Author skills
Levelling Up Your Creative Skills
The ideas you need to craft that novel
I write fantasy novels, most of which are in a series. Each one requires a lot of creativity, a lot of ideas. You need to work on:
- settings
- characters
- plot
And that’s not to mention things like magic systems, cultures, and more. Fantasy maps! Weapons! Species of monsters!
And in LitRPG novels, you need to figure out a game system, too.
All of this is really demanding, so in this article I want to explain where the ideas actually come from.
How creativity works — in brief
I’ve said before that creativity is not something you are born with. You can work at it:
For that reason, it’s valuable to understand how creativity works. Let’s not see this as something mysterious. Instead, let’s lift the lid and poke around inside the gears.
After all, if we know how it works, then we have a chance of tuning up the engine!
Crafting a novel draws on the four key pillars of creativity:
- What you already know
- New information that you find out
- ‘Incubation’ of ideas over time
- Random chance and luck
Let’s think about how these play out in one of the most challenging of creative tasks — inventing a new world for a fantasy series.
Harnessing Creativity
When you create a fantasy world you are using those same four pillars (and really, it’s the same on a smaller scale for a thriller, a historical novel, etc).
Here’s how:
What you know…
Although a fantasy world is by definition new, authors draw heavily on what they already understand about geographical locations. Look at any fantasy map and you see pretty normal-looking mountains, rivers, islands, coastlines…
It’s basically the real world with the lines moved and new names!
Sometimes we can make simple switches that make things feel very different, for example:
- In my Shadow Kingdoms world, the equator is cold and the poles are hot.
- In my Sparta Online series, there are city states (like those of ancient Greece) ruling the American continents.
- In my Druid Stones Saga historical fantasy, I basically set the story where I actually live but in a different era (1000+ years ago!).
Even when things are different, they draw on inspiration stored away in the brain. For example, the Shadow Kingdoms world focuses on a single landmass rather than lots of continents. However, this is just how the real world was in the past.
As you can see, creativity is often just about taking familiar elements and moving them around.
New information…
We only know and remember so much… In The Druid Stones Saga, I had to do a lot of research to find out about about the rulers of the minor Scottish kingdoms at the time, about Viking lords who were attacking and colonising Britain, and about technology.
For example, I reasoned that local people would be much better at foraging and at using herbal medicine than they were today. They couldn’t just buy stuff! So I spend time researching the uses of herbs, seaweed, and so on.
As they walked, Donnell noticed tangles of bladder-wrack seaweed washed up nearby, and recalled that this was saltwater loch, connected directly to the sea estuary at the same point that the River Clud spilled into the ocean. Fenella noticed it too, and crouched down, harvesting several of the bubble-lined fronds. “Useful for treating goitre,” she said. “Let me know if you spot the seaweed known as pepper dulse. It’s reddish in colour.”
Incubation…
It’s hard to know exactly when new ideas are incubating inside our minds, as by definition, it’s an unconscious process.
All the same, we can plan for it.
Just as we plant seeds in the garden and wait for them to grow, we can do the research — such as the example I used above — and then wait for the right moment to use it when writing.
To me, one of the best ways to use incubation is in creating characters. This is how I do it:
- I come up with an initial sketch of who the character is, and what role they play in the story. At this stage, they are quite basic and generic.
- I let the character play around in my mind for a few days, picturing them in some of the locations and thinking about how they will react to problems.
- I have a go at writing a scene with the character. By this stage they have more depth, and I feel that I know ‘how they tick’.
- In the process of writing a scene, new things crop up that I didn’t see coming, but which can become signature traits, e.g. a phrase that the character likes to use, or what they drink.
- I then mull over the scene, thinking about any elements that don’t work. This very specific ‘character work’ helps me get to know the character in real depth. What keeps them awake at night, and what are their core principles?
This might sound time-consuming, but the whole thing can be done inside a week, and it’s really worth building a character and giving them depth.
Random chance…
Sometimes things just happen.
I remember when I was writing the very first drafts of Sparta Online, I was sitting on a train typing away (as I often do), and a very large man with a moustache sat beside me. He made me think of a military officer.
He then encroached on my space, shoving my arm aside to hog the armrest. It really pissed me off!
It was clear that this was a man who considered himself important, and liked to take up space.
And pretty soon, he was a character in my novel…
Being a writer means observing your surroundings. You might not go out in the morning to find someone who you can write about. But you have to be ready to react. Ready, so that when something fits a hole in your novel, you see it, and throw in that random element.
Another way to use random chance is to be deliberately messy in your process, spreading out notes, images, whatever... Who knows — by chance, you might spot a chance to pair up two things that you hadn’t previously connected.
Happy writing! And a shoutout to Scot Butwell who has encouraged me to share more personal examples in my posts.
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