The Creative Process
By Brian Wallace

My creative process is one in which I try to actively foster a state of mind that's conducive to doing writing. A lot of times that can be exercise; a lot of times that can be a stimulant such as coffee; a lot of times that can be philosophical pondering about what's going on around me, about what's happening in the world. I try to tap into a variety of different ways to create the inspiration to sit down and write and create what I want to say. That would vary from week to week and from month to month. Certain weeks, I didn't feel very much inspiration and so I just needed to set down the paperwork and go and do other things, and take my mind off it for a while.

But, I think that, to take on the project of a novel, about a 300-page novel, and begin it at a certain place and end it at a certain place and be happy with how it turned out, requires that one develop almost an addiction or almost a complete immersion into the process and into the story of what's happening. My personal creative process with this book involved developing such a mind state that the world of my characters and the experiences of my characters were almost more real than so-called objective reality around me during my normal waking hours. It became almost an internal story, a movie, or a dream that I worked toward perpetuating as long as I possibly could and as significantly as I possibly could.

It's the same discipline that comes into play when someone excels at a sport or excels at an artistic endeavor, sporting event, academics, artistic endeavors - anything that requires a high degree of discipline or perseverance I definitely tried to call into play into the process of this book.

...requires that one develop almost an addiction or almost a complete immersion into the process and into the story of what's happening.

Writing this story from start to finish was transformational to me in that when I set out on the adventure of writing the book, I didn't really know exactly where it was going to end up. I didn't have a conclusion in mind at the beginning of things. I really set out to tell a story and get some ideas across through the lives of my characters.

Over the course of time, I developed a significant knowledge about many of the subjects that I had to go and research for the sake of my characters. I had to do a lot of personal reflection on many of the issues that my characters deal with. Over the course of time, I modified my thinking about certain issues because I had given more thought to them and different things were happening through the course of the research. Over the course of time, certain theories that I already had were only strengthened and corroborated by what my characters were doing.

Then, at the very end of the entire process, you look at the work and it seems to stand independent of me as an individual and thoughts and ideas and experiences that I've had as an individual. The author, I think to a certain extent, needs to be modest and give gratitude where it's due; and that's to the fact that ideas and experiences and much of the information that ends up in written material really seems to come from some other place. Whether it's a universal idea or a plutonium form, whatever you want to refer to it as, it definitely seems that there are thoughts and ideas and stimulations of consciousness that exist in the universe and many creative people, many artists, seem to tap into that reservoir of thinking, that reservoir of thought and funnel it into their individual incarnation or individual expression of what seems to exist within the universe as a whole.

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