Small Steps

When I need something to write, when the Big Ideas aren’t quite flowing and I just need to get words on paper, I have a default. I have a theme that I return to, over and over again. It fits like a glove… or in this case, a boot.

There are many settings, there are many plots that occasionally evolve. But there is always, at the core, someone walking.

I pick up in media res and set a character walking. I usually don’t bother naming them, I just set them off. I almost never have a destination in mind, a purpose for the journey, and sometimes my fresh protagonist doesn’t either. They’re just going, step by step, mile by mile. They are alone, normally, save for the occasional bird or other miscellaneous bit of wildlife: alone with their thoughts, and with the wind, and with whatever terrain they’re crossing.

This is the bit that varies, according to my mood, or my idling imagination, or occasionally from whatever I’ve been reading or watching of late. I’ve done deserts, I’ve done mountains, I’ve done space – and perhaps most importantly I’ve started with fields, though those last two stories took on a little more life of their own. You never know where a story’s going to take you – and I do mean you – after all. But this is also one of the most important bits, really: the environment, the place which the unnamed protagonist is passing through, and the place that my idling imagination can warm itself up through describing. It’s the sort of writing that I love doing but there is so often not enough space and time for in my published works: you do, at some point, have to get to the plot. But lavishing detail on every rock, every patch of lichen, the whistling of the wind or the heat of the sand… it’s relaxing. If reading is escapism then writing is too, and I find few things more escapist than immersing myself in describing a foreign environment from bowed head to striding food.

It started as a wish to walk in the fields of home again. The plot came knocking at the pub door some time later.

But the walking is key. The travel, the journey, is key. Just describing a place isn’t enough to scratch the creative itch for me. I need that sense of progress, of motion. Whatever weary traveller I’ve sketched must be travelling, no matter how much they, or I, might want to stay in the little clearing in the woods I’ve just drawn up, with its fragrant wildflowers and birdsong.

There’s probably a much stronger creative metaphor or insight in here somewhere, but their progress is my progress, for all that these stories often go pretty much nowhere. To break myself out of a creative rut I spin my wheels by not spinning my wheels, by making someone else get moving… anywhere, really. And it works. My brain gets moving right alongside my nameless protagonists, and I merrily switch over to my main projects with my creativity nicely refreshed.

To all those nameless people who still languish in the middle of the desert, or high on some mountainside, I salute you. I do finish most of these rambling tales but there are a good few left undone, as there are plenty of other, more focused works that I’ve never finished. But those nameless wanderers are special. Their task is simple, but vital. They journey so my mind can too.