Eureka Moments & Creative Flow
Breakthroughs, Blogs, Bureaucracy, and William Blake
I don’t know what it is about the bath, but it’s a haven of positive creative energy. Donald Swann and Michael Flanders extol the virtues of the tub in this fabulous song. In The Darkest Hour there is that delightfully eccentric scene with Winston Churchill, covered in suds, dictating one of his renowned speeches to his young female secretary perched on the other side of the door. And who can forget Archimedes’ Eureka moment when he formulates the theory of displacement during a good soak?
Breakthroughs
Ah, Eureka moments! When you’ve grasped the essence. When you’ve finally broken through. My previous article, Under Pressure, did that for me. I captured what I was writing about.
Under Pressure relieved the pressure. Ideas and justifications that have been dammed up in my skull for years finally found a release. They’ve flooded into the Subtack sea, and this has resulted in a surge of creativity. There’s room in my head for a story now, and it’s beginning to flow.
Blogs
Under Pressure also generated a host of Substack articles ideas which I’ve added to my already long list. I now have six posts in progress and it’s getting harder to decide which one to focus on. Please feel free to comment if you would like to read an article on any of the following:
Writer as pilgrim
On Sincerity and Writing
Telescopic Narratives
Why write another World War II novel?
My ongoing research has its own pet topics:
Paris apartments
The last public guillotining in France
Famous trials
Character names
The War
The creative process. For those of you who don’t know, my other desk is a piano. So many writers I have met in recent months also pursue other artforms. I am intrigued by the way multiple artistic pursuits feed creativity, and would really like to write an article on it. So, if you’re interested in contributing your experience:
What is your other artform?
How does it influence your writing, and vice versa?
How do the two (or more) artforms influence how you see yourself?
When you neglect one or the other, how does it affect you and your creative work?
I cannot believe how valuable community engagement has been in pushing through with this project. I have always been a bit of a loner, particularly about my creative work, and will generally only let my ideas loose if I can guarantee a safe space for them to frolic in.
article, Find Your Sliproad, about ambition and procrastination, reminded me of the importance of small steps.Probably the most annoying question I have been asked at book launches and interviews is how do I manage to write while homeschooling my kids. I find it annoying because firstly, as much as I love my family, writing is a welcome respite from daily concerns. Secondly, I am more interested in talking about ideas and creative processes, and I am present at an interview or launch in the capacity of author and artist, not homeschooling mother. So, I have to resist the temptation to look daggers at the offending person and grit out: ‘Discipline’.
Instead, I am training myself to lightheartedly reply, ‘One sentence at a time’.
Having tumbled out the main ideas of In the Hearts of Kings, I am continuing the project one sentence at a time.
By the way, my kids have all grown up now and I no longer homeschool.
How do you write a novel? One sentence at a time.
The other week,
from Caffeine Enlightenment asked a casual question, do you write in the morning or the evening? I replied that I am more of an all day person. In explaining why, I formalised, quite by accident, a writing routine that I am very happy with:Early morning: brainstorming
Morning: hard core writing. Goal: 500 words a day
Afternoon: editing and research
Evening: reading for pleasure
This is not to say that I spend all day writing. Some sessions might be less than an hour. Others may be two hours or more, depending on my availability. The point is, there is a focus, there is variety, and I am free to work across the book as required.
Bureaucracy
Marriage and romance are all very well, and are favourite concerns of fiction; but consideration of the legal dimension of marriage can have interesting ramifications for a story. I am particularly interested in marriage in Occupied France. For me, it’s part of the gears and cogs of historical fiction, and it’s becoming an interesting component of the theme of choice as I write Outside Heaven’s Sway.
Marriage, in France, is primarily a civil contract, and the French are notoriously bureaucratic. So, what do you need to do if you want to get married? Was it possible for foreigners to marry in France during the war? These questions led to an interesting email exchange with Anne Morddel at The French Genealogy Blog, and ended up inspiring Anne to write a blog post on the topic. For anyone interested in navigating research in France, The French Genealogy Blog is a very helpful website.
William Blake
In Under Pressure, I discussed the significance of the titles of my three volumes. I’ll add here that I also made the decision to include part and chapter titles. Since there are quite a lot of chapters, this has been a very interesting challenge. Part titles have helped create a thematic and chronological structure. Chapter titles both reinforce the part titles’ purpose and enhance ideas at a more detailed level. Sometimes, I come up with a title before I write the chapter in full. Othertimes, I write the chapter and work out from that chapter how best to encapsulate its main idea in a title. Usually the title links to literature, art, music, or popular culture; and the allusion adds further dimension to the chapter, which I then edit accordingly.
This week, I was working on a chapter in which Phoebe sees portraits by Picasso and Modigliani for the first time. Her experience of these unusual and confronting contemporary representations of the human form prompts some reflections about the Self and its relation to the Other. In subsequent dialogue, pity became a key topic of conversation, which got me thinking of William Blake’s poem, ‘The Divine Image’, from Songs of Innocence:
I had me a chapter title which, incidentally, fits in very well with the novel’s overarching themes, as well as Expressionist art.
I’m now reworking the chapter.
As for one of its corresponding poems, ‘A Divine Image’, which was not included in Songs of Experience (it was replaced with ‘The Human Abstract’), how well suited it is to Nazism. Be sure it will feature in chapter titles in Outside Heaven’s Sway and A Balanced Wheel.
And now for the word count reveal for Outside Heaven’s Sway:
Annette, love this text. It touches on so many subjects and still revolves around writing. As it may be obvious from this, I am very much interested in "On Sincerity and Writing" theme. The other art forms, that contribute to my writing inspirations are architectural design and playing bass guitar. However, I find people to be the greatest inspiration of them all. Cheers.
Why are so many interview questions focused on the mechanics of writing, such as a writing routine? A more important question is where writers get their ideas, the fount of creativity. Now, this leads to some interesting responses and stories.
This makes me think someone ought to write a short story on a semi-famous writer who makes up different answers to such questions, not to be malicious, but to have some fun. He also arrives at interviews with a macaw on his shoulder, sometimes on the left shoulder, sometimes on the right.
Depending on the shoulder the macaw sits on, different responses to questions are given. Again, he is a fiction writer with a gifted imagination around 45. Otherwise the whole dog-and-pony show would be a complete bore.