Visual Inspiration, Narrative, and Starting a Novel

 In Conversations with Mark Frost (by David Bushman), Frost, the co-creator with David Lynch of Twin Peaks, explains how he and Lynch, two very different kinds of film-makers, worked together: 

 “And because [Lynch is] first and foremost a visual artist, he worked in visual ideas, like a giant or Josie in a doorknob. I don’t think he worried about what they meant intrinsically. So I tried to take these arresting images, ones that were rich with mythic overtones, and incorporate them into the narrative. That’s one way in which our different natures and interests manifested.” (p. 140, Kindle edition)

 Lynch produced mysterious visual imagery and Frost logical story telling. (You can see this difference in the latest manifestation of Twin Peaks, “The Return.” Both Lynch and Frost worked on the scripts, but Lynch as director included unexpected visual impressions which Frostthen devised tentative narrative logic for in his two books, The Secret History of Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier.)

 But in reading Frost’s passage, I found the mingling of different styles not to be surprising—indeed, to be both familiar and inspirational. It’s the very action that’s necessary before one can start writing a novel.

 In another blog entry (#21), I argued that three “catalysts”are important before one can begin writing a book:  an idea (for a sustained conflict and narrative), an image (a visual inspiration for the mood and tone of the novel), and an inciting incident (the occurrence from which the entire narrative proceeds).

 For me, having a specific and “arresting” visual picture is crucial. It provides the imagination’s spark needed to create events that then, with logic, can be made believable and well-motivated. These images might be as varied as two strange derelicts in space (what inspired The Man Who Loved Alien Landscapes), or an unknown man falling from the sky onto the hood of an archaeologist’s jeep (In a Suspect Universe), or an old space-prospector in a “lonely bar on a lonely world” waiting for a dangerous business contact (the current Haunted Stars).

 These images generate both an intangible creativity—a wonder, a sense of awe or fear, an emotion—that then inaugurates a series of causal events. Such pictures are crucial, even though when they come, they might have little meaning (as they often do in Lynch’s work). But the logical mind, like Frost’s, then negotiates with this blunt inspiration to make it fit a logical narrative. It’s difficult, yet heady and rewarding, and so necessary to creating a novel.

 This is why I believe strongly in the visual stimulation that photographs, drawings, or even images in dreams, can bring to a writer—why I occasionally post “Prompts from Pictures,” images that can call up embryo ideas for plots. And—wonderfully—they won’t be the same for every viewer. They’ll produce many moods, insights, situations, concepts, and the wilder the better—logic can come later. For now, at the start, surrender to the imagining eye and indulge in what it sees, whatever that might be, and let it become a “vision” for a developing narrative.

 Pictures  into words, moments into stories.