How to think (and write) more effectively.
How to think (and write) more effectively.
I’ve been watching a lot of neuroscience and psychology recently. Primarily, so I can organise all my ideas into a workable crystalline thing that will linger at the back of my mind and help me form connections between things.
Because that’s what any truly creative writing is.
Forming connections.
Imagine you’re an aspiring horror author. You might read loads of horror books. When you’re writing, you might put those books down, fearing their influence on the soft metal of your story (I do this when writing sci-fi, and turn instead to non-fiction for my reading). But where does all that learning go? Where are your experiences? And how do you bind these to your new ideas.
Because your story does have new ideas. And one of the best ways to present people with new ideas is to bring them in alongside old ones.
In writing, we sometimes call these ideas Tropes.
So you have a new twist on the horror novel. It’s big, it’s innovative, and it’s weird. But where did it come from and how does it fit into the more recognisable parts of the genre?
In my mind, all my science fiction stories happen in a shared universe. This isn’t the same universe that my readers are familiar with, it is what I call the primordial universe. It’s the one inside my head, and it is definitely NOT canon.
This universe ties all the stories together by the weird strands that protrude from them. Stories with similar tech or feeling or character arcs click together like dominoes, but on another page of this universe they connect like parts of a molecule. It’s a framework, and I realised only recently that this might not be the default way of thinking about stories. I’m a visual thinker, some story ideas come to me as shapes.
With that in mind, I began researching different ways of thinking.
I thought this video might be of interest to some of you. It’s great for business owners, coaches, etc, but it’s also good for authors. Because your ideas need organising too.
Because a universe that has connections between its concepts is a universe which feels alive.
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