Stimulus: Internal vs External
Posted by Mathew Abonyi Sun, 30 Oct 2005 12:10:00 GMT
One of the easiest things to do when writing is to explode with any old nonsense on to the page, but this isn’t going to avail much in the long run. The content is most likely muddled with less important, even irrelevant, material. Once you have the idea, the style and the skill to write, the stimulus factor becomes increasingly more important. No matter what you write about, everyday experiences will influence it, whether you realise it or not. The reason for this, I imagine, is the way the mind is churning through the most recent ideas in order to emblazon them on to your memory. In other words, it thinks unusually hard about that bagel you just ate, how many calories were in it, the cracks in the pavement you just walked over, the coloration of the sky at midday, the smell of curry which daily wafts in from the restaurant nearby, the texture of the carpet on bare feet, a fly which happened to annoy you all afternoon, the lack or excess of artificial lighting, the peal of bells on a Sunday, the theme of chivalry in Chaucer, and a particularly attractive sentence or line of poetry you just read. Already, you see why the everyday experiences influence what and how you write: you cannot escape what you are thinking about. So, for instance, if you watch Good, Bad and the Ugly, undoubtedly there’ll be a hint of Leone in your prose that day or the one following. Is this a problem?
There is an advantage to minimising, consciously, the influences of everyday thought from your writing. If you have a particular idea rattling around in your head, such as the reasons for embracing a certain culture whether foreign or native, it takes some effort to prevent it from creeping into your writing. But by doing this, you achieve a higher level of consistency and concision for what you are investigating. However, the disadvantage is that it inherently feels unnatural; you aren’t thinking so deeply about the way Azim feels, so it is harder to write about him convincingly. This process I would call the internal stimulus. You force yourself, every time you write, to be in the world you created, intolerant towards real life and spending considerable time striving for consistency in your work. In other words, you try to create experiences for yourself so that you can write about them. For a highly structured work intended to explore only a certain group of topics, this method (not in the extreme) is preferable.
But the natural inclination is that you stick in a little scene where your character thinks about what you’re considering at the moment. The advantage of this approach, which I call external stimulus, is that a lot of what you read, watch, hear, see or do will be reflected in your work, written to a better standard than usual. You absorb and regurgitate, fiddling with the experiences to fit the situation in your story. The patchwork (it will be patchy) may or may not be interesting. The disadvantage is the inconsistency of topics you discuss. I think the best way to use this method (not in the extreme) is in a book which is more reflective, revealing the thoughts of the characters more closely. That way you get away with the inconsistency, since thoughts themselves come rather randomly.
To use the internal stimulus method, you deliberately reject books, films, going out, and seeing new things while you are trying to write your novel. The more you reject the better, because they will only interfere with the world you created and make for annoying hiccups in your connection with the work. But is that really true? It must be a question of extent because rejecting absolutely everything means less for your mind to chew on day to day. Parts of it atrophy, parts you cannot put your finger on but are obviously crucial to being a convincing, widely-experienced author. One of these parts which I recently noticed is the cataloguing of detail. For whatever reason, the details of things I saw and read were fewer than before. I wasn’t used to noticing them all at once, it became frustrating to even try and, it’s no surprise, my writing also began to lack variety in its details. Going only by internal stimulus, you narrow yourself a little too much. Creating your own experiences without the external world means they’ll come out flatter and flatter as time goes on, because they are only concoctions of the last few days or weeks. Their novelty wears thin exponentially fast. You begin to repeat ideas, then words, then you’re fucked. You’ve drained yourself. Writing with the internal stimulus method to the extreme is like binging for a few years and then fasting for one. Put simply, you’ll be the antithesis of the idea-filled person you were at the beginning, no matter how much you eat before you start.
Rather than reject the everyday, it is better to embrace the random differences it creates in your writing on the most detailed level. A perfect book is a dull one. It is all so well constructed, the themes so empirically explored, the characters so fleshy that none of it seems real. If you let in the random differences (with a critical eye to completely irrelevant topics, of course), you give the writing some rough edges for people to feel. So read more books, more frequently, while writing and not. Watch more, think more widely, get into the habit of exploring. You are using the same mental toolset whether absorbing or writing and the more exercise they get, the better you will be at rejecting material not appropriate for your book while also writing at a better standard, however influenced, than if you rejected life to write about it.
