Where DO I Get My Ideas?

Hello All!  Happy November!  Brrrrrr . . . living at 7,000 elevation, we basically pole-vault from hot summer right into winter most years.  This one doesn't seem to be an exception.  Almost overnight the leaves on our trees decided to make a run for it.   They were just there the last time I checked!  We also had a pretty catastrophic tornado right in the vicinity.  No one was killed, but the multiple areas hit lost thousands of Ponderosa's, Oaks and Junipers.  A tornado?  In Northern Arizona?  Not likin' the changing weather patterns I'm seeing the last few years.  We're not prepared for riding out a tornado.   The house sits on top of a rock mountain, so not much chance of us diggin' out a storm cellar.  Okay, I'll save my off-the-wall opinions about changing weather patterns for another post.  I did have another off-the-wall subject matter when I started this one . . .

I've been asked how I come up with ideas; for my plays and for the story lines for my book, and to answer that sends me off into a little bit of uncharted territory.  First of all, for my various teleplays, I was following along with the television shows I wrote submissions for and the ideas just kind of came to me.  Same with my screenplay; "Mexican Vacation," following the Griswalds and combining that with all the experiences I'd had in Mexico up to that time.  With my screenplay; "Fugitive Child," well that was interesting . . . it was a timely subject that had been coming up repeatedly on the news and it hit me at some core level that got me furiously writing.  I had it finished, edited and submitted in three weeks . . . but it still wasn't fast enough.  Someone else got their version out there first:  As for "I''ve Come Home," I actually dreamed it.  Them, I should say.  Two complete and separate dreams I had that ended up coming together to form my book.

Back when the girls were in high school I was doing quite a bit of writing; exercising my mind on a daily basis in the regimen of putting pen to paper, or in this case fingers to keyboard.  We took a month-long vacation in our motorhome back to Florida in the early Spring of 1998, a time during which I thought I would be taking a break, but apparently my subconscious didn't agree.  Two weeks into the trip I woke up one morning from dreaming the storyline of Spencer and Savannah, literally shaking my head going, Where on earth did that come from?  I got busy jotting down a detailed synopsis of the dream just in time to have the second one:  the ghostly story of Garrett and Belinda.  These two dreams were unreal . . . because they were so complete.  Mostly when I dream I remember bits and pieces at best, but not these two.  By the time the trip was over I had a detailed synopsis of the two story lines, deciding later to merge them into the book as it reads now.

I do have theories about the experience; and it's these theories I think people might find interesting, to see how my mind tracks just a little 'outside the box.'  First of all, I firmly believe that the mind is just like any other muscle of the body in that it desperately needs exercise.  The more it's exercised the sharper it focuses.  Beyond the stunning example I was given above, I cite back to my biggest confirmation of what for me is irrefutable truth:  my music.  When I was young and practicing hours a day at the piano, it wasn't only my fingers getting a workout.  My mind had absolute clarity for music, for notes on a page.  I may have been a bit of a drooler in other aspects of my life, but not that.  So burned into my mind were pieces like "Claire de Lune", "Liebestraum," "Moonlight Sonata" and many others, that to this day I've never needed to open the music to sit down and play.  It sounds strange, but I call up the sequence of notes to my fingers from a place I can't point a finger to and say from right there.  It's somewhere deep in my subconscious.  In fact, if I let my mind, my thoughts, get in the way when I'm playing, most often it trips me up.  Those many pieces were written to some kind of hard-drive inside me and the only way I can tap into it is to just 'let my mind go.'  Play from impulse only. 

The most striking example of that was after I'd officially 'quit' taking piano lessons at sixteen and was then asked to perform for the national 'American Medical Association' convention in Phoenix at the Camelback Resort.  I worked up the most difficult piece I'd ever attempted to perform all on my own to entertain them with, and I think because I didn't have my security blanket there (a piano teacher in the background) my mind was fighting me on it.  I was introduced, came up on stage and sat down at the piano, placed my hands into position . . . and froze!  I couldn't remember anything beyond the first chord.  I literally sat there for over a minute, until I started hearing some mumbles from the crowd.  I almost got up with an apology and walked off the stage.  Last second I made the decision to just play the first chord and then 'let it go.'  See what happened.  It worked.  That internal hard-drive took over for me.  It was the weirdest thing.

Writers say; 'Keep writing every day!'  Musicians say; 'Keep practicing every day!'  Fitness experts say; 'Keep exercising every day!' and I think that holds true for everything you do.  Because I also happen to believe something else:  'You either use it or you lose it.'   Just as the gifts of your life, the accomplishments, come to fruition equal to the effort you put into them, they can also fade without it.  And before you say, 'Hey, you're contradicting yourself;' yes, it is harder for me to get through one of my classical pieces now versus twenty/thirty years ago . . . I'm thinking maybe my hard-drive's gotten a little corroded.  But all is not lost or forgotten.  Just, er, a little rusty.  And here's another theory I have that ties into the above. 

It's about creativity.  I've long speculated that perhaps creativity is a quantifiable, physical element, a gene you either possess or you don't, like any other gene you have in your body . . . for blue eyes, or the ability to roll your tongue.  And I think it can be exercised as well.  Here's what I theorize this potential gene might actually do.  I imagine that as it's exercised and gains strength, it draws energy, inspiration from a source of frequency in our surrounding universe mankind has yet to label or identify.  It taps into that band, which if I'm correct and it's out there,  is just another version of the ones that carry radio waves or WIFI.  Four hundred or so years ago people thought the world was flat.  A hundred years ago people would've laughed themselves silly if you'd talked of radio waves or WIFI.  So, who knows?  Perhaps that band, that frequency captures and stores the energy we generate from our use of creativity; our ideas, our physical efforts using it; making like a mega hard-drive that all someone who was born with the 'creativity' gene has to do is tap into to make use of.  It might explain how three or four different writers come out with almost the identical movie or song or book at the exact same time.  Maybe they tapped into and downloaded the same file folder, because that idea in particular was being given a lot of mental energy and power to it at that time.  Exercising their creativity by using it everyday gave that gene within them the strength to stretch out and connect with that mega-hard-drive.  Just like some people have a gene that makes them more prone to a particular disease, or a gene that makes them more psychic, some people, I believe, are more sensitive to the source of energy where creativity is stored.

In a roundabout way my mother used to theorize on this herself, advising me that if I had something significant I would invent/create that I wanted to be mine, to claim ownership of, don't weaken or corrupt the energy of it by advertising it ahead of time, or even speaking of it out loud.    She said it would weaken its power and I'd be apt to find the rug pulled out from under me.  She was a firm believer in keeping silent as the grave until the right moment . . . keeping the focus, the energy internalized until finished and ready to unveil the masterpiece.  Too weird, I'll bet you're thinking right now.  But if you think about it in the context of above; maybe that was her way of saying;  the more you externalize the creative process with verbal words and energy, the more the mega hard-drive gathers it in, making it accessible to others who are tapped in as well.  Real Twilight Zone kind of stuff, right?  Well, mom was very much into Metaphysics.  I've never formally researched the principles put forth by it, but I'm fairly sure a lot of her advice to me in our brief time together came from their ideologies.

So, there you have it.  I don't look at myself as any different from anyone else.  I believe I happened to have inherited the 'gene' for creativity.  Luck of the draw, I guess.  I had relatives upline that were dripping with it.  I also inherited the gene for gray hair, mondo oily skin, pesky extra fat-cells and a double-chin.  I had relatives upline that were dripping with those, too.   It's all relative.  Take care all . . . talk to you soon!