When you start a project, buy an unlined, spiral-bound art book, and use it as a creative playground. Keep it completely secret. Until you’re dead and famous – and your papers are safely in the national library – nobody else gets to see inside it.

What goes in?

Anything. Words, drawings, caricatures, maps, T-shirt slogans. Overheard conversations. Half-formed ideas. Choose unlined paper so your thoughts – even your written thoughts – aren’t kept in straight lines.

This book is where you try things out. The contents must come without limits.

One Sentence Subconscious Prompts

In this post, Fix Your Internal Creative Marriage, I suggest a process for getting your conscious mind and your unconscious mind to collaborate, not fight.

Your Imagination Book is a place to test out your one-sentence sleep prompts.

Key offscreen scenes

It’s often very helpful to write key scenes that will never appear in the script.

Backstory

It’s especially useful for creating and exploring backstory.

Imagine your protagonist is a single woman, let’s call her Rose, who has moved to an isolated religious community to escape a violent marriage, and is being wooed by quiet, trustworthy George. A seemingly good man, whom she would like to marry.

But, secretly, she is still married. Although she ran away from Tom two years ago, Tom refuses to divorce her and still believes that she will come back to him. And he would certainly come and get her if he knew where she was.

You might find it helpful to flesh-out that backstory in secret – even writing key scenes between them. Not to include them in the story, but to allow yourself to discover things about the characters that will colour the scenes in the film.

You never know what you might discover if you tell yourself this is no more than play, that nobody will ever see it or judge it. Give your subconscious free rein.

For example, you might discover a phrase that Tom habitually used, and then give it to George. How does that play in your story?

Perhaps George and Tom use the phrase in an entirely different way, but it triggers Rose anyway. Or perhaps they use it the same way, and it reveals to Rose that, under the surface, the two men are more alike than she first realised.

You’ve made a potentially valuable discovery.

BUT you have to be willing to imagine a new backstory, if you find the one you’ve created has painted you into a corner.

Imaginary scenes that never existed

Perhaps Rose keeps imagining that her husband turns up in town one day. Write what she imagines happens, what she does. Not to include literally, but if it’s always present in the back of her mind, it will affect how she behaves.

(Please, no lazy nightmare scenes ending with her sitting bolt upright in bed, gasping.)

Illogically meaningful scenes

Some scenes demand to be written even when they make no sense yet. I call these illogically meaningful scenes.

Giving yourself the permission and space to write scenes like this strengthens your connection to the material, helps you bring your own sensibility and concerns to the story, and often gives the story more depth.

They are your subconscious’s way of letting you know what the story is really about, and why you need to write it.

Dodging writer’s block

“Bum-in-seat-time” is crucial to successful writing, but staring at a cursor blinking on a blank screen is not. It’s worse than a waste of time – it undermines your confidence and sense of creativity, and creates a downward spiral.

The more you do it, the more you find yourself doing it.

When you get stuck with writer’s block, give yourself permission to go and play in your Imagination Book.

Scenes from real life

People say and do the darndest things, if only you pay attention. Take your imagination book with you to cafés and on public transport, and eavesdrop.

Draw your characters

Not so you can demand that the actors they cast look like your drawings (mine certainly shouldn’t), but so you know something about how they dress, sit, carry themselves in public.

T-shirt slogans and bumper bar stickers optional. (But make them active, not descriptive.)

Two Tools to trigger imaginary scenes

Include Random Elements

Open a dictionary at random, find a word that triggers your imagination, and use it to construct a scene that could happen in your story. Maybe someone uses the word in dialogue, or it appears as an object, or describes the tone…

Pick a song, and steal a lyric or a situation or an attitude.

Deliberate Imposition of Obstacles

Give your character an obstacle that would make it impossible for them to behave as they usually do. Obstacles are very important to a story, because obstacles force the characters to make difficult choices and take risky actions – all things that we want in the final product.

But obstacles are also useful in the process, for exactly the same reasons.

For example, in Rose’s story above, what if I wrote a metaphoric sex scene between George and Rose – a scene that puts into action their attraction to each other and their care for each other, but with the obstacle that they are not allowed to touch each other, and must be fully clothed at all times?

And, as a bonus, can I get it to challenge the narrow constraints of the society? So, no heartfelt sighs and lingering looks across the aisle separating men and women in church.

Here’s one version.

What if George and Rose are cleaning up after a formal dinner for the church hierarchy, for which Rose cooked and George served.

Back in the kitchen, George accidentally drops an exquisite, expensive teacup, and it shatters on the floor. He’s devastated. Stares at the broken shards. Rose takes another teacup and throws it on the floor. George, even more horrified. Then she throws another. Hesitantly, George picks up a milk jug. Smash!

Laughter amid shards. Release.

CUT TO the bishop fare-welling his last guests at the front door. Hears distant noises. Suspicious noises.

Quickly dismisses his guests, slams the door (loud enough to be heard), and hurries off.

Pushes the kitchen door open, face like thunder. To see Rose sprawled across an upturned serving trolley, and George gathering up the shattered crockery, as if Rose had tripped and overturned the trolley. “Oops!”

A sex scene without any sex.

In the long run, if you’re lucky, around one in five of these scenes will eventually make it into the screenplay, probably in a modified form. But you would never have found them if you had only worked on the logical to-and-fro of the story.

Make a habit of It

Even ten minutes at the beginning of a session is enough. Your ‘real’ writing will thank you.

Secrecy is the Key

Don’t show it to anybody. Until you’re dead and gone, it’s yours and yours alone.