Creative marinating

I'm reading Doreen Virtue's 'The Courage to be Creative' again this week, and as always when I pick up the book, something new leaps out at me.  The section that caught my eye this time was headed 'Creative Marinating'.

What she means by this is solving a creative problem by walking away from it for a while.  Got a plot hole you can't fill?  Go for a walk, and stop worrying at it.  And I realise that's just what I've done with the last two short stories I wrote.

With The Queen of Swans, I had the opening scene of my heroine tending shaven-headed swans.  I knew what had been done to them, but I didn't know who had done it, or why.

My heroine had to leave her island home after hostile men burned down her farmhouse and nearly  killed her. But I didn't know where she was headed.  But at the start of the story l'd put in a throwaway line about her mother leaving a year before, and that provided the answer.

I wrote the story over four days, first thing thing in the morning, before I left the house to work on my novel for the day.  Then I'd come back and worry at the story again in the evening.  And as soon as I read Doreen Virtue's section on creative marinating I realised that's exactly what I'd been doing.  "Go distract yourself," she says "and let your unconscious mind work in the solution."

I did the same with a story I've recently finished, The Reaper and the Reamer.  I had to come up with an ususual form of death for this one. I had no problem with that, but working out the reason for its wholesale slaughter was a little more tricky.  So I again I walked away from the story at several points.  And each time I came back to it, the next bit of action suggested it itself to me.

It's unusual for me to write stories this way, where I'm pulling the pieces of the puzzle out of the aether as I go.  I'm far more comfortable with the stories I've 'downloaded'.  These are the ones where I get an initial idea, then the 'what ifs?' cascade friom it, rapidly forming themselves into a story outline.

But working blind, without having a full story outline first, has thrown up a few twists and surprises I probably wouldn't otherwise have got.  So I think that maybe I should get used to creative marinating and work this way more often.