Craft Wednesday #3 Ambient Thoughts

This blog needed a place for talking about writing. "Craft Wednesday" will be me talking about all things writing: how to write, why to write, and my own craft journey. I hope to learn and share experiences with you.

Ambient Thoughts

      I wondered about the coincidence; just a week after I began to write a genre-changing story (which I hope to share on this blog, just for kicks) I picked up a book entitled Cloud Atlas.

     Readers familiar with this David Mitchell novel and viewers of the 2004 movie version are aware of how many time, place, and character changes there are in the story, and of the coincidences, cameos, and shocking similarities that bind otherwise disseparate elements.

     I also remembered a short story in 2014 about someone living through the aftermath of what would have happened -- yes, in confused tenses -- in the year 2015. And now it seems that what happens in that story could very well come true.

     Anyways, I was reminded of the rise of the superhero movies, the market dominance of dystopian Y.A. novels, and the fashions that crop up every season in New York, Tokyo, and Beverly Hills. Who starts these trends?  Surely a few people must have gotten together for a collaborative brainstorming session.

     But what if the product of creative people is created with the help of patterns their brains pick up, the world around them stirring their energies in a rising storm of data and sensory information? Could it be that they are just more sensitive - some might say overly sensitive - to changes and happenings in the world around them?

     Or do creative-types have a bit of mind-reading or premonition? These are just the wandering thoughts of a creative junkie.

     But if creative people truly are a vessels catching the "ambient thoughts" around them, we should be careful about how we use our gifts. Yes, there are dreams that inspire a story, someone else's story that rises a response with our pens or keyboards, a gnawing feeling driving a song.  But we creatives have to wonder where the ideas come from, and how we have nurtured the ideas into a mature work -- if not at inception then before we click "publish" or stick a stamp on our manuscripts.

     Will our work create goodness in the world, or will it just scream in tortured darkness? Is it meant to draw attention  to suffering in order to alleviate a problem or add to its confusion?

    John Gardiner was one fiction writer who believed in the importance of morality in stories. I think I should dig around my papers for the essay I wrote contrasting his philosophy with William Gass'...