What TEDx Really Takes - and why I am the poster child for the Imaginative Storm method
Well, I didn’t think it would be easy, exactly, but I never imagined it would be all-consuming for two months. Ha!
I left home on January 26, already on draft 3 of my talk after a month of work, advised by the brilliant TEDx Asheville mentors. I was confident I could present it well on stage - after all, I’ve been on stage plenty, and did a few 45-minute talks when on book tour for my memoir Love Child. So, I thought, I should be able to finish the book proposal for Imaginative Intelligence in the two months I’d be away, and maybe even finish up my book on how to write a memoir.
Ha! As I said.
One day of work on the book proposal. Zero days on the memoir book.
The talk ended up somewhere north of draft 17; that’s when I stopped numbering. And I was still rehearsing my performance at 8:30 the night before. AND I changed three parts of the talk itself at 4 o’clock that morning. (Are you surprised I didn’t sleep well?)
Before I left Asheville, Navé interviewed me about the months of work it took to put together a 12-minute TEDx talk. (It looks like a video, but it’s actually just audio.)
I hope it’s clear in the interview how much I owe Navé. In fact, I owe him my entire writing life, bar a few magazine and newspaper articles. I am the poster child for the Imaginative Storm method. Seriously.
There would be no Love Child, no novel, no Write What You Don’t Know, no imaginative intelligence, if I had never met Navé and if he hadn’t asked me to teach workshops with him, despite having discovered how very bad at it I was back then.
He taught me:
not to care if what I put on the page was good or not
how to ignore the rules when it suited me
why to generate material by hand
the value of a 10-minute timer
And best of all:
how valuable it is to write nonsense!
By “nonsense,” I mean non-sense. What doesn’t make sense to the rational mind. And I was a heavy user of my rational mind. Before playing in the Imaginative Storm, it didn’t occur to me that something could make imaginative sense. I thought good writers made up imagery and metaphor by force of will.
Ha! As I said.
Writing non-sense freed up my imagination, so that sense and non-sense could blend and dance together.