Secrets of Success (eBook)

GENIUS IS 1% INSPIRATION …

You’re itching to get started. Fame and fortune beckon – you just need the idea that’s going to do it for you. Shouldn’t take long. Inspiration can’t be that hard, can it? Can it? Er …

The question of where ideas come from, and how they can be accelerated on their journey, has taxed and bedevilled our species’ greatest creative minds since the first caveman fashioned the first pointy-headed sharp thing and called it a spear. Some pretty great people have done some pretty weird things in search of that elusive substance known as ‘inspiration’. Beethoven used to tip iced water over his head as he composed, while Charles II collected dust from Egyptian mummies and rubbed it on himself to acquire what he termed ‘ancient greatness’. Peter Sellers, meanwhile, was inspired by no less an authority than the Almighty. ‘I just talked to God!’ he told director Blake Edwards one night, after a long day struggling with a difficult scene in a Pink Panther film. ‘And he told me how to do it!’ The next day they tried the scene that way – and it was even worse. ‘Peter,’ said Edwards, ‘next time you talk to God, tell him to stay out of show business.’

Here’s how some other notables have tackled the inspiration issue …

Keith Richards often reads the Bible – ‘some very good phrases in there’, he says. He got the title for the Rolling Stones song Thief in the Night from Thessalonians 5:2.

Stephen Sondheim deliberately improvises in keys he’s uncomfortable with, to prevent ‘muscle memory’ guiding his fingers into tired old patterns.

Albert Einstein did what Sherlock Holmes was famous for – he played the violin as he mused on a problem. He credited it with extending his thinking.

The British comedy writer John Junkin was once asked how he inspired himself to write. He said it was very simple: you put a blank sheet of paper in the typewriter, then put the gas bill next to the typewriter.

Where inspiration strikes:

The bathroom

Chris Addison: ‘I have most of my best ideas when I’m brushing my teeth. Maybe I should floss them, too. One day you’ll see me doing an amazing show with really, really clean teeth.’

Junot Diaz, whose novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize, writes in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bath.

Hilary Mantel, author of the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, counters writer’s block by taking a shower.

Demosthenes wrote his speeches after shaving half his head, so that he would be too embarrassed to show himself in public.

The bedroom

Paul McCartney woke up with the tune for ‘Yesterday’ in his head, and couldn’t believe it wasn’t an existing song. He had to hum it to several people before being convinced that it was indeed his.

The guitar riff for ‘Satisfaction’ came to Keith Richards in his sleep. The guitarist woke up, recorded the riff and the words ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’ into a cassette recorder, then went back to sleep. Listening back to the tape he heard ‘two minutes of “Satisfaction” and 40 minutes of me snoring.’

Victor Hugo made himself work by having his valet hide his clothes. He was therefore unable to go out and had no choice but to write – naked.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed the whole of his poem ‘Kubla Khan’. As he wrote it down he was interrupted by a visitor from the village of Porlock, and on resuming found that he couldn’t remember any more. This is why the poem stops after just 54 lines. ‘A person from Porlock’ has come to be literary slang for an unwanted intruder.

Freddie Mercury used a piano as the headboard of his bed. If he awoke with a tune in his head he could reach up behind his head and, being double-jointed, play it straightaway. This is how he composed the beginning of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

The car

George Lucas got the inspiration for the Star Wars ‘hairy co-pilot’ character Chewbacca from his own Alaskan Malamute dog, who used to ride around on the front passenger seat of Lucas’ car. The dog – Indiana – also inspired the name of Harrison Ford’s character in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which Lucas produced. (Meanwhile Lucas got the idea for another Star Wars character while mixing his earlier film American Graffiti – he asked the sound engineer for R2-D2, meaning Reel 2 Dialogue 2. Liking the sound of the phrase he noted it down …)

Gertrude Stein would sit in her parked Ford car (called Godiva) to write poetry.

The pub

Sebastian Faulks: ‘Pub research – it’s quite important to do that. The difficulty is to determine the difference between a thought and an idea. I may be interested in certain notes in a female singer’s repertoire. If I talk about it in the pub and people’s eyes glaze over and say it’s completely uninteresting then I know it’s just a thought I’ve shared and move on. But if it lights up their eyes and they say “yes, I wonder if people write songs just to include those notes” and “do you think it’s possible a singer might actually live her life to give herself material for a song,” then suddenly that’s more than a thought, that’s an idea. You can see some sort of flesh on it.’

The importance of routine

Karl Lagerfeld: ‘The brain is a muscle and you have to work out not with machines but with your brain. You know, the French say “you get hungry when you are eating” and I think you get ideas when you are working.’

Somerset Maugham had a very strict routine at his home, the Villa Mauresque on the French Riviera: after breakfast, he would go up to his study at the top of the house, then work from 8.00 a.m. until noon (in longhand). Then he went downstairs and got ready for lunch. He once told a friend that he did that every single day. The friend asked: ‘You mean Sundays and holidays and birthdays?’ Maugham replied: ‘Especially Sundays and holidays and birthdays.’

Some notes on notebooks

Francis Bacon (the Elizabethan statesman, not the twentieth-century artist): ‘A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket, and write down the...