Seeds of Inspiration: 1 Foolproof Way to Generate Ideas

We’re getting ready for Camp NaNoWriMo this April! Every writer carries seeds of inspiration; today, Grant Faulkner, NaNoWriMo’s executive director, shares his tried and true method of breaking through writer’s block, borrowed from Ray Bradbury:

I don’t like to observe the phrase “writer’s block”—and I’m not even sure I believe such a state truly exists. I think it’s too easy to end up building an odd shrine to writer’s block—to proclaim the affliction, and then festoon one’s writing life with it by saying, “I’m blocked,” over and over again, as if waiting for magical bolts of inspiration to strike down from the sky and un-stopper it all (which only happens in the movies, right?).

My policy is that if I feel “blocked,” then I have to take responsibility for unblocking myself. I recently discovered a fun way to jump-start my imagination when one of these creative impasses occurs: Ray Bradbury’s list-making method. It’s a simple technique to generate new story ideas, go deeper into an existing story, and just have fun.

When Bradbury first became a writer, he made long lists of nouns to trigger ideas. He said that each person possesses a “fabulous mulch” of experiences in their minds, but you have to find a way to draw out the threads of memories stowed away deep in your subconscious. He did this by making lists of nouns—quickly, without over-thinking things. “Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness … speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page,” he wrote in Zen in the Art of Writing.

For example, here’s the list of nouns that sparked one of Bradbury’s more notable books:

THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. THE TRAPDOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON.

This might look like a random list of words, but it offered Bradbury a window into his mind. Once he’d written a list, Bradbury began to word-associate around it by writing what he called pensées, tiny prose poems or descriptive paragraphs of approximately 200 words that helped him examine each noun and dredge his subconscious for meaning. 

Concerning the list of nouns above, he said, “Glancing over the list, I discovered my old love and fright having to do with circuses and carnivals. I remembered, and then forgot, and then remembered again, how terrified I had been when my mother took me for my first ride on a merry-go-round. With the calliope screaming and the world spinning and the terrible horses leaping, I added my shrieks to the din. I did not go near the carousel again for years.”

From Bradbury’s pensée, characters emerged and carried the story forward, and he ended up returning to that terrifying carousel from his youth when he wrote the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Bradbury said this exercise operated as a provocation that helped his “better stuff to surface” as he felt his way toward something “honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.” The exercise might look whimsical on the surface, but it is all about finding the essence of the story you want to write. 

“You can’t write for other people,” said Bradbury. “You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.”

And here I am, writing noun lists as preparation for Camp NaNoWriMo. Or just as warm-up before writing to help me go a little deeper, a little further into my story. I hope you’ll give it a whirl. Writer’s block be gone!

Grant Faulkner is the executive director of the nonprofit behind National Novel Writing Month. He received his B.A. from Grinnell College in English and his M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. He has published stories and essays in The New York Times,Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, The Southwest Review, The Rumpus, Gargoyle, and The Berkeley Fiction Review, among dozens of others. He’s also the founder and editor of the lit journal 100 Word Story, and has published a collection of 100-word stories, Fissures.