How to have ideas: Your brain, mushroom moments – and why boring tasks are good for your writing

Ever wondered why ideas come more easily at some times than at others? This may be the answer.

I have an urge to slice mushrooms.

Yesterday I was preparing for a dinner party and had to slice half a kilo of teensy button things into tiny wafers, like a mushroom in cardboard cut-out. That’s a lot of mushrooms and a lot of identical knife strokes (darn French cuisine). So repetitive that you have to tell your brain to go away and play. Mine, of course, had plenty to do – there’s another novel I’ve been mulling over. Soon the ideas were flowing far better than any concentrated session at the keyboard.

Where do you get your best ideas? I find it’s not a question of where I am as what I’m doing. When I was compiling my tactics to beat writer’s block for Nail Your Novel I discovered a lot of writers find this. When their mind’s gone blank, they pick up some knitting, go for a drive… and while they’re dealing with the practicalities of that, the ideas come streaming in.

I’ve just read something in The Independent that suggests this has a scientific basis. Researchers hooked creative people up to EEGs to watch what was happening in their brains. When the brain relaxed out of sharp attentiveness into idling mode, that was when new ideas happened. To quote the article (by journalist Jeremy Laurance): ‘Stimuli that might otherwise be ignored are allowed to enter awareness and can resonate with thoughts, memories and existing knowledge.’

That’s me with my mushrooms. Looking for something to think about while doing a boring task. Now this scientific evidence suggests that it may work for everyone. 

The article was reviewing The Brain Book by journalist Rita Carter, and it had another interesting thing to say about creativity. Researchers imaged the brains of musicians when they were playing. If they were reading from a score, the frontal lobes were activated. If they were improvising, the frontal lobes were turned off, allowing ideas to ‘float’.

So ideas come from a specific part of the brain, and maybe can be inhibited by certain activities. Most people understand that the right brain is dreamy and the left brain is critical – and this adds another mechanism.

Our brains have a specific gear for creativity. You’re either in the mode for carrying out logical operations on a problem (playing from a score) or for having ideas (improvising). You can’t be in both. Which is possibly why sitting at your keyboard with a plot or character problem is not going to make a solution appear. You’re literally thinking too hard about it – and squashing the inspirational part of your brain.  

It also suggests why some of us feel unconfident about making things up – inventing stories and characters (see Helen’s Writing Journey – lies and twisty ways with words, and the inner child). It’s actually a question of opening up specific neural pathways, activating a part of the brain that can’t work if others are being used too forcefully. But it’s there. In other words, creativity can improve with exercise.

This morning, as I typed up my ideas and enjoyed where they were leading, I thought back to the hypnotic state of a knife going through white balls of fungi and wished I had another heap to do. So that I could slip back to the mental place that was so productive, pick up the creative thread again. Sports psychologists and neurolinguistic programmers talk about triggers – powerful memories that generate a useful feeling (usually confidence or calm) and that you call up at will. I hadn’t thought before that each book might have its unique ideas trigger, its meditation activity where I feel happy with the book and confident I will have ideas. For this book, there’s something magic about mushroom moments.

Do you nurture mushroom moments for your works in progress?