This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
People always say to writers: “Where do you get your ideas from?” The Romans didn’t see a “genius” as a thing you could be; they saw it as a breath of divine wind, an inspiration, that might blow into your head. But how do you coax one in? My mornings are hectic. Shoes get lost. People get tense. My mind flicks from subject to subject like a nervous fly. So I fetch my dog, and we take a little jog into the woods, then we find my Magic Spot of grass and clover, hidden by some silver birch.
For 10 minutes, I stretch, I close my eyes, and meditate on a ritual I learned in a psychic circle. I imagine I have roots into the ground. I imagine warm energy rising up to each chakra, and, at each one, I breathe on a different thought: I am safe, I am creative …
The last is the top of the head. I imagine it opening with a shower of platinum white love. Then, feeling calm, I picture through what I’m going to write today in a sequence of images. Then I open my eyes. I thank my dog for standing guard. Then I hurry back to my Shepherd’s Hut, and I write as fast as I can. My last book started with a narrator. She was 43, she was feeling tense. She left her kids at home, while she drove to the garage to buy rice, but then she had a terrible car crash, and, the next thing she knew, she was a student again, lying beside a handsome man – the one she always loved, the one she never kissed …Was this an inspiration of divine wind? I couldn’t tell. But the story felt real, and it got me hooked. Would she return to her kids? Would she kiss the man? Can the past be changed? These were things I wanted to know. So each morning I ran off to the woods, I meditated, and I found out a little bit more in my Shepherd's Hut …
The Things I’d Miss by Andrew Clover is out now.