Written by R.M. Hamilton

Writers aren’t really that creative. There’s an illusion that we are, because we sit in front of a blank screen and put something on it.

“Aha!” says the observer. “That’s creative! I wish I could write.”

I love people like that.

I mean, who doesn’t? It’s nice to feel one’s ego expand on occasion.

But it’s time to come clean.

Absolutely anyone can write a story.

The baseline skill isn’t creativity.

It’s observation.

Yes, there’s a little creative flair that goes into crafting a story. I’d say about twenty percent, and it’s twenty percent that can be learnt.

The real bit of writing a story doesn’t even happen in front of the computer. That’s just where you dump the story after it’s crystalized into something other people will understand.

Stories aren’t written.

They’re harvested from the hedgerows of life.

They sprout like juicy blackberries wherever people are, and writers just collect them up and take them home.

The resulting essay or poem or book, is a literary pie.

You turn what you collected into a yummy treat in your kitchen, but you don’t make the blackberries yourself!

That’s far too much work!

So where do these fat fruits of stories grow?

EVERYWHERE.

On the train.

Standing in line at the supermarket.

Stomping through the bush on a crisp Autumn evening.

I was wandering through Sydney one day when I saw a family approaching. The mother, a grown-up daughter and the father. They looked like a very nice, friendly sort of family.

Suddenly the mother says in a deep, hollow voice, “I really think we ought to start cutting down on our carbs.”

“Oh Mum,” said the daughter. “I don’t think we eat that much!”

The father brightened and pointed into the distance, “look! Portuguese Custard Tarts!”

That’s the start of a story.

And a pretty relatable one too. I could tell you a very interesting cautionary tale about a children’s author who once decided to eat fresh brownies and homemade ice cream every day for a month for breakfast. She thought she’d get away with it because it was her own recipe.

But I, (I mean she), didn’t get away with it at all.

Come to think of it, that’s not interesting at all.

Forget I even brought it up🙄.

Then there was the case of the horrendous lawyer on the packed train. Mostly, I like lawyers. They’re smart and good with words. But this one seemed determined to live down to every nasty stereotype ever written about his species.

Here is a small excerpt of this man’s very real conversation.

“Oh I’m sorry!” he yelled proudly into his phone, swiveling his head around in a circle to make sure the entire carriage was listening. “I can’t talk about that. That is a VERY private case, requiring THE UTMOST DISCRETION! In fact, IT’S A LANDMARK CASE! I can’t POSSIBLY tell you about something this DELICATE! We don’t want some loudmouth leaking it to the PUBLIC!”

Then he proceeded to bellow out a tale so sordid, I don’t want it on my blog.

That’s not a full story, but my goodness it’s a happening. And you don’t need a lot of imagination to work out all the problems that could arise from a big mouth lawyer boasting about his ‘delicate case’ in a crowded train carriage.

In any case, you don’t want a full story. Putting someone else and their situation into a book is usually cruel and I don’t recommend it. Not even hideous lawyers who yell boastfully on trains.

(This is an essay on creative writing, journalism is another matter, and it’s not my field).

What we’re looking for is a spark to set our own creativity into motion. We are after lots of different observations, gathered in different places, all woven together with a thread of skill.

Libraries are great too. That’s so much easier. The fruits are already picked and packaged in other books. Libraries are the grower’s markets of story ideas.

Of course, I’m not suggesting you pinch someone else’s story.

But the more books you read, the more ideas you’ll get.

And that’s all writing is, really.

It’s collecting ideas and then stringing them together in an interesting, edited way.

Learn to listen and you’ll find that the entire universe is rattling and whirling with stories.

In fact, sometimes I wonder if the universe is made of stories.

But that’s getting a bit too metaphysical for my brain.

What I do know is this:

Writing isn’t really all that creative. It’s primarily observation. Once you learn the trick of spotting nice, ripe story berries, you’ll be bashing out tales with the best of them.

And once you learn to hear all the stories the world is telling you, life is just so much more interesting!