Ride the Lightning

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I got an email last week which I post here with the sender’s permission.

Dear Mr. Bell,

I’ve been reflecting on something I thought you might find intriguing, given your strong defense of flexible structure in storytelling and your view that both plotters and pantsers benefit from it.

I’ve come to think of it as The Paradox of Spontaneity:

Spontaneity feels wondrous because it bypasses conscious control. But it’s only possible because of preexisting order.

The metaphor that struck me is lightning. Rather than being random, it’s the sudden visible manifestation of a vast, invisible system of order, aka, the atmosphere.

It even goes a step further with what’s called the Schumann resonances, which describe how all lightning strikes worldwide combine to maintain a fairly steady “heartbeat” of the planet. Old-fashioned car antennas pick up on this. Watch closely, and they’re always vibrating, tuning in to this heartbeat like an AM/FM stethoscope.

The Earth and the ionosphere form a gigantic spherical resonant cavity, like the body of a guitar. Every year, roughly 1.5 billion lightning strikes excite this cavity, forming low-frequency electromagnetic waves. These waves settle at specific resonant frequencies, mostly around 7.83 Hz. Isn’t it amazing how so many “random” lightning strikes both originate from and sustain order?

And yet, people often say structure steals the heart of stories! They forget that even hearts must beat to an orderly drum, or they wouldn’t be alive.

It’s like we crave the romantic idea of “the pure waters of creativity” so much that we forget: without structure, you don’t even have water yet. Reminds me of a neat, little orderly formula called H₂O.

Since you’ve written so persuasively about structure as a friend, not a foe, to creativity, I thought you might appreciate the connection.

What a brilliant insight! Our world vibrates with a great cosmic heartbeat. It sends us signals, bursts, and we experience them as spontaneity. It is not chaos theory; it all comes from a connected web of structure and order, which is what holds everything together.

Imagine an Earth without gravity. We’d all be Starlink satellites. Gravity allows us to move around on the ground, to dance, to run for the end zone, to put our arms around each other and sing or pray or bring words of comfort.

All of this is wild and wonderful. Structure is beautiful.

Yet there seems to be a notion out there that a thing called “story” can exist apart from structure. That’s not possible. Heck, it’s not just impossible at the novel level; you can’t even write words, sentences or paragraphs without structure.

I write lehslitrr.

Oops, I mean thrillers.

As writers we all love to ride the lightning. Should we just wait for it to happen? Or are there ways to attract it? Let me suggest a few methods.

  1. The Bradbury landmine. Ray Bradbury’s brain was a lightning rod. It worked at night, sometimes in his dreams, but mostly at the subconscious level. When he woke up he’d record as quickly as possible anything that came to the surface—images, concepts, bits of a scene. Only later would he see what kind of structure was being offered.
  2. Outliners can use the “killer scene” method. One of the most enjoyable parts of my planning is sitting in a coffee house with a stack of index cards, writing down scene ideas which come to me in visual form. I don’t think about the outline at this point. I just ride the lightning. When I have 30 or 40 cards, I give it a day, shuffle the deck, and then start to assess what scenes I love and where they might fall in the story, or where they might be giving me new direction. With cards, it’s easy to move them around (which is why I like the corkboard view in Scrivener).
  3. Pantsers ride the lightning as they write, and do so right on through to a completed draft. Nothing at all wrong with that (it is simply a longer version of what outliners do in #2). At some point, though, structure and craft need to take a hand. I’ve read so many manuscripts (and more than a few books) by “discovery writers” that drag like a rusty anchor because they fail at the structural level.
  4. Ride when you’re not writing. You see an image, a billboard, a person crossing the street. Or you overhear a bit of conversation and find you imagination starts firing. Let it go.

(For ten more ways to “goose the muse,” see my TKZ post here.)

I was at a Starbucks once, looking out the window at the parking lot, when a scene from my WIP started playing on the movie screen of my mind. I have no idea how long I was like that, but at one point a man sitting in a chair across from me said, “Are you all right?”

“Huh?” I said.

“You weren’t moving,” he said.

“Ah,” I said. “I was working.”

“Working? What do you do?”

“I’m a writer.”

He looked at me with that expression of wonder and pity we sometimes get when we give that answer.

Thinking back, I wish I’d said, “I ride lightning.” He probably would have switched chairs.

What about you? Do you ride the lightning? When does it happen for you?

25 thoughts on “Ride the Lightning”

  1. Yes, if you ever respond to someone with the “I ride lightning” we’ve gotta hear about the response you get. LOLOL!!!!!! 😎

  2. I really appreciated this post. The lightning metaphor resonates deeply because it bridges creative styles: whether you’re a meticulous planner or someone who writes by instinct, it honors that both methods draw on a deep, unseen foundation—something every writer builds, sometimes without even realizing it.

    For me, this adds a whole new level of understanding to the idea of brainstorming. I find myself “riding the lightning” in three ways:

    1. When brainstorming — letting the flashes come freely.
    2. In daily life — keeping my WIP in the back of my mind so I’m ready when a spark hits.
    3. When writer’s block sets in — I stop forcing the plot and either write a playful, exploratory scene or revisit a favorite book or movie, which almost always delivers a jolt of inspiration.

    It’s encouraging to think of all these moments not as random chaos, but as lightning grounded in an atmosphere of preparation and structure.

  3. Thank you, Jim, and thanks to the emailer. I’ve found that working with an AI writing assistant *demands* structure and discipline. There’s an involved “prompt engineering” skill needed in order to present the AI with a cohesive story idea, its three-act structure, scene beats, character arcs, and yes, outlines, before the thing can generate the first line of prose. Several are now capable of producing a likeness of our writing voice in whole chapters, given examples and proper instruction in how to apply them. Improper instruction will produce flawed results that are sometimes ludicrous.

    Putting AI aside, we work in similar fashion with our “muse,” or “brain” to send the same or similar “prompt” messages to our subconscious instead of a large language model software megalith. In signaling our what-ifs and how-woulds, we pose trial challenges, conflicts, and solutions based on a story concept. What the subconscious presents to the conscious is often a delightful surprise, but just as often can be fodder for the round file. We can kick ourselves for a “dumb idea” or get back to staring out a Starbucks window in motionless concentration.

    Underlying both approaches is a knowledge of basic story structure. Once we understand it, we can hybridize any approach to actually writing down the words.

    • Yes, and “understanding” story structure, IMO, doesn’t come from having it handed to you on a digital platter, but only from hands-on work, study, writing and more writing, and exercising the gray matter.

      I learned structure initially from Syd Field’s book Screenplay. But he was fuzzy on the “plot points,” what they were supposed to do. I spent a year watching and analyzing movies, and discovered what I think is my major contribution to the matter–the Doorway of No Return. And after years of teaching and writing, I hit upon a unique insight, the “mirror moment.” Now AI knows it. It owes me a few bucks.

  4. Imagine an Earth without gravity. We’d all be Starlink satellites.

    Now that sounds like fun… 🙂

    This post reminds me of the structure of music.

    Music has rules and roadmaps. And I must understand them, and follow the signposts . . . sort of. Only after learning and practicing those signposts, can I “ride the lightning”.

    Here’s what I mean.

    I have the sheet music (structure, structure, structure) in front of me, the accompanist(s) beside me, the audience in front of me.

    When I start singing, the accompanist(s) follows me. Yes, I sing the correct words at the right time, but when my creative interpretation (the lightning) of the music takes over, sometimes the rules get broken. A good accompanist will watch me to see where I’m going with the music–then we ride together.

    And that’s when the fun starts.

  5. I used to think structure was a strait jacket that constricted creativity. It conjured outlines in eighth grade: Roman numeral I, capital A, sub-headings, etc.

    Gradually, thanks to you, Jim, and Larry Brooks, I began to understand structure wasn’t an enemy.

    I remain a pantser, driving cross country, seeing only as far as the headlights reach, but heading to a specific destination. I recognize roads are the structure that gets me there. Sometimes it’s the interstate, sometimes it’s a dirt trail, but eventually I arrive at the destination. W/o knowing that underlying structure, I could wind up going round and round in a traffic circle.

    So thank you, Jim and Larry!

    • Yes, for those of us of a certain vintage, “outline” conjures up that A.1.2 B.1.2 stuff from high school. The problem there, I think, was the teacher telling us to outline first. Only much later did I pick up the idea of “free writing” (called “cooking” in the book Writing Without Teachers, and from Writing the Natural Way); you find the order later…pantsing your essays, as it were!

  6. Do you ride the lightning? Absolutely, when it strikes. What helps it strike is working an idea, an outline, or the draft itself. Putting the time in. When I hit a stumbling block in revision, the best thing to do is to brainstorm, and then, like actual lightning, that’s when creative lightning strikes.

    Thanks for another terrific post, Jim.

  7. Fascinating stuff, resonance from a global heartbeat caused by apparently random lightning strikes. Thanks to you, Jim, and the emailer for this. It will take me a while to process all the information in this post!

    Structure is the basis for life itself, eh? DNA defines who we are, yet each of us manifests in a different way. Billions of people, each an individual, all based on the same structure. It’s encouraging to know there is no limit to what we can create within a story structure.

    • Love that DNA analogy, Kay. And it’s fascinating how Darwinians can’t explain complexity of life arising solely by random mutation…even Dawkins admits it “looks like” design but stops himself from exploring that avenue…that might upset the ol’ apple cart!

  8. We live in the lightning capital – Cental Florida.
    A few years ago I was standing at the kitchen window watching the storm when lightning hit our sweetgum tree. It ran down the tree, underground, and came up through our small palm bush. The sweetgum survived, but with a scar. We now refer to it as the Harry Potter tree. The palm.did not. It got fried.

    I’m not riding lightning. Ever.

  9. I ride the lightning (mostly a panster with a few things to reign me in)
    But what most don’t understand is that all stories have a beginning, a middle and and end. And you must have those to make a story.

    I can’t remember who wrote this but “Baby booties for sale. Never worn.” is a full story.

    Without structure we wouldn’t be. Everything on earth has some form of structure.

  10. At the end of a scene: A fluffle of bramble bunnies poured into the cave and gathered in a hollow in the cave wall to wait out the storm. Hope and her dragon companion were started by their new roommates. Hope said, “Would you like to learn how to count?”

    Unplanned and spontaneous like a strike of lightning is how that last line felt.

    I structure and plan extensively, but as I write, it’s those lightning moments I crave.

  11. Hitting the “flow” state is such a high, isn’t it? There’s no high quite like it. Without structure, there is no story. They go hand in hand. And I’m going to try your card scene activity before I start my next book.

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