| Author | Message | ||
     Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.132.93.170 |
Yesterday at work the bloke had these big black box things with holes going through them. They were for putting drains through he said. But i got fascinated with them, kept seeing them as a massive borg ship toy, or some strange spaceship. My mind was really working and i took a few pictures. What was odd was i felt quite excited and had allsorts of ideas as a result. What is it makes our imaginations grow, be fired up? Sculpture or music does this, but usually it has to be art or music of a particular kind, pushing us here and there. I for one am inspired by mystery and texture. Over on facebook (where i now seem to live) I get bored sick by links to marches and political things, but a single word from some mad bloke might make me dwell on ideas for days. Anyone else think about such things as this? What fires you up? | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.253.77 |
It's people that fire my imagination - our oddness, the way we interact with each other, the downright fucked-up way we live. The sparks that are generated in the gaps between what we say and what we mean; the things we do when we think we're acting out of love or faith or rightness. All that stuff. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.22.179 |
Anything at all. It's wholly unpredictable for me. | ||
| Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 212.219.233.223 |
I like the fact that what is real and what is true aren't necessarily the same things. For instance, logic is a self-contained system for deducing truth but it is actually independent from the empirical world. People often assume that if something is logical and therefore true it must be real, but that isn't the case at all. I often like to exploit the result of this misunderstanding... So ideas fire up my imagination. Especially offbeat, lateral ideas: unusual but logical connections between events or situations or qualities that don't always make sense on the surface but are perfectly valid on a deeper level. This sounds rather abstract, but it doesn't have to be. The other day I was reading Marcus Chown's book of farout cosmology, The Never Ending Days of Being Dead, and I came across the idea that the reason the universe exists is because something is actually simpler than nothing... Certain fundamental laws such as symmetry apply equally well to nothingness but are expressed more efficiently in a universe that contains matter, so the universe began as nothingness but then collapsed into a simpler state and that simpler state is our universe full of things. Speculation like that gets me excited. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.132.93.170 |
Yes, I agree with all these things. But some things - and I think this was my point - actively stretch the mind, force it to grow. I was thinking jazz did this, and abstract art. It can have no connection with what we term the real life. I'm reading Philip Jose Farmer at the moment and am utterly thrilled by it. He's described by some as a pure fantasy adventure author, but this book I'm reading is completely boggling my mind. It's not remotely realistic but has more going for it than Avatar and the like. | ||
| Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 212.219.233.223 |
Philip Jose Farmer was constantly frothing over with ideas. He couldn't stop having ideas. He kept having so many of them all the time that he had to cram lots of them into each book he wrote just to use some of them up. I like writers like that. I prefer maximalism to minimalism, I prefer overstatement to understatement, I prefer hot to cool, I like generosity (sometimes this is called self-indulegnce, I don't know why)... But it's all just a question of taste, of course! | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
The closest we can equate to nothingness is what I call the Zero State of static all knowingness. This ultimate reality is fragmented into all possible individual somethings. Consciousness is the universe's way of endlessly examining or cataloguing itself in minute detail without ever coming to an end point. | ||
| Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 212.219.233.223 |
Stevie: would you say that the universe is an egotist or self-indulgent? | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.132.93.170 |
I have loads of ideas but hate them cluttered sometimes. Actually, I don't have many ideas, just the same one again and again done different(ish).  Sigh - you and I are completely unalike, Rhys. You're great. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Rhys, I see the ultimate universal consciousness as equating to Lovecraft's "blind idiot god". A being frozen in a state of eternal screaming boredom for which no action or thought is meaningful because all effects are already known and set in stone. This entity fragmented, either by choice or through insanity, into infinite individual consciousnesses, for whom the universe became their neverending playground filled with eternal mystery - each of them its own centrepoint, forever growing and shrinking and evolving through infinitely higher and lower levels. That's Steviology in a nutshell. | ||
| Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 212.219.233.223 |
Tony: thanks for the compliment, but Philip Jose Farmer blows me off the stage and writes me under the table... I have a reputation for arrogance but actually I know where I stand. Compared with giants like Farmer I'm a midge. My reputation for arrogance is actually due to the fact that I'm equally modest on behalf of certain of my contemporaries... | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.132.93.170 |
Does that make me the bored God (see up above)? | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.22.179 |
"My reputation for arrogance is actually due to the fact that I'm equally modest on behalf of certain of my contemporaries..." Overrated was your word, I think. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.132.93.170 |
That means I'm an atom on a midge then!  | ||
| Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 212.219.233.223 |
Stevie: I'm sure there's a pre-echo of what you have written above in Hinduism. I'll have to check it out... But a bored god! Ye gods, what a nightmarish scenario! | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.132.93.170 |
I always thought of him as a bored god that can wipe his mind. I think the trouble in the world comes from us starting to remember (I do think we are fragments of God), and have to reset/rewipe again soon. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
The ultimate universal consciousness isn't a God as that would imply a creator and nothing in the universe was ever created. All we see and are has always existed and will always exist but in an infinitely varying succession of forms. There is an ultimate conglomeration of all universal consciousness into one frozen point of complete awareness and complete inaction... the Zero State, howling void, blind idiot god or whatever you want to call it. But it was not our creator anymore than I am the creator of my left index finger... | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
In the beginning was the word, and the word was 'Whatever'. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.188.49 |
In answer to the thread's question: Necessity. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
When something external (a place, an event, a news story) collides with something internal (a memory, a dream, a private fear) and the two strangers, having collided by accident, decide they like the feel of each other and arrange to meet for coffee. I watch and take notes. I rarely structure a story consciously, I just feel for what the emerging structure is. If the structure is flat, the strangers don't make a go of it, I just move on. It's not like the most professional approach to creative work, but it's fun. Being a voyeur or eavesdropper of your own imagination, when you have just provided the venue. | ||
| Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 80.4.12.3 |
> In answer to the thread's question: Necessity... Necessity is the mother of invention Despair is the mother of necessity Stasis is the mother of despair Boredom is the mother of stasis Reality is the mother of boredom Invention is the mother of reality | ||
| John Llewellyn Probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.33.242.34 |
Irwin Allen is the father of disaster | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.28.95 |
"My reputation for arrogance is actually due to the fact that I'm equally modest on behalf of certain of my contemporaries..." Overrated was your word, I think. | ||
| Stephen Theaker (Stephen_theaker) Username: Stephen_theaker Registered: 12-2009 Posted From: 92.232.184.206 |
A challenge. Facing a blank screen I'm completely hopeless. But if I have to figure out a story to fit an interesting title I found scrawled in an old notebook, ideas start to come. I haven't actually written any fiction for a couple of years now, but when I've come close it's been because of a set of submission guidelines that set me to thinking how I could work within them. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.118.73.80 |
In reply to the question: other people's sexual escapades, anything that's well written, unexpected outcomes. | ||
| John Forth (John) Username: John Registered: 05-2008 Posted From: 82.24.1.217 |
Junctions. Collisions of notions. | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 49.227.25.78 |
Place, setting, observing something odd, vivid imagery, just being left alone to explore it all. Reading great writers. Extending an exciting thought. Waiting for that moment when it will come up from my subconscious as I write. | ||
| Mbfg (Mbfg) Username: Mbfg Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 212.219.63.204 |
Ideas just come. An overheard work, a stray thought, a snatch of this and a snatch of that, a sound, a memory, reading...bang, they're there. But woe betide if I don't let them brew and fester, because if I try to work on them straight away they're doomed. Regards Terry | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
"But woe betide if I don't let them brew and fester, because if I try to work on them straight away they're doomed." Amen. I rarely write a story less than a month after writing the initial notes. One of my least crap stories was based on notes written five years beforehand, but I couldn't find the right structure for it until then. An idea has to sit in the back of the fridge through a few power cuts before it takes on a life of its own. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.26.188.49 |
Really? I'm not sure that's true of all writers. I believe Bradbury whacked out his hot cognitions PDQ. | ||
| Weber (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 109.150.19.98 |
He wrote his stories pretty quickly as well... | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
And fast! | ||
| Darren O. Godfrey (Darren_o_godfrey) Username: Darren_o_godfrey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 205.188.117.80 |
Happy accidents. Many times I've happened to be in the right place at precisely the right time to witness something startling. While that something may not always be unusual, it's always one that sets my mind working. Extrapolating. Often these things result in mere intresting topics of discussion (like the time I saw a coyote take a dump on an empty beer can without knocking it over), other times in short stories (I happened upon an old woman, who, by all appearances, sat dead behind the wheel of her car, engine running, on a 20-degree-below-zero morning). Hell, my first professional story sale came about because I saw a small child vomit an unbelievable amount of mac & cheese all over the place. Some disgusting examples, I know, but one never knows from where these little sparks will come. |