Do Electric Muses Dream of Bloggers?

According to legend, when a journalist asked Harlan Ellison where he got his ideas from, he replied “Schenectady.” The joke was subsequently expanded until there was a story about a shop in Schenectady from which you could order “those crazy ideas” in boxes of a dozen. (It may have been Robert Heinlein.)

Some writers give less obviously silly answers. Douglas Adams tells an excellent story about drifting off to sleep one starry, starry night with a copy of the Hitchhikers Guide to Europe in his pocket, and half dreaming and half imagining that somewhere there might be a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. But this etiological myth tells us less than nothing about the origins of Adams’ very good radio script. The idea of hitchhiking barely features in the story; and when it is mentioned it feels shoe-horned in. The references to the Encyclopedia Galactica scattered through the text are a partial acknowledgement that the idea of the book that contains everything comes indirectly via Isaac Asimov. A waking dream about cut-price tourism in the milky way doesn’t get you anywhere near Peter Jones’s arch monologues; or Stephen Moore’s robot Eeyore; or the idea of leech shaped universal translator; or a very good joke about the number forty two.

I suppose that the title “The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy” has a sort of whimsical lilt to it; and the actual scripts have a similar tone. But that was very much the way Adams wrote: there are frequent flashes of it in his Doctor Who scripts and right the way through his journalism.

It may in fact be true that Paul McCartney created the melody for the song Yesterday “in his sleep”. He woke up with the song in his head; assumed he must have remembered it from somewhere; but eventually realised it was completely new. He had literally dreamt it up. But it is perhaps not a coincidence that the person into whose head Morpheus chose to drop this very good song was a person who had spent every waking minute since he was twelve years old listening to music and thinking about music and improvising music. And it would be interesting to know how often he woke up humming a song but didn't do anything with it because it was rubbish. 

It is at least arguable that there exists something called “melody” or a “tune” can be extracted from a song. People who know about this stuff say that the melody of Yesterday is musically unusual. (Something about the wrong number of beats in the key, I shouldn’t wonder.) But good music doesn’t require an original or innovative melody. Private Eye ran a campaign frivolously suggesting that Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s tunes were mainly borrowed from other sources. The great man not unreasonably said that the repeated three notes that make up the main theme to Jesus Christ Superstar could be found in many hundreds of compositions — it was his particular arrangement and orchestrations that made them into a song. Ford Prefect thought that he could convey the value of human classical music to the Vogon by chanting the first three notes of the Fifth Symphony: it understandably didn’t work. Yesterday is not just Paul’s dream-vision: it’s also his lyrics and his guitar technique and his little-boy-lost delivery and six months in Hamburg and mobs of teenagers outside the London Palladium and the murder of JFK and…

Years later, Paul acknowledged that the line “Why she had to go I don’t know, she didn’t say, I said something wrong…” may have been an unconscious reference to the early death of his mother, Mary McCartney, who subsequently came to him in another dream and whispered words of wisdom. 

Until the day he died, Stan Lee believed that the whole creative impulse that became the Marvel Comics Empire came from a sequence of little free-floating idea-nuggets that he had generated in 1963 and 1964. In later years, he would claim that the detachable idea at the heart of Spider-Man was “a teenager who can stick to walls”; and that he had had that idea while observing a fly in his writing room. But closer to the event, he claimed to have extracted the ideas for the Marvel pantheon from already existing characters: Spider-Man from a pulp called “The Spider”; Doctor Strange from a radio show called “Chandau the Magician” and the Hulk from Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson. But either way, what he claims ownership of his that original, core idea. The creation of the actual comics, which was undertaken by artistic assistants, he regards as a secondary, artisanal task.

It is relatively easy to create ideas. Just put two words or two simple concepts side by side and look for the connection. It’s the principle behind William Burroughs “cutups”; it’s how fortune telling games like I-Ching and Tarot function. Topical comedians, who have to generate a large amount of material at short notice, use the formula of picking two news items at random and drawing a connection between them. It’s surprisingly easy. “Thousands of pop music fans were expected to descend on Liverpool for the Eurovision Song Contest, but unfortunately Suella Braverman has diverted them all to Rawanda.” Michael Moorcock claimed to be able to “write” a book in a weekend: but only if he had previously used free-association to create a pile of ideas to drop into the story when the hero needed something to do. Which entirely fails to demystify the creative process. It is not hard to come up with fantasy-ish phrases by putting words together: “The week of festering uncles”; “The shop of dying clothes”. It’s precisely the capacity to see the connection which makes you a funny joke-smith or a successful fantasy author.

Michael Moorcock’s example is “the city of screaming statues”. Which may be a random collection of words; but it’s a Moorcockian collection of words if ever I heard one.

“Where do you get your ideas from” is really a modern manifestation of the myth of the capricious Muse. Some people are magically gifted with IDEAS: and suddenly become writers. YOU would be a writer too if one of these IDEAS dropped on your head. If YOU had been sitting under the apple tree when the apple dropped on your head, your picture would have appeared on the old one pound notes. If you had been cleaning the mould out of the petri dish, you would have discovered penicillin. If Lord Byron had challenged you to write a ghost story, you would have invented science fiction. Remember the giant glowing finger that used to select lottery winners? It could be YOU.

It’s also a manifestation of conservative anti-intellectualism and a dislike of experts. It implies that writing is not real work: it’s just a way that people who happen to bump into ideas con punters out of cash; no different in principle from charging people money to look at your left shoulder blade or the surprising birth mark on your right buttock. It’s a good racket. I wish I’d had the completely original idea of a doing generic English school stories about generic witches and wizards; then I’d be so famous they would have to cancel me.

Rowling’s books, in fairness, do contain a lot of “ideas” — certainly the early ones do, before she was famous. A shop which sells wizards magic wands in the way that a violin shop sells violins: that’s a good idea. A room which happens to contain the exact thing you need when you go in it. A game that’s a bit like rugby and a bit like basket ball played by wizards on broom sticks. But there is no one over-arching spasm of originality: just clear slog and brainstorming the various ways in which “like school, but magic” could be applied. Magic games class. Magic chemistry lesson. Magic Eleven Plus. Magic kit-list. Magic detention. Magic tuck shop. Magic schools had already been done by Ursula Le Guin and Jill Murphy; although the more direct antecedent is the assassins school in Terry Pratchett (which itself came out of Fritz Leiber.

So let's not talk about Ideas. Let us talk instead about The Knack. I believe that I have The Knack for writing out opinions and talking points. From time to time I have Ideas: but I have never really had The Knack of turning them into stories. But I assume that’s because I don’t particularly want to.

Some Writers talk about The Knack as if it is mysterious and magical. They start to Write, they say, and their Characters just begin to do things under their own steam, sometimes things the writer never intended or even approves of. And this is attractive: as attractive as the idea of The Muse bestowing Magic Ideas on Chosen Ones. If I have never really got the hang of writing about things that didn’t happen to people who never existed, it’s not because I didn’t put in the hours or learn the skills or acquire The Knack. It’s because the Muse hasn’t inspired me. Yet. It puts the process of constructing a text into the same category as Douglas Adams and Paul McCartney’s serendipitous dreams. Maybe it will happen to me one day; but if it never does that’s not my fault. You can no more learn to be a writer than you can decide what you are going to dream about.

One of the nice things about Steven Spielberg’s recent self-biography was that it didn’t represent the creation of movies as a form of alchemy. It showed little Sammy spending hours and hours with reels of tape and sharp knives and glue, figuring out how it was done.

Nearly every week I go and listen to incredibly talented people playing guitars. Sometimes harps or fiddles or accordions but very often guitars. And it frequently blows my mind that this very beautiful music which can make me laugh or cry or vote for Jeremy Corbyn involves knowing exactly where to put your fingers while doing something entirely different with the other hand.

There was a time when no-one apart from the rich and pretentious had cellphones and then there was a time when some of my friends had them and then there was a time when I decided I needed one and then there was a time when anyone who didn’t have one was basically just showing off. Then one day someone told me that there was a way of sending short text messages from my Nokia, and I was like, “Why would I do that when the whole point of the device is that I can talk to people on it?” An indeterminate amount of time later there were devices which just sent texts and didn’t function as phones and this no longer seemed like a completely ridiculous idea. Twitter was a thing young people talked about, and then it was a thing which everyone did, and then it was the direct cause of Obama, Trump and the Sad Puppies, and then Elon came along and I am not quite sure how I am going to manage without it.

Artificial Intelligence has had an unusually quick turn-around. Before Christmas, it definitely didn’t exist. It’s now nearly Easter, and it distinctly does. Three months ago, it was quite amusing to allow Predictive Text to write Tweets for me: they came out like word games on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. “I get my ideas from the same people who have been around for years and have been working on the same thing for years and they are all very passionate about the project so they can get the idea to work.” But it's now perfectly feasible to ask Chatbot to write an essay about where writers get their ideas in the style of Andrew Rilstone. 

Whenever there is a new scientific discovery, Richard Dawkins claims that it is the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God; and a few weeks later, someone on Thought for the Day says that it confirms what Christians have always said, and life carries on very much as before. (C.S Lewis said that.) AI is not going to conquer the world and make humans obsolete any time soon; nor are we on the cusp of a bold new era when computerised house elves can free humans from labour and drudgery. (I said that.) I think that, like text messages, Google, Wikipedia and microwave ovens, chatbots will turn out to be interesting tools which will somewhat change the way we work. Some people will use them well and some people will lose badly. Wikipedia isn’t the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or the Encyclopaedia Galactica; but it does mean I can fool you into thinking that I am the sort of person who can remember who wrote the Worst Witch and hasn't forgotten the first name of the main character in the Fablemans. If you are the kind of person whose essays free associate as wildly as mine do, that is a godsend. (A back-formation from “god sent”, by the way, not attested before the beginning of the 19th century.)

But here's the thing. 

Stan Lee thought that sitting in your room thinking "What if a teenagers could stick to walls like an insect" was the same thing as creating Spider-Man. Creative geeks stare at the interstices of their favourite texts and see potential stories. “What happened the day Kirk took over from Pike on the Enterprise? Did Spock accept him straight away? When did McCoy replace Boyce?” Sometimes they see unrealised stories in the impossible spaces between different texts. “What if Darth Vader became Herald of Galactus?" "If the Smurfs and the Care Bears had a war, who would win?" "Fifty Shades of Grey, only with the characters from Cranford.” And some creative types build worlds of their own. "It's the Far Future. Human life has been infinitely extended: the earth is populated by a vast majority of incredibly old people and a tiny minority of youngsters. The old are advocating forced sterilisation; a cull of the young; even cannibalism; but the young are planning a revolt..." Unless you have The Knack, these very hungry Ideas will never emerge from their cocoon as beautiful stories. 

Once upon a time, what could be represented on a TV screen or in a movie was limited by the ingenuity of the prop and costume department. The Dalek is an iconic monster: but it is an iconic monster because Ray Cusick had to work out a way of physically constructing a roboid that could be operated by an actor in a BBC studio. The Starship Enterprise has transporters because it would have been two much trouble to film a model spaceship landing and taking off three times an episode. The arrival of computer generated animation makes such considerations secondary. If a director can imagine it and a conceptual artist can sketch it, Harrison Ford can be threatened by it. Yes, the are Luddites who say that spaceships were better when they had obvious wires and no Tyrannosaurus Rex which hasn't been personally fingered by Ray Harryhausen has a heart or a soul. And doubtless there will be days when the old techniques will be the best techniques. String puppets are an incredibly ancient and primitive form of theatre: but kids in the 1960s still enjoyed Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. Very possibly the particular kind of techno-fantasy-thriller that Gerry Anderson envisaged couldn't have been told in any other format. But I don't hanker for Avatar to be re-shot in supermarianation. CGI is a tool which can be used well or badly. Ninety per cent of everything is crap. 

There was a time when just knowing stuff made you a scholar. But now, almost anyone can know almost everything they want to know. It used to be that the only way of knowing about the Apocryphal New Testament or the minor Middle-English Arthurian stories or the first black and white seasons of Doctor Who was to study for an MA at a prestigious university. Now you can just download it onto your tablet in the kitchen while the sausages are grilling. Just knowing matters less: having something interesting to say matters more. (The availability of information has certainly changed the way we talk about Doctor Who and Spider-Man; I would be surprised if it hasn’t changed the way we talk about William Shakespeare and Plato as well.) 

So. As of last Tuesday, computers have been able to take human generated prompts and turn them into passable passages of text. Which means, surely, that the human ability to generate prompts has become exponentially more valuable, and the skill of constructing text has become correspondingly worthless. What differentiates my computer-generated fan fic about Kirk and Pike from your computer-generated fan fic about the Rani and Missy is the strength of our respective ideas. We have realised Stan Lee's dream: creativity means sitting at your desk Dreaming Up Ideas; and watching automata spew out infinite streams of narrative.  The Knack has been automated. In the future the sought after elite will be the talented idea-wright. 

As late as the 1990s, some people claimed to be able to tell when a novel had been written on one of these newfangled “word processor” devices. Keyboards and silicon chips somehow made the story much less human.

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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