I think I lost people on my Geneplore explanation. So here’s the easy version:
Coming up with an idea is the not the same thing as exploring it. The Geneplore model suggests that idea generation and idea exploration are two separate processes. The creative constraints you use are up to you, but they affect your generation and exploration processes.
Let’s say you’re writing an action novel that takes place on a snow-peaked mountain top. You are naturally constrained by the mountain in what your characters will be able to do. It wouldn’t make sense to come up with a car chase that takes place in a downtown setting with skyscapers, because you’ve already established the setting as a mountain top. Therefore, the setting becomes a creative constraint that you need to generate and explore ideas around. Through the constraint, maybe the characters would have a snowmobile chase, or a fight scene on a gondola, ski-lift, skii-chase, sled ride, avalanche, or some other thing. Your constraints define what kind of ideas you can generate. Exploring them is another issue altogether.
A creative constraint could be anything… maybe your story takes place in the winter, maybe your main character is in a wheelchair much like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. The character’s constraint is your constraint as the writer, because you have to write around your goals or other ideas you’ve already established.
So on one hand you generate ideas. On the other hand you explore them. One way some creative people do this is to make a big list of ideas on paper, and then after they’ve finished listing them they go back and expand or explore those ideas, and maybe ‘limit’ what those ideas can or can’t do based on constraints or goals of the project, the material that already exists, etc.
The main point is to consciously recognize that generating ideas is not the same as exploring them, and it can be helpful to view them as separate processes.
I hope that makes the Geneplore model easier to understand!
Wow, there’s a scientific model for this?! I guess it is a much neater explaination that faffing around–make that floundering around–a story.
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My big problem is always exploring the ideas too early–getting too bogged down in the details of ONE idea, when I should really be generating more alternative ideas and then exploring after I’ve got a better list.
It’s been a big problem for me simply because I didn’t realize I was doing it. I didn’t realize there was a difference between generate & explore.
So what I get from this is that I should try to come up with a variety of ideas and then explore all the ideas I’ve generated before just going with the first thing that pops into my head.
Yep! That’s exactly it Nienke. Generate a larger list of ideas before running with one of them. Because if you just run with an idea that doesn’t work out, and you don’t have any alternative ideas to try, you’re going to be stuck.
[...] Trusting, and Training. This is similar to the difference between Generate & Explore I discussed lwhen explaining the geneplore [...]