Using Chance Creatively

The use of chance in creativity goes back a very long way. Mary Shelley famously tried to bring on nightmares by eating strange foods before she wrote Frankenstein. She had decided to let her unconscious (not that it was called that then) take over. Chance and accident in creativity become even more significant and celebrated in the wake of Freud, and the development of his theories about the unconscious. The surrealists and Dadaists of the 1920s and 1930s found all sorts of new ways of getting the unconscious to throw up connections and ideas that would normally be rejected by the conscious mind. Carl Gustav Jung, one of my big influences, believed that you could see patterns of truth in supposedly 'accidental' connections. In his foreword to the IChing, a system of thought based on poetic readings of patterns created by the throwing of coins, dice or yarrow stalks, Jung says that, 'In the exploration of the unconscious we come upon very strange things, from which a rationalist turns away with horror, claiming afterward that he did not see anything.'

In the 1960s, two European groups flourished: the situationists and OULIPO. Both used games of chance to inspire creativity. The situationists were known for navigating one city using the map of another city. And members of OULIPO used mathematical problems to trigger ideas. The novel Life: a User's Manual by Georges Perec famously uses the Knight's Move problem from mathematics as a way of structuring a novel set entirely in an apartment block.

Every creative person has had a happy accident with chance. Sometimes it is simply an unexpected meeting, or event. Sometimes a word will pop into our mind and we know we have to do something with it. Sometimes we enter a (fictional) location with some characters and just see what happens.

With my own writing, I like to have about 30% of it planned and leave the rest to chance. Not completely random chance, but more a sense of 'seeing where things go' as I write. The percentage that I plan is going down each year. I decide roughly what kind of plot I'm using (which I know I will subvert in some way) and then let the content fall in around it. I trust my unconscious to make things work. I do use a lot of structural diagrams for overviews, and I meticulously plan callbacks and payoffs. But within a scene some really surprising things always happen. It’s like when Mark Rylance says acting should be more like tennis. You know what yo’re trying to do - but you can’t possibly choreograph every move that gets you there.

So how can you use chance in your own writing? Well, one thing I would recommend is to let scenes and characters develop in as free a way as possible. I often change the focus of a scene entirely in the writing of it. In OLIGARCHY I wrote a scene where Natasha goes in a helicopter with her aunt to a castle on Boxing Day. She hopes to see her father there. I always knew that this was where she was going to meet a seemingly obnoxious rich boy called Teddy. As I wrote the scene I realised Natasha was going to have to attend a big dinner, and I seated her between two elderly ladies. But I didn't realise until I wrote it that the scene was going to end with one of the old ladies saying to Natasha, 'Are you one of the prostitutes, dear?' But once I'd written that line I knew the scene was complete. I wanted to get across some information about how these characters lived, and also how uncomfortable and out-of-place Natasha felt, and this one line did it perfectly.

You'll often hear writers talking about their characters taking on a life of their own, and doing things the writer does not expect. This is extremely common, and is another example of chance working in favour of creativity (and also of the particular magic that starts working when you are deeply into a project). Although most writers I’ve met admit that this happens, I was once at a dinner with the Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah where he expressed some horror at the very idea of this happening. ‘They do what I tell them,’ he said.

I have long been suspicious of those Creative Writing 101 activities which employ chance. I've never much liked automatic writing, even though that was a big fave of the surrealists. And I've always hated those writing activities where someone puts a banana, an old boot and a picture of a rabbit on the table and tells everyone to make a story from these elements. I have always thought writing should be more personal and urgent than this. However, since I’ve done improv I can see that not a lot actually comes from pure chance at all. But elements of chance can free up your creativity in ways you don’t expect.

One of the things I most like about the matrix is that it brings chance to your own individual content. That's important. Every good writer has to work with their own material: the things that are fascinating and moving to them. I suppose at heart, although I like avant-garde 20th century techniques and games, I am a Romantic. I believe that art is about how one individual sees the world, and what is special about that. The danger, though, is that we all start to see the world the same way, through the same clichés and Instagram filters, and games of chance do at least shake that up.

For anyone who is interested in surrealist games, I recommend ‘A Book of Surrealist Games’ compiled by Alistair Brotchie (Ed. Mel Gooding).

One of the games in this book that I particularly like is Conditionals, where players write out two sorts of phrase and then randomly put them together. This could be a fun thing to play in a group on a winter's night. The instructions in the book suggest that one person should take a pice of paper, write an 'If...' or 'When...' sentence and then fold the paper over and give it to a second person who writes the conditional or future sentence. But you could also just get everyone to write two sentences that follow from one another, cut them up, stick them in a hat (or two hats) and pull them out at random and see what connections you can make. What ideas can you generate like this? Could you do this at work with your team? Could you go further and book an improv day? (Or get a storytelling consultant in, hint hint!)

So what can you do right now to bring chance to your writing or creativity? Well, how about this... Using two random numbers (but let's say 2 and 3) generate 23 scraps of information. For example, open your newspaper to page 2 and find the 3rd story. Cut this out and fold it up. Open your current notebook to the 2nd page and find the 3rd thing you've written. Write it on a scrap of paper and fold it up. Do a Google search for something you find interesting. Choose the 3rd thing on the 2nd page and write it down and fold it up. Open a random book of yours and pick the 3rd word on the 2nd line... And so on until you have 23. Put all these scraps of paper in a bag and shake it up and choose 5 of them. Now start writing...