Sometimes, when I’m having trouble writing a scene, I’ll take a step back from trying to express it in words and just try to see the moment in my mind’s eye. Where is this taking place? Who’s in the picture? What are they doing? What important things are in the picture? What’s about to happen to those people or those things?
Sometimes an image comes readily to mind. Sometimes an image comes to mind so readily I need to think about it a little further, until I realize which old movie or TV show my subconscious lifted the image from, and then I discard it. There’s good money to be made in recycling old TV tropes, but not interesting writing to be done.
Sometimes it really helps me to find an old photo or an image that seems to crystallize something about the scene I’m trying to write or the people who are in it. I used to find old issues of National Geographic really helpful for this, as the photography was always eye-opening and mind-expanding. (I’m still trying to come up with a story idea that’s worthy of the incredible images published in “Zaire River: Lifeline for a Nation,” in the November 1991 issue.)
More recently, as magazines with good photography have gone extinct, I’ve found it helpful to type a few key words into Google search, and then to browse through the images the search returns. I can also find it helpful to go out to a stock art library and do the same, trying to find one or two images that really capture some key element of the story I’m trying to tell and the people who are in it.
Sometimes, this is really helpful.
Other times, it can lead to spending hours taking deep dives down unproductive rabbit holes.
And once in a while, I find an image that completely derails my train of thought, sends me off in an entirely different direction, and starts rewriting my characters’ dialog before I’ve even written it.
For example, recently I was trying to begin writing a completely new space opera tale; a serious story; one that played shamelessly to all the grand heroic action tropes and traditions of pulp sci-fi and yet (this is the nearly impossible part) owed absolutely nothing to Star Trek, Star Wars, or Starship Troopers. In my mind this story opened on the day before the commissioning ceremony for the space fleet’s latest and most powerful flagship, as a group of high-ranking officers gathered to conduct the final inspection. To help me visualize the scene I searched through the Adobe stock art library to find a few images that would really help me to crystallize the scene in my mind.
And that’s when everything went to Hell…
Well, damn. It looks like I’m back to writing satire again.
2 comments:
Belongs in Spaceballs, for sure! Mel Brooks missed his chance.
This past fall we stopped at a gift shop in St. Jean-Port-Jolie, Quebec. The owner had found amazing carvings from all around the globe, and I was struck by one that reminded me powerfully of the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz. I explained this in French to the elderly owner, who had never heard of Oz. He explained that this was the Hindu monkey god Hanuman, and wrote it out for my benefit. Hanuman normally appears as a muscular man with a monkey face and long tail, often shown as flying without wings, rather like Superman. This carving came from Indonesia, and they carved him as a winged monkey with sharp teeth. When I unwrapped him at home, I realized that he was impressively anatomically correct, in a pose similar to that starship. He now hangs proudly in the living room, turning in the air currents.
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