Attaching

So what’s going on in the image we’re holding? In my example, I can throw out a few IDEAS:

-He’s trying to read the tea leaves.
-He’s washing his spare fez or his toupee
-He’s cooking soup
-He’s washing the couscous
-He’s warming or cooling his hands

Note that cleverness is not called for. What’s so clever about “washing the couscous”? Nothing- but it can bring us to good usable ideas and powerful images if we let it. We needn’t be clever, to be unique. We merely need to be honest and diligent.

So if we pick one, of these, we can begin to slowly daydream other images. Slowly is key; frantic energy can get desperate. Desperate energy can be a good motivator, but is not good for generation. What we want right now is the genuine slow pace of the material world. The pace of breath.

We can begin to do is to imagine other moments that might be related, like I’ve doodled above: here he is pulling his hand out with a fish attached, or trying to shake the hand of someone who has just arrived, his hand full of goo or whatever foodstuffs was in the bucket.

Note that my doodles here are starting to get silly, because that’s just how I am. Yours may get dark, or may even stay “unclever” as I’ve mentioned above. Maybe the bulk of your originality will come out in dialogue, or maybe it will come out when a new character is introduced, or it may come from a soon to be introduced thematic jump, or maybe it will come out in the drawings, or the “linefield” as I’ll later call it. The important thing is too keep working, keep attaching ideas and images together with your attention.

The important thing to understand is that ideas and images attach themselves to each other.