Creativity is everywhere

I've been thinking about where creativity comes from this week.   My musings have been promoted by working on several wildly differing projects.  First up was writing a dark story for T'Articulation's  event at the Square Tower in Southsea later this month.  I  don't generally write dark stories, so it took me a while to gather the ingredients for my tale, and I was bothered by its ending at first.

Then the November issue of Writing Magazine plopped through my door.  And in it there's an article on the art of the scare by Alex Davis.  He says that a growing number of stories are offering ambiguous endings.  That was the endorsement I needed for my piece.  My idea for the ending is ambiguous, as I don't reveal what's actually happened to the characters.  So now I'm reassured that works okay.

I took on another creativity challenge at a workshop last Sunday.  Havant Writers' Circle had their annual retreat day, and we invited Charlie Cochrane to be our tutor.  Charlie wrote a brilliant workshop just for us, and one of the exercises she had us do was a character mashup. We had to choose two cards, each with the name of a character on them, then weave those people together in a story.  The idea is to get the two characters to mesh together, reconciling their different worlds and histories.

Some pairings were Beyonce and Miss Marple, James Bond and  Mr. Darcey, and mine was Luke Skywalker and Woody the Cowboy from Toy Story.  I chose to have Luke as an ordinary character, and have him find Woody in the guise of a toy, which he knew nothing about.  As I wrote I could feel different ideas coming up, pushing and pulling the narrative in different ways.

The third vein of creativity I've been mining this week relates to drawing.  #Inktober provides a list of prompts on the Internet, which you then produce a drawing for to interpret each theme.  The first day's theme was ring, and being a SF writer I immediately thought of a stargate.  But stargates go somewhere, so in the middle of the ring I drew the strange trees from the novel I've just completed.

It's been a very creative week, with very different influences meeting, and sometimes colliding.  Now all I need is another couple of ideas for another dark story.  I think I might have someone go looking for the ship's dog...