How To Pick a Topic to Write Creatively About

Creativity as a process has only one true source, across all fields of creative endeavour, whether that be in the arts or the sciences – and that is, the unconscious. Ayd Instone in "Creativity and the Beatles" has this to say: "It wasn't until 1995 that Paul McCartney realised…that his 1965 song, Yesterday, apparently on the surface, about the loss of a lover was actually about the very real loss of his own mother a few years earlier from cancer… a pain that he wasn't consciously aware of when he wrote it… Perhaps creativity is a ghost after all, a spectre of energy, emotion and hidden memory that at certain times, perhaps when we least expect it, will come to haunt us".

It is well known that the idea for the tune of "Yesterday" first came to Paul McCartney in a dream. Dreams have a large part to play in how our unconscious minds communicate with us.

Whether we write, or whether we create in any other field, for the initial inspiration we are reliant on the unconscious. This can make us insecure and vulnerable; for control comes from the conscious mind, and the unconscious lies beyond. Of course, there's a time when structure and reason are vital; but my point here is that when you pick your topic to write creatively about, behind all your conscious selections there will be something else at work that you can have no control over at all.

And many great novels which catch the imagination of large readerships have been based on ideas that arose from the author's unconscious. Take for instance the story of "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde". These characters came to Robert Louis Stevenson in a dream. And the novelist John Fowles has said that the first idea for "The French Lieutenant's Woman" came to him simply through an image of a woman standing alone at the end of the Cobb at Lyme Regis, gazing out to sea. He didn't know where the image had come from. But there it was – and a novel arose from it. And creativity is not confined to the arts. Scientists too are creative. Thomas Edison said many of his most brilliant ideas and insights came to him in his "creative alpha state" between wakefulness and sleep.

Therefore I believe the answer to the challenge of "How to pick a topic to write creatively about" lies in your unconscious mind. This is the key to the creative process.