Artistic Inspiration
By Caroline Totten, Past President
Let us assume that you have a fascinating character, an intriguing plot, and your prose is steaming along like a locomotive when suddenly something in your brain throws a switch. Your prose comes to screeching halt. Your mental process is blocked. What happened?
This, my friend, is your artistic intuition. It is telling you that you are going in the wrong direction. Oh, swell. You are on page 50. What are you supposed to do? Abandon the story? Maybe rush to the nearest book doctor for therapy?
Since I am highly skilled at driving my train into a swamp filled with alligators, I have figured out how to solve the problem. BACK UP THREE OR FOUR PARAGRAPHS. DELETE. TAKE THE STORY IN ANOTHER DIRECTION.
Intuition is a wonderful subconscious tool. It is the equivalent of a guardian robot. You don’t even know it is functioning until it kicks in the brakes. It will tell you when logical progression has turned stupid, illogical, and unbelievable.
Sometimes, the problem is proper order. Example: Jane hit the brakes, hearing the explosion.
This is presented backwards. The syntax makes the reader aware of the response before he knows the stimulus. The sentence should be recast:
Hearing the explosion, Jane hit the brakes.
When you are hot with inspiration and writing at the speed of light, a plot development that is in your head may not make it to paper. Therefore, when you arrive at page 50, intuition shouts: “Whoa.” Check the cause-effect sequences in your plot. Did you establish on page 25 that a wimpy, little guy is capable of diving off the Brooklyn Bridge to save a puppy?
Let’s assume that all your stimulus-response components are in order. You have established that this wimpy, little guy is capable of a heroic deed. He is on the verge of jumping off the bridge, but you stop the action with a long flashback of his childhood in which his father counsels him to be brave and selfless. In effect, the prose has jumped the track. This flashback defuses the stimulus that brought him to the heroic leap. Unless, you are plotting a big multi-viewpoint novel, the stimulus-response components must be close together.
It is wise to know the destination of your story (the ending) before you begin, but sometimes writing is a process of discovery; and the ending is a surprise. With or without a map, construct the scenes as a transaction between stimulus and response.
Of course, you will need to go back and critically review the scenes. Maybe cut excessive description or tighten sentence structure.
Absolutely, you must cut stuttering, complex dialogue, such as:
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” she said.
This may be stimulus-response, but chances are your intuition will stubbornly resist this literary flair.