(Neil Gaiman has an essay on this over at his site, and someone just pointed me to it – but I’ve been pondering the question for a while. In fact, I wrote an insane piece about it a while ago.)

It’s like reading, but backwards.

And I mean that much more seriously than it would first appear. Reading is a cognitive skill which must be learned. It is not native to the human brain: the brain acquires it through practice and reshapes its own architecture in order to facilitate it. If you read a great deal, the reading part of your brain gets smoother and better. Other skills diminish, by the way: the brain is finite, although it’s probably not entirely a zero-sum game. Not sure about the science of that.

The point, though, is that coming up with ideas – which is, as Gaiman points out, a very long way from being the hard part – is also something which needs to be unpacked in order to be understood. Reading starts as spelling out letters to make words, but it rapidly becomes more complex and powerful – you recognise single words and even phrases in whole chunks, and the idea feel as if they are being pumped into your mind, conjuring images or generating ideas inside your head. You no longer have to labour to comprehend sentences or paragraphs unless you’re reading something impenetrably-written or something in a new language. Hence the goofy examples which circulate every so often showing that as long as the letters are in the right sort of group, you can still read something horribly jumbled:

tihs i’snt yrev hrad to udrnetsnad, eevn tugohh yuo mhigt epexct it to be.

And it’s also true that while the other skills of writing – characterisation, plotting, self-editing and stamina – are all vital and more challenging in the long run, the making-stuff-up skill is more mysterious and less examined, because writers tend to think it’s a single action, and I’m not at all sure that it is. I suspect it’s a group of skills acting together in a concert so well-practiced as to appear inseparable, both from outside and from within. Gaiman mentions one: “what if…” although it could equally well be “I wish” or “wouldn’t it be appalling if”.

I think there’s also a ‘brakes off’ element to it. Most people are taught by school and work (and social pressure, because someone who says “wow, what if everyone here suddenly turned into a dog?” tends not to get dates or even repeat invitations: trust me on this, my early adolescence was one long social embarrassment which, come to think of it, stretched pretty much into my twenties) to clamp down on the urge to explore a mad possibility. Making stuff up requires the opposite: let it run.

Then there are other questions: what would such-and-such a person be doing in such-and-such a situation? What would it take to achieve situation X? That works nicely in reverse – you can see it in action in The Gone-Away World – I knew what the world looked like, then I had to tell the story of how it got there, first to myself and then on the page.

The other thing is interweaving. One zany idea looks sort of lonely. Bind a few of them together and you’ve got something – and everyone assumes, if you get it right, that you came up with the whole thing all at once.

And then there’s free association, which is the root of the Jeff Noon-style sampling-and-rewriting approach to getting started. Look: this is a selection of random words from my bookshelf -

Sand team merchant bottom gentle seven best patron demolished ride whale skinny final mystery.

Let each of those words give you everything and you have more than one story. Weave them together and you have something amazing -

A beach, a liminal place, a borderline place. Dust. A group of merchants, could be Wall Street, but I prefer the notion of a group of small shop owners in an unlikely place. Is there something on the sea bottom in front of the beach? A dead customer who wanted to swim with whales? Was this person killed? And why?

Go further: understand that the whale is now the key to the mystery – because oceanography and fishing are both closed communities to investigate; because whales are beautiful and a little eerie; because they are mysterious. Then go back and examine your traders, their interior worlds, their concerns. You have a story about economic pain, family life, maybe immigration, which is pulled along by a death, a mystery. You have conflicts of interests, friendships, people to explore.

And that’s your idea, right there.

Now you have to do the next part: the writing.

But the point is, coming up with stuff is a process, a group of processes. There are different ways to achieve it, and skills you can learn to improve it. Cull what is ordinary, leave what is not, and you can learn the magic.

Back to work for me :)