes, these sorts of twists and turns. I think that if you immerse yourself in these things long enough, you will start to be able to generate these tools on your own. In the same way that an accountant can look at what we do and say, “Wow, I could never do that.” Yet I look at what the accountant does, and I could never be creative in the way they are because I haven’t immersed myself in the ways that accountants problem solve.
[John] Exactly. Because you… because there are a certain set of questions, a certain set of problems that we’re trying to solve, and there are a lot of options. The more you learn in a given domain, in a given area, the more you can see a number of options, and the more that you have those right questions. I think those right questions are critical. Some of those are… if you look at a story, story is character, setting, then some people say plot but I like to break it out problem and plot. There are those four main elements. So when people say how do you get your ideas, for me, the problem is… that I ask the question is… okay, so I just found out about Abdul Hassan, the one who never sleeps, who is the Somali pirate down… one of those Somali pirates. I found him and I felt the little zit. I saw him, he’s got this gap tooth, and he’s got the headdress and everything. So, great… that’s a great idea. I don’t have character, setting, problem, and plot. So the question is now, well okay, what kind of story problems could be generated by Abdul Hassan?
[Howard] He needs a new tooth.
[Laughter]
[John] He needs… he needs… you ruined it.
[Brandon] Just that name, he who never sleeps.
[John] The one who never sleeps.
[Brandon] The one who never sleeps. You could…
[Dan] That’s very cool.
[Brandon] That should be our story prompt. Write a story about the one who never sleeps.
[Dan] One who never sleeps.
[John] But you have to go beyond that, right? You have to do a question, and then let’s start listing answers, all types of solutions, until you get another one of those, “oh, yeah that’s what I could do.”

[Dan] See, and I think that the way this works for me, and I imagine for many people, is when you get one of those zing moments, and then you realize that you have to combine it with other elements, you search back through your catalog of all your previous zings, and go, “You know, the one who never sleeps? That would actually fit kind of cool with this other idea that I had about the guy who every time he has a cool idea, it turns into a gigawatt monster. I’m going to combine those two, and that’s an excellent book.”
[John] I agree. But it comes through the process of being on the lookout, then asking specific questions, and coming up with solutions. I think part of the… I don’t know, you guys tell me. You tell me this. I know sometimes when I’m writing, you just get a solution and you go with it. But there are some times when brp, you stop, and you’re like, “Okay, I’m not really caring about or believing in this. I need to come up with something.” Is it your process? Because this is my process, I will just start listing things out. I will just start saying, “Well, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this.” I might get an answer after number 20 or number six or whatever. I might not get anything, and I’ll have to go on a walk or whatever. But it’s a matter of listing possible solutions until I get a couple that are interesting. Do you guys do that?

[Howard] Yeah. Usually when I get to that point though in the story, it’s not that I could do this or this or this or this, it’s character a has all of these options to solve a particular problem or to deal with whatever. What are these? Why will they work, why won’t they work? Sometimes I’ll look at the point where I am in the plot, and I’ll say, “All right. I need them to try three or four things and I need them to all fail badly. What are the worst ideas I can think of, and how can I make those ideas really attractive?” By phrasing the question in those ways, I come up with really funny, wacky stuff that the readers weren’t expecting, that often I wasn’t expecting. When I surprise me and manage to laugh at what I’m drawing, that’s awesome.
[John] That’s one of those powerful, productive questions.

[Brandon] Well, for me, what works… just what you’ve been talking about. Often, I’ll hit those points, and for me, I start to think, “Okay, this scene needs a transformation at this point.” Either the dialogue needs to veer in another direction, or something needs to shake everything up. Something needs to happen. I have to keep working, listing things in my head, trying things in my head, until something says, “Oo, that is what is going to transform this scene and bring it to the point I need it to be.”

[Brandon] Let’s go ahead and do our book of the week. John, you had a Lois McMaster Bujold book you wanted to promo that you had mentioned.
[John] Yeah. I just… I have come late to Ms. Bujold. My first book ever of hers was audio book, The Hallowed Hunt. I can’t remember who it was read by. Did you guys happen to… did you… we don’t know who it was read by?
[Dan] Somebody awesome.
[John] Somebody awesome. It was incredible. It was an incredible, incredible listen for me. I absolutely love her. I went and bought the other two books. I can’t wait to read them. So it’s the Hallowed Hunt.
[Brandon] This is epic fantasy. Each of the books in the series is basically a standalone, as I understand it, but they’re kind of connected.
[John] Same world. That’s right. So this is the third quote unquote in the series, but it doesn’t matter. You can listen to this one, it’s different characters, different [garbled]
[Brandon] Paladin of souls, the second one, is a Hugo award winner. Voted as the best science fiction or fantasy book of the year it came out. So, yeah. So that is The Hallowed Hunt.
[Howard] She’s got four Hugos and three Nebula awards?
[Brandon] One of the most decorated authors in science fiction and fantasy right now. You can go to audible.com… go to audiblepodcast.com/excuse, and there you can start a 15 day free trial where you get a free audio book and you can support the podcast, so we suggest you look into The Hallowed Hunt.

[Brandon] All right. We’ve talked about generating ideas. What do you do to develop these ideas once you’ve got them in hand? What’s the next step? John?
[John] Well, I think that’s it. You ask questions, and there’s certain questions… So you need to know… for you to even be able to come up with the right question, I think that you have to have some basic idea of what is a story or what am I trying to do. Otherwise, you just kind of fumble around, and maybe you get it, maybe you don’t. So, there… I think this is different for everybody. I think every author’s probably got particular questions, but I think there are some that overlap.
[Brandon] Okay. Dan, how do you do it?
[Dan] How do I develop ideas into a story?
[Brandon] Yeah. You got this zing, it’s like zit, and you’ve got two of them sticking together, what’s your next step? Two of these ideas have worked really well, awesome together. How do you begin development?
[Dan] My next thing that I do at that point is I try to look for conflicts and look for what would be interesting. What would be an interesting story to tell about that? What would be an interesting problem for that character to have to deal with or a problem that that technology or that magic system could create? Find where that conflict is because that is what, for me, generates the interest of the story.
[John] See, that’s just those questions. There’s those questions again.

[Howard] For me, I’ve been playing with a ghost story idea. Doesn’t fit in the Schlock Mercenary universe, but it has to do about the way in which apparitions are perceived. There was a point at which I was telling myself this little rule for how we perceive apparitions, when I gave myself chills. I realized as I was having that zing moment that whatever I did with the story needed to lead up to the reader having the same realization that I just had.
[John] That’s cool.
[Howard] So I needed… it’s like, Brandon, when you write these complex magic systems and then there is a synthesis of things that does something cool and new and we all have this “aha” moment. This “cool, oh wow, that’s so neat.” It’s like that. I want to… that’s the moment that gives me the zing and so I say, “Well, let’s put that here two thirds of the way through the book, or a third of the way through the book, or wherever it fits in the story area” That tells me what I’m trying to build toward. Sometimes it’s a character arc, sometimes it’s the overall plot problem arc, sometimes it’s something else. But I look for moments… defining moments… and then I aim for them.
[John] I see what you’re saying.

[Brandon] All right. Last question then is, how do you know when it’s done? You’ve been baking this idea, you’ve been asking these questions. How do you know when it’s ready for prime time, and it’s time to put it on the page? What makes you decide? John?
[Dan] I freewrite.
[Brandon] You freewrite?
[Dan] If I think it’s ready, I will write a chapter and it will either work or it won’t work. If it doesn’t work, I think, “Well, okay, then I have to go back and I have to revisit this some more.” So a lot of playing around with the ideas. Taking them then moving them around and actually playing with them in writing to see how they fit.
[John] Well, number one, it’s not ever done. Because I do… for me… because I find things out and develop things all the way until the end of my first drafted into the second draft. But, I will know that I’m ready to start drafting when all of a sudden it goes… and sometimes I do exploratory drafts like Dan was talking about… but there will come a point where all of a sudden it goes click click click click and I can see, I can just see a plot.
[Brandon] Everything falls into place.
[John] I can see things go roll out. It doesn’t have to go all the way to the end. But I can just see… it’s like “Oh!” And I feel totally stoked to write, and I know where I’m going with it.

[Howard] Yeah, often for me, when I’m doing Schlock Mercenary stuff, it’s when I realize I’ve been spinning on the same two or three lines of dialogue, that are what happens immediately next. And I realize I have to write that part now in order to clear my brain for what comes next. Because there’s a piece of my subconscious that’s saying, “Hey, I want to get to the next part, but I can’t let you forget this first bit, so we’re not moving on until you’ve sat down and written it.”
[Brandon] You know, I actually do that too.
[Howard] It’s so annoying because there’s a part of my brain… the conscious part of my brain that says I want to work this next bit of dialogue, and I can’t. Why can’t I? Oh, because I haven’t written down the part that I have been working on. So I’ve got to sit down and write. As soon as I’ve got a week of scripts… and this is where my process differs from everybody else’s… as soon as I’ve got a week of scripts, I’ll run it past Sandra, I’ll look at it myself, if it makes me laugh, if it seems to move the story forward, then I put pencil and ink on it. Once it’s got ink on it, then it’s done. I’m not going to go back and fix that.

[Dan] You’re not going to go back and change it. You know, talking to other people is actually a big one for me as well. If I think that I know what’s going on or I know how to fix the story or I know what the thing is going to be about, then I will tell somebody. I’ll tell my brother or I’ll tell my wife or whoever, and if that… that helps solidify it more. That helps me see it from a different light. All of a sudden, I’ll either go, “Yeah, that’s not really ready because I can’t think of how to describe it to you.” Or it will all… suddenly I’ll have the words and say, “Oh, yeah. This is exactly how it’s going to work. Now I know what the solution is.”

[Brandon] All right. Well, we want to give a special extra thanks to John Brown for being on the podcast with us. His book Servant of the Dark God came out last week in paperback. We all certainly hope you check it out. I enjoyed the book immensely. It is an excellent epic fantasy novel. I did also want to mention… John, make sure everyone knows… you’re okay. We’re joking about his cancer and stuff, but it’s already been taken care of. You’re fine, right?
[John] I am good. I have a huge slit, 33 stitches. It was amazing. Yes, I’m good.
[Brandon] But you are okay?
[John] I’m good. I can’t wait until the bandages come off.
[Dan] How do we know that was really cancer and not just surgery to look more like a Somali pirate?
[John] You don’t, but that’s a good writing prompt.

[Brandon] All right. A person gets… this is going to be our writing prompt, officially. A person gets surgery so that they can imitate He Who Does Not Sleep. Why? This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write.
[John] All right.