Where do ideas come from?

Personally, I think Neil Gaiman had one of the best explanations for where ideas come from, namely that he doesn't know and he doesn't really want to know in case it scares them off.

However, I have noticed myself typing out the same couple of idea prompts I learned at university every time I see this question online or on a post-it note stapled to the door of my bunker. So in order to save myself typing them out each time (and sneakily making a paltry scraping of ad money) I type them out here for your browsing perusal.

Enjoy. They only cost me 9 grand and three years of my life.

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1) Carry A Notebook

In the above videos, one of the useful things Gaiman points out is that "Essentially, [ideas] come from daydreaming. And I suspect it's something every human being does. Writers tend to train themselves to notice when they've had an idea. It's not that they have any more ideas or they get inspired more than anyone else, we just notice when it happens a little bit more."

This is fantastic, but I am criminally absent minded. The seven point plan for world peace that occurs to me on the way to Sainsbury's is usually gone by the time I get to the tills, and I'm left later sat in front of the open laptop when I get home scratching my head and trying to remember why guinea pigs were involved in stage 2.

Consequently I carry around a notebook. It's a nice one, it has a little strap around it so it doesn't come open. And I guard it carefully. Not because the contents are valuable, but because if found by someone who doesn't know me, I'm fairly sure its contents could get me committed.

But what it does contain are ideas. I cross them off as I realise them. Ideas for scenes, opening lines, characters, events, snippets of dialogue, and solutions to problems. And shopping lists. But mostly ideas. If you want to fill a book with ideas, you'll need every single one you can get,

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2) Freewrite

Another popular idea generator is free writing. I was pretty sure I'd written about this before, but I can't seem to find the post so here it is again in brief:

Write anything for 5 minutes. Do not stop for punctuation, spelling or logic.

Anything. Even if it results in the following:

Oh god, what am I writing? I don't even know. I have literally no ideas. Like an empty box in the back of a shed covered in dust but there are a load of boxes in the way so you can't quite see properly - is that a leg sticking out of it? it looks too big to be a leg. oh god it's moving. WHY IS IT MOVING AND WHY AM I STILL IN THE METAPHORICAL SHED.

There you go, now you've got the beginnings of a horror story about giant spiders. First scene: a young couple are moving into their new house when they discover an old box at the back of the garage. When his body is discovered nobody believes the plucky young researcher at the local museum, until people start disappearing...

Yes it's Jaws with spiders, but you get the idea. No matter how bad the initial piece of free writing is, there will be an idea or the spark of one in there if you look hard enough.

Freewriting works because it loosens up the creative side of the brain and forces the critical side to take a back seat. If you really, really examine your thought processes when you're stuck, it's not that you're not having ideas: You have ideas all right, but you've trained the critical part of your brain to shoot them all down. The more you let your critical side get away with this, the less in tune with your own creativity you become.

Conversely, the more you give your creative side free reign, the more in tune with it you get. Seriously, the more you do a thing, the easier your brain finds it to do that thing. That's neuroplasticity, Kyle. Science. Let the ideas out, and snip them down when you're finished creatively outpouring.

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3) Automatic writing

Right. This is a bit of an odd, hippy one, so feel free to ignore it and stick to the first two if you like.

To cut a long story short, an artist called Brion Gysin used to lay down newspapers to protect the table while cutting up canvases. He noticed that in cutting up these headlines, sometimes they fell together in funny, tragic, bizarre or poignant phrases. He liked it and called it the cut-up technique. This inspired William Burroughs to write The Naked Lunch, which is pretty much the same thing but with a manuscript he had written. It's a bizarre book, but this also inspired David Bowie (yes, that David Bowie), who created a machine that scanned newspaper articles and spat out rearranged sentences, which he started using as lyrics.

Got it? Accidentally produce the profound from accidents. So how do we apply this?

Find a page of text, photocopy it (please don't go round cutting up people's books, it's mean), and then cut out each sentence. Then cut each sentence in half. Scatter them on the table or the floor. Turn them all right-side up so you can see them. Then start putting together any interesting combinations you see.

It depends on how interesting the source material is really. If it's a page from something by Neil Gaiman, you'll have a lot of dark imagery to work with. If it's a page from a cookbook, less so, but the results might be funny. If you mix Neil Gaiman in with a cookbook, I'm 90% sure the results will be about eating children.

The results will not be great English, but they WILL be great ideas and rich in the kind of imagery you need to tell a great story.

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So there you have it, three ideas to get you started if you're stuck:

- Carry a notebook and write down any cool ideas before they disappear,
- Write anything to get your creativity going, and then edit it into just the good bits,
- Cut up a bunch of text and rearrange it randomly to see what pops out.

I look forward to finding out how useful these are to people.

Free Writing - the player

Imagine a ball, floating in mid air. The ball is red, and it shines with the sheen of rubber and has a small but noticeable seam or casting mark running across the circumference. It’s floating in mid-air because time is paused. A baseball bat floats alongside it, gripped in the hands of a world renowned player I sadly don’t know because (A) I’m not American and (B) I don’t care.

So it’s a stock baseball player. Looks to have some sort of South American heritage from his dark skin and curled hair, the look of concentration on his face briefly eliciting almost of sneer. His eye is on the ball but this reveals something; it’s not a baseball. From this we can deduce that it’s not a league game, and it’s not a practice because they’d want the right ball for the weight, otherwise it’d be pointless.

Back to the ball. It’s red and cheap, so why is it heading towards him? I have all these ideas - he’s in the park and a dog owner threw it at him, but then why would he have the bat? I was also going to say that he was attacked and someone threw the ball as a distraction, relying on his finely-tuned reflexes to automatically swing at the ball while they stab his side, but the problem with that is that they would have had to to attack a baseball player with a baseball bat. Irony? Misdirection to make it look like a disgruntled team-mate?

I get it now. He’s at a friends house and their son recognises him. He’s pretty famous after all, even if I don’t know who he is. The kid throws a ball at him - not a proper one, and not at the right height. The player will miss, clipping the ball and sending it skittering off into next door’s pool. The player will want to slam the bat down and say it’s not a regulation ball, the pitcher was too close, the bat he signed for the kid is not the size he’s used to, any of the excuses the blood rushing to his neck is jamming into his forebrain.

Instead, he’ll smile, shrug in embarrassment, and tell the kid he got him, he’s better than the pros. And the kid will smile at the lie as kids do, and cling to that memory every time he fails, or things don’t work out right.

Any time life tries to beat the childhood out of him he’ll stand proud and remember the day he beat the pros.

Political Musings from a Coffee Shop

What if the tea party, the republican party, Fox News - the staunchest defenders of America with a capital Fuck Yeah - were all part of a conspiracy to destabilise it?

The right wing makes no sense to me, I'll freely admit that. It seems to be selfish and underhanded in the same way that they probably view liberalism as overthinking and naive.

But I can at least see where the part of the right nearest the centre is coming from. They believe that making the rich richer is fair because it's better to reward hard work. From a strictly eugenic point of view, it makes sense, I just disagree with the brute simplicity of it. I'll never really understand racism, but there again the right is usually (with the exception of the EDL and such) pretty quick to try and disassociate themselves from it. And limiting the rights of people is a temptingly simple solution because I do believe that people are all idiots, including me. See, I'm typing in green now. Why am I typing in green. Now Blue. Clearly, I'm an idiot.

But what I don't understand are the Sarah Palins and the Sean Hannitys - the crazy right. The ones who think the female body can magically repel rapist semen, who think that 47% of the country they're trying to win over don't pay taxes. The ones who are currently shutting down the US government to stop free healthcare, despite two thirds of Americans being for it.

I mean, these people have to be funded from somewhere, but the majority are against them. If they're just taking advantage of the revelation that (in the UK at least) an obscenely rich minority have the majority of the money, then clearly we need to take a very close look at the word 'democracy, because the government is being run by a minority acting against the interests of the public.

Put it this way. We mock Americans for their attitudes towards war, their unfair healthcare systems and their megacorporations that make Ebeneezer Scrooge look like Oprah on amphetamines. But when have you actually met an American person who agreed with any of it? I mean I've met four Americans off the top of my head, and one of them was a fan of guns; but she was from Alaska where they do kind of need them. I have found all the individual Americans I've met to be reasonable, rational people.

But the news we hear from America is completely different, and it's promoted and funded and reinforced by the same network of attention grabbers, all acting like idiots. It's hard to believe they're not mentally ill, that nobody's sat them down and explained to them that we don't share or support these opinions. It's hard to see where the impetus comes from to keep putting them on our screens.

But... what if that's the point? What if they're elevated to these positions not to defend the US, but to give it a bad name? To tar it with a label reflecting the worst bigotry of the right wing? After all, we can agree that direct attacks of violence have failed. America does not negotiate with Terrorists. But it does love money. Mmm, delicious money. That's it America, dry roasted money in a delicate oil jus. It's their kryptonite. It's even green.

And given that attacks both direct and indirect have failed (modern espionage becomes pointless in an age where the NSA can tap into everything) the remaining option is to take a leaf out of the USA's own playbook: destabilise the government and turn the people against them. Just like in South America, just like in Vietnam. The Republican party is being led astray by the interests of healthcare organisations, most of whom pay their taxes overseas. Foreign interests paying for the US government. And the whole cycle of destruction is protected from repercussions because it's shielded by the money it accumulates.

We have capitalism actively destroying a democracy, and nobody's doing a damn thing.

I think what worries me most about the politics of this era is that governments are no longer listening to protest, and acting without mandate. Something has changed, and that has let them unleash their worst excesses - even in our country, we have the sale of the NHS, grants to energy companies for fracking and the destruction of the welfare state. And we are powerless to stop any of it.

I don't know. I said in an earlier post that that it's very easy to spot conspiracies emerging where there are none, but I think it comes from an in-built desire in the human mind to find patterns in the chaos. Somehow, it's more reassuring to imagine the secret terrorist bloc from Team America: World Police funding Bill O'Reilly's rants about the mentally ill than to imagine instead that someone genuinely feels those kinds of opinions are acceptable.

We're in one hell of a state when it's easier to believe we're being manipulated than it is to believe that we're choosing to act this way.

Through the Looking Glass

I meant to write about this last year when it was first on, but... well...

We have to talk.

I mean I've left TV to it's own devices recently. The break-up was fairly amicable. I've been spending more time with the Xbox anyway, and every time I tried to catch up with TV, it started screaming at me about people I'd never heard of, playing terrible music at all hours and asking if I wanted to borrow any money. And to be honest, the sex was better elsewhere (*ahem*). It hadn't been the same since I was a teenager, and on the few occasions I could bring myself to turn it on, there was nothing there. The magic had gone.

Wanking metaphors aside, there is something genuinely disconcerting about Gogglebox. It's like someone sat a TV executive in front of news reports about privacy concerns surrounding the new Kinect and unease in the public mind towards the rise of so-called reality TV, and then followed it up with a viewing of Orwell's 1984; then lobotomised them and gave them a piece of paper and a crayon.

The resulting scrawl would doubtlessly have spelled out the show's central premise: Watching people while they're watching TV. That's it Britain, that's your cultural lot. You've gone from Elgar and Richard Curtis to staring slack jawed at someone staring slack jawed back at you. It's like chatroulette without the random stranger nudity, although I'm sure Channel 5 are already working out how to (A) get around that and (B) involve Keith Chegwin.

I mean it's just... It's fucking stupid, alright? TV is an inherently non-interactive medium, and nothing brings it home like this. Staring at people staring at a TV. Does it fulfil some voyeuristic longing to see into the lives of other, so called 'normal' people? Is it because most people sort of suspect that they're not normal, and want a yardstick to measure themselves and their opinions against? Are we just nosey sods?

Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to tune in to this week's episode, but I suspect I've been able to replicate the experience by sticking a mirror in the corner of the room, facing me. Oh look, he's typing on his laptop. Now he's picking his nose. Now he's wailing in abject despair at man's desperate, clawing need to consume inane drivel to fill the void modern life has torn from them. Hilarious!

5 Shocking Ways this Insane Website Doesn't Know what a Rip-Off is

I love Cracked.com, even if sometimes it feels like every one of their titles came from a mad-libs drinking game revolving around the words 'shocking,' 'insane' or 'you didn't know.' At least if that were true, it would explain the liver failure and / or brain damage that went into their recent piece, 17 Insane Movies That Ripped Off From Lesser-Known Films You Didn't Know (I may be paraphrasing a little).

I mean, I get that it's nice to be into pop-culture, and I get that it's interesting when you notice things recurring across the vast swathes of things you've watched. Pointing it out to other people validates the amount of time you've invested into watching movies. And to give the article it's due, there are some great examples of actual theft - the author of Voyage of the Space Beagle settling out of court with 20th Century Fox over Alien, and the similarities between A Fistful of Dollars and Yojimbo.

Beyond that though... I'm sorry, but as insane and shocking as this might sound, the majority of the article doesn't really deal with theft. For instance, #10's revelation about an irresistable force meeting an immovable object fails to take into account it's earlier use as a wrestling meme in the 1980s. #5 just compares some fairly commonly recurring (if a little schmaltzy) lines from a male protagonist to a female one, and #12 is at best an interesting piece of prop spotting.

#2 is probably the low point however, claiming that both Dredd and The Raid ripped off Die Hard because they were both set in a tower block. Do we extend that logic to accusing everything from District 13 to Rec of ripping off Towering Inferno just because they're also set in a tower block?

How far back do you go when accusing films of ripping each other off? Granted, there are shot-for-shot 'homages' going on all the time in movies, but when you stray into the territory of accusing one thing of ripping off another because of thematic similarities, you're straying dangerously close to scratching off the veneer of mass-storytelling completely.

I mean, I'm sure most readers are savvy enough to realise that films have tended to adhere to a fairly standardised three act structure since the late 70s. But beyond that, there is also the discovery that unfortunately, there are only seven basic plots:

• Overcoming the Monster,
• Rags to Riches,
• The Quest,
• Voyage and Return,
• Comedy,
• Tragedy and Rebirth.

'Comedy' being an overall catch-all for those stories which have no other narrative but to make you laugh. So if there are only seven basic plots, how many variants of those plots can there logically be?

I mean, if we're pointing the finger to this extent, surely Cracked needs to be aware of Total Film's list of 50 Great Movies Accused of Being Rip-Offs from July 30th last year, or What Culture's '13 Famous Movies You Didn’t Realise Were Shameless Rip-offs' from August of the same year, or even their own article '7 Classic Movies That Are Shameless Ripoffs' from May this year, by a different author.

The truth is, there is a big difference between repetition and inspiration. History repeats itself, and so the events that inspire the minds of writers will similarly repeat themselves - we just have worldwide cultural access to those events. More people seeing those events means more people being inspired by them in their writing, and eventually, cultural output seems to have all these eerie underlying synchronicities.

It's OK to take an overarching theme and set it in a new light. It's fine to look at a previously used setting and try and do something new with it. It's obviously not OK to take the events, universe or movie poster and just change the names then sell it on, but then there's a fine line of ambiguity in exactly how close is 'too close.'

It just seems to me that this article is really reaching in trying to find similarities. Oh, and a lot of their 'lesser well-known' films aren't really that lesser well known. But apart from that, it was almost as interesting as this concluding paragraph is bad.

Sorry.