Creative adventures

Nimue Brown

Sep 6

(Nimue)

Here I am with fabulous Japanese wizard Dr Abbey, looking at his most recent art. If you've followed the blog for a while you may remember there was a time when I was regularly writing small pieces to go with Abbey's pictures. We've both been busy with other things for a while now, but I am working on a novel based on some of the ideas we developed together.

I hadn't seen Dr Abbey in person for about three years, and it's been wonderful having some time with him to plot, plan and catch up. We're thinking about performing together next year.

As a creative collaboration we've so far not quite got things to work. We both get very excited about each other's ideas, and we've both created a lot of things in response to each other - mostly art in Abbey's case, poetry and stories in mine. The trouble is that we work in such different ways. Abbey tends to have intense bursts of creativity where he produces a lot of art and has a lot of ideas. I tend to work at a fairly consistent pace, and I'm a lot slower. I'm still working out how to turn into a story some of the ideas we were sharing more than a year ago.

It's the differences between people that often make collaborations rich and exciting. Figuring out how to work with someone is always a big part of the challenge. Perhaps performance will put us into the same creative timeframes - it will be interesting to find out.

It may well be that creatively speaking, what we do best is spark off ideas in each other, and then let that go where it will in different directions. There's no one right way of being inspired, no one right way of connecting with another person, or co-creating with them.

Relationships like that have always been at the heart of my creativity. People who I can connect with deeply, where there is mutual understanding and a rich flow of ideas. I write for the people I can relate to in this way, and I write about the ideas and possibilities that come out of those rich connections. One of the reasons I'm so invested in the steampunk community is that this is so often where I find my people, my inspiration and motivation.