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‘Where do you get your ideas?� Asked of a novelist, it’s often a shallow question, implying that the work stands or falls by its premise. But at another level, it’s a deep, practical enquiry, because the entire writing task is about coming up with ideas, from inventing story and characters to solving a plot problem to crafting an elegant sentence—a process of constant creativity.

I’d argue that for most of us, creativity is our scarcest, most limiting resource. If I’m stopped, it’s more likely because I’m stuck for ideas than because I’ve run out of time. We all want to be more creative.

Yet few writers work on their creativity as they work on other aspects of their writing. As someone who has studied creativity, tries to foster it and attempts to teach it, I still struggle to convince other writers that I actually use the techniques I recommend. Cute idea but� So, here’s a short case study of deliberately-applied creativity: my recent novella, Creative Differences.

Asked ‘What comes first—the words or the music?�, songwriter-for-hire Sammy Cahn replied, ‘The phone call.� For me, in the twenty-first century, it was an email from Audible: Would I be interested in writing a novel of about 30,000 words to be produced initially as an audiobook. I was interested—but where would I get my idea?

At the time, I was completing my how-to book on writing, The Novel Project, in which I’d tackled this problem. One suggestion I offered was: Keep a list of ideas and look to combine two or more of them. A single idea is unlikely to be original, but a combination of two is less likely to have been used before. I had the list, but nothing spoke to me. So I focused on the point of difference: this was to be an audio book, and my writing should somehow reflect that. I held that thought for a few weeks, coming back to it almost every day, knowing that if I worked hard at a problem, then let it incubate, my subconscious would eventually step up.

It duly did, with what turned out to be a pretty terrible idea. But you can’t expect a new idea to be as strong as something old that’s been worked and refined. You have to give it a chance—play with it, see the possibilities, do that working and refining.

That pretty terrible idea was to write a story that mimicked the meters of the songs on an album: one chapter per track. Growing up the era of LPs, I thought of an album as having two sides, which suggested that the book could be in two parts. But I frequently use a conventional three-act structure which actually breaks a story into four parts of roughly equal length (Act 2 is split into 2a and 2b, divided by the midpoint). The musical equivalent would be a four-sided album: a double album, which would also give me more tracks to work with. (Well, one musical equivalent: if I’d gone for a symphony in four movements, the story from here would be quite different).

I decided to run with The Beatles ‘White Album�; as the most iconic, familiar and diverse among double albums: diversity was important if I didn’t want all the chapters to sound the same. And The Beatles� creative productivity was legendary; they were good company to invite in. The record has thirty tracks. Thirty thousand words would equate to 1,000 words per song. Neat.

I quickly discovered that it’s hard to write readable (or listenable) prose in the rhythm of Back in the USSR, the opening track, at least not without the crutch of music. I was likely to face the same problem with the rest of the songs.

Meanwhile, I needed a second idea: since my first idea was stylistic, I was looking for plot. I revisited my ideas list, and now one of them spoke to me, except that it had already been checked off: my ‘how to� book on writing. But why not dramatise the conflict between different approaches to writing? Somewhere in my mind, I must have the been thinking of the conflict between The Beatles� writers, Lennon and McCartney, and the eventual break-up of the band for that most clichéd of reasons: creative differences. I had my title.

At this point, it’s harder to describe the creative process, because two ideas are playing off each other and developing in a non-linear—organic—way, akin to what happens when you introduce two interesting people and the conversation starts. Mechanically, I was walking around (literally walking around: ‘Trust no thought arrived at sitting down,� said George Sheehan, the running doctor—I do a creativity walk or light workout every day).

A bunch of thoughts were in play. I could personalise the tension between two writers with different approaches and ambitions, and make them a couple working on a book together, so that the differences had consequences. I knew this territory. My partner and I have co-written two books, and people are always interested in how that works: ‘Don’t you fight all the time?� For the sake of the story, the answer would be ‘yes�.

Having connected Lennon and McCartney with my two writer protagonists, I could draw inspiration from The Beatles. The two songwriters, eschewing the joint approach that had brought them early success, had largely written and sung their own songs for the album. Perhaps my two protagonists, likewise pursuing their own ambitions, could narrate the chapters that corresponded to their alter egos� songs. As for alter egos…who’d be the woman? There’s a theory that Bob Dylan’s song Just Like a Woman is about John Lennon� Everything you know is fuel for the creative process.

My concept was developing into an structure of thirty chapters with narrators changing according to the songwriter or lead singer. Except that the White Album features all four Beatles in those roles: George Harrison sang four songs and Ringo Starr two. What could I do with this? Two more characters?

Harrison inspired a junior writer learning from our protagonists, perhaps coming between them, and trying to carve out their own career. Throw in a bit of sexual tension or misunderstanding to heighten the conflict. As for the fourth narrator, with a small part, the agent or publisher seemed like a good choice. They’d have their own agenda. I recalled the unflattering description of Ringo as ‘the luckiest drummer in the world�; how about making the publisher the luckiest small publisher in the world, accidentally pulled into our protagonists� success and now, comedically, struggling to keep up.

So I arrived at my four central characters inspired by (but only partially shaped by) their Beatle counterparts. Scott (McCartney) would be the planner, extroverted, technically skilled, commercially focused, working on the next bestseller as if it was a building project. His partner, Emily (Lennon) would be the tortured artist, writing about her own issues, wrestling with writers� block, valuing critical acclaim over sales. Piper (Harrison) would be the socially-concerned student of Emily and mentee of Scott—dealing with their contrary advice. I tried out names from the Beatles� songs, but used only one: Gideon for the Ringo character. It inspired a slim, bearded hipster.

After all that, I had enough of an original concept that it no longer needed to be written in meter. I abandoned that idea, not before time, as everyone around me was quick to point out. But it had done its job in getting the creative process going and could now be discarded. Well, not completely. I’d spent so long on Back In the USSR that I thought I might open the book with a few lines that mimicked it.

I turned to plotting the story. The set sequence of narrators—dictated by the order of the tracks, which I wasn’t going to mess with, yet—was a real constraint. Constraints—not too loose, but not too tight—provide a great environment for creativity. This one felt about right.

The songs themselves played the role of random words from the dictionary—prompting ideas for what I wanted to say and how I’d say it. (Incidentally, George Harrison used the technique to inspire his best-known song on the album, opening a book at a random page and finding the words gently weeps.)

The singer of Back in the USSR (a song which was itself inspired by the music of Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys) tells us he’s flying home. That suggested Scott (the designated narrator for that McCartney song) returning from an unsuccessful solo book tour, and imagining another joint book as the way forward. The song for the next chapter, Dear Prudence (‘won’t you come out to play / greet the brand new day�) suggested Emily had been hunkered down in her room with her solo project…with writer’s block? Could this be the core of the dynamic between them?

In The Novel Project, I suggest going to a shooting range to get the feel of shooting a gun before writing about it. When I hit Lennon’s Happiness is a Warm Gun, I was prompted to think of Emily doing just that. But she doesn’t write crime or action. Could I give her a reason for doing so? And an important story element emerged.

Sexy Sadie (‘You made a fool of everyone�) gave me the idea of Piper going public with some information that would be damaging to Scott and Emily. Glass Onion suggested the literary pretensions of student writers in class, which gave me an opportunity to introduce Piper. And so on.

Some songs generated valuable ideas; some didn’t suggest anything. Revolution 9, the penultimate, chaotic, song on the album, suggested a crazy writing bender to produce the manuscript (Emily’s � it’s a Lennon song) that would mark the climax of the book—the achievement of the hero’s goal. Bungalow Bill gave me nothing—at least not consciously.

The outlining process was as easy as it’s ever been for me, and I was happy with the result: thirty chapter summaries, in four acts corresponding to the four sides. One over the act breaks was not quite right, and I ended up shifting it back one chapter / song. The geek in me railed against it; my practical side told me that the album was ultimately a tool, not a straitjacket. Not a challenge to be met at the expense of the writing.

Rather than begin writing, I went back to the well for further ideas. I played that album through at least a dozen times while I worked out, thinking of each chapter as I listened to the corresponding track: ‘what could I take from this?� After each side, I’d stop and make notes—thoughts escape too easily. It was the random-word technique, and, as expected, it produced results, though there are a few songs I never want to hear again.

As I drafted, I listened to the relevant song before I wrote each chapter. It didn’t help much; I’d likely mined what I could. Indeed, I’d become too invested in referencing the songs: I really wanted that Bungalow Bill chapter to have something of the song in it. Maybe just the opening line. Or at least the opening word. ‘Hey�.

Fortunately, I had sanity checkers around me. It was the time of Covid and I was sharing my progress on weekly walks with fellow writer Tania Chandler. ‘It’s only scaffolding,� she said. ‘You throw it away when you’re finished.� True, and the metaphor sent me down another creative alley. A friend pointed me to Seamus Heaney’s poem, Scaffolding, which is about romantic relationships. I could use that—and did. Writing together would be the basis of Scott and Emily’s relationship: would they need it forever or could they see it as scaffolding? It offered a nice resolution to their creative differences.

So I wrote and rewrote the novella, forgetting about The Beatles after the first draft. Some references crept in unconsciously. ‘We don’t know how lucky we are,� says Scott, mimicking a line from Back in the USSR. ‘Piper said what she said she said’—an odd formulation containing the title of a Beatles song from another album. And there’s a minor character named Michelle.

I asked that the audiobook begin with the sound of a plane landing, and end with massed strings, as the album does, as an auditory nod to its origins. But without those cues (and the background that I’m sharing now) the connection to The Beatles would be invisible to most readers. When I came to adapting it as a screenplay, I let go completely. There’s no chapter structure or narrators in a movie.  Nor would those opening lines in meter, the remains of my earliest idea, play any part. The last of the creative scaffolding, having served its purpose, was discarded.

I was left with my story and could rest easy that The Beatles� copyright owners would not be after me. But the story would never have been written had not those two disparate pieces of work, in a deliberate application of a frequently scoffed-at creativity technique, come together.

If you’d like to see the result, it’s available as an audio book and is in print on Jan 10, 2023 along with a bunch of short stories: Creative Differences and Other Stories.

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