Summoning Imagination: The Secret to Being Creative Quickly
Behind the Scenes #13 How Einstein's theories helped me create a new short story for Radio 4!
My exciting news is that I’ve been asked to write a short story for Short Works on Radio 4! It’s called Grace’s Cave and will be narrated by Halema Hussain!! It’ll be broadcast at 15.45 on 15 November and 17 November at 23.45 (and on iPlayer after that). Members of
can read the full story below!The difficulty was that the deadline was extremely tight - one week!! I did push it back, but still, it was not long to capture a story from the ether and refine it enough to feel as if it could be read on the radio.
(The link to the show is at the bottom of the page!)
So what to do? I decided to take my own advice, for a change. I run writing workshops, mainly for university students, and my most popular one, How to Professionalise your Writing (coming to you lovely people soon too!), encompasses techniques to boost creativity.
Now, normally I don’t need to boost mine. This sounds boastful, but it’s more about practicalities - I have a few ideas but very little time. Even if you only have two ideas for novels (as I do), that’s potentially two to ten years of your life accounted for. Job done
.
So how do you come up with an idea for a short story? In a day or two?
What I share in my workshop is that creativity is found in the intersection of different ideas and thoughts to create something that feels original and new to us.
As the biologist Stephen Jay Gould said: ‘connecting the seemingly unconnected is the secret of creativity.'
Albert Einstein described the process as ‘combinatory play’, writing in a letter: ‘combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.’
I’ve adapted this rough guideline from A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young as a blueprint for achieving combinatory play and boosting creativity:
Assemble ‘raw material’ (ideas, research papers, pictures, objects, etc.).
Ask is there a relationship between any of them?
Allow the unconscious to work.
Hope for an a-ha moment!
Later, ask Does it work in the real world?
What is key is to allowing the unconscious to process the information at some point by doing something else: Einstein played the violin (oh, and not censoring yourself in the early stages).
This is what I did:
I went to Yeo Valley Organic Garden for half a day. It’s not just a place that has flowers. This is a garden that has been beautifully and lovingly designed for two decades by someone with a quirky mind and a Bohemian sense of humour (think glitter balls in the greenhouse, stools with human legs, a giant orange plastic throne in the hay meadow and gardening magazines wallpapering the toilets).
There is a strong sense of Yeo Valley’s ethos: sustainability and environmental stewardship (there’s a sign telling you how to make your own compost). Plus on the day there was a sculpture park so I had even more inspiration than I had anticipated.
Sanjida in Yeo Valley Organic Gardens; one of the sculptures on display I allowed myself to wander round the gardens and look at the sculptures, before heading to the café. The food is delicious and I love it when the barista knows your order in advance (black coffee if you're ever buying).
I’d brought a beautiful brand new notebook (‘Sandler Mug with Tulips and Narcissi’ by Angie Lewin) and a nice pen.
I made lots of lists without censoring myself. These were my lists:
Characters - ones I love from my novels, both published (sweary teenage Stella in My Mother’s Secret) and unpublished (Billie Pink from Castle Freke).
Locations - such as the Sweet Track, a Neolithic walkway through a marsh in Avalon.
Ideas - random thoughts, phrases, stories I’ve cut out of newspapers or downloaded from Reddit.
Scenes from unpublished novels that I could turn into a stand-alone story.
Then I allowed all those ideas to tumble together and pulled out the ones that gave me a frisson when I thought about them.
I noted down my two strongest ideas / collections of thoughts and wandered round the garden again.
The following morning, I came back to the two sets of ideas and asked, Which one excites me most?
It was this one, which at the time was a random collection of bits and bobs:
Aveline’s Hole: A cave near me that I’ve been researching for my Wilderness book. It’s the oldest known human burial ground and as well as human bones, it also contains those of aurochs, giant cattle that were 2m tall.
A childhood characterised by loss.
A missing child.
A girl called Grace. (I’ve got Grace by Supergrass looping round and round in my brain. If only I could sing I’d be happy).
If you’re enjoying this post, you might be interested in How to Tell a Story, my process from start (blank page!) to finish (publishable short story), which you can read at the end of this mini-series.
This is what I came up with:
‘I haven’t had a birthday since I was ten years old. That makes me sound like I’m immortal or a vampire, but it’s really not like that.’
Kat is about to turn sixteen on the anniversary of her sister Grace’s disappearance 5 years ago and her anxious parents are on overdrive. Everything in Kat’s life since Grace failed to come home has been the result of loss; her life is defined by her sister’s absence. When Kat goes out running with her dog her Mum insists that both she and the dog wear a GPS tracker at all times.
A message glimpsed on social media leads Kat to uncover the dark history of the local area - but will she find out what really happened to her sister that terrible night 5 years ago?
Grace’s Cave by Sanjida Kay
And then I followed through the process, step by step, that I’ve outlined for you here in How to Tell a Story.
I’m hugely grateful to Joe Melia, who recommended me to Radio 4, my daughter, Jasmine, who brainstormed the plot with me, and to my writing friends, Heather Dyer and Chris Simms, for dropping everything for an emergency read of my first draft.
I particularly loved this dark little chiller on Short Works: The Stranger by Daisy Johnson.
And if you’d like to listen to my story, it’ll be out on Radio 4, Short Works, at 3.45pm 15 November.
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Members of Wild Writing with Sanjida can read the full story below: