Ruled by chance / Social insects

Today: Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead; and : Joe MacLeod, Creative Director at INDIGNITY and author of the column MR. WRONG.

Issue No. 163

Look What Does Happen
Arwa Mahdawi

A Nest in My Home
Joe MacLeod

Look What Does Happen

by Arwa Mahdawi

One of my favourite things to do when I should be writing is read about the routines of successful writers. It’s not procrastination, it’s very important research! The only problem, however, is that I am far too lazy to adopt any of the exhausting schedules these writers seem to follow. The bestselling novelist Rumaan Alam, for example, wrote his first novel between the hours of 7:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. every night. Alam and his husband also have two children for God’s sake! All I want to do at 7:00 p.m., having spent the day freelancing and juggling post-3:00 p.m. childcare with my wife, is flop on the couch and watch Love is Blind. 

While routines like Alam’s are far too grueling for me, I did stumble across a fascinating low-effort creativity trick in an episode of the British podcast Desert Island Discs featuring Steven Knight. I’m not a Peaky Blinders fan (although if you’ve got a good pitch as to why I should give it another chance I’m listening) and didn’t know anything about Knight, the creator. But the guy is fascinating. He came from very humble beginnings and helped create Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, among a gazillion other things. 

But I’m not here to regurgitate Knight’s biography, just share a little trick he uses to get the creative juices flowing. When asked about the research he does before starting a project, Knight said that he likes to utilize randomness. 

“If you’ve got [a project] set in New York in the 1940s and you put into Google ‘New York 1840s ice cream’ or ‘watermelons’ or any random word, it’ll take you to something that no one else has looked at,” Knight explained. “If you put ‘New York 1840s’ you’ll get all the stuff that’s about New York in the 1840s. But if you add the random word...it takes you to drama and issues and situations you wouldn’t [normally find]. Real life is pretty random, lots of weird things happen and it seems to be the job of the fiction writer to try and make it more normal. People say, ‘Well that wouldn’t happen.’ Well look what does happen.”

Yes, indeed: look what does happen.