From Idea to Story: The Creative Process with Mary O'Gara

I’ve gotten in the habit, reading and teaching Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, of thinking about my creative side as an inner child or at least an artistic child.

My apologies to all the wild and wonderful inner artists who no more deserve to be called children than women deserved to be denied the vote because of our childlike innocence.

Do you write in binges and sprees (What a high!) or do you carve out steady, predictable writing time in your daily schedule?

Like trips to Disney World with grandchildren, events such as NaNoWriMo, Chocolate Challenge and the various BIAWs and BIAMs can be exhilarating, challenging and produce a flood of words on paper.

Karl Shapiro was an awesome and terrifying professor. The Pulitzer prize-winning poet edited the University of Nebraska's Prairie Schooner Magazine, taught poetry in an invitation-only class, and generally terrorized less verbal politicians and professors whose opinions conflicted with his. His students loved watching from the sidelines, of course, and took our own turn being roasted in class.

Karl had our biographies and knew what our "pet cows" were, so he attacked them and goaded us to put our rage and emotion in words. Was he unfair? of course. That was the point. We learned on the fly to find the words for strong emotions and words to defend our beliefs. As barbaric as it sounds, we all knew it was a gift. That goading and his own love of language were what he had to give us.

“Obsessions.” Such a nasty word, usually reserved for psychological suspense, true crime stories and the darkest of erotic fantasies. And the nightly news, of course.

But there might be a brighter side to obsessions. There might even be reasons for you to indulge a few. In fact, indulging obsessions may be a necessity for creative work. (I can even quote psychologists in favor of obsessions, so please stay with me here.)

I’ll admit to two current obsessions of my own: The feminine journey as story structure and sentences of every shape and form.

Ancient wisdom and modern meditation practices reveal a rhythm to creativity that can become a model for anyone’s individual practice. Symbols and metaphors have fuzzy boundaries, so your personal use of these symbols may not match another writer’s interpretation. All that matters is that you find a creative rhythm that sustains your work.

We call it a body of work for a good–and forgotten–reason. The best work comes from or at least through our bodies, through our emotions. Everything universal is in the emotions; the details only draw a readership if they are linked to universal emotions.

Melanie Phillips, co-author of the Dramatica software and a prolific writer and teacher on story structure, writes about the four stages of the creative process.

How creative are you? I've devised a simple test, based on half a century of study and a total lack of statistic proof:

1. Did you get in trouble a lot as a child?
2. Do you passionately hate micro-managers and plan to kill them off in a book someday?
3. Would you rather go to the office supply store than clean the kitchen sink?
4. As a child, did you find ways to keep up with the big kids?