On Ideas

Where do ideas come from?

Well, I’m not really sure.  Each idea, when it turns up, seems different from the others, and I can’t really claim to be an expert on even how my own ideas come to be.  

In my experience, knowing where they come from isn’t really that important.  What you need to know if you want to have ideas is how to recognize them when they come about, how to catch them, and how to put them to use.

You will need three things to do this.  First, patience; second,  practice, and third, a small notebook.

Patience

Patience trumps any other aspect of the inspiration enterprise.  Without it, you might well spend your whole life waiting for a good idea to occur to you, and wait in vain.

This might sound a little paradoxical -- you have to have the patience not to wait for something -- but let me explain.

You can’t force an idea to come into existence.  In my experience it’s practically impossible.  No matter how crushing your deadline, no matter how hard you stare at your computer screen, no matter how desperately you exert your will for an idea to appear, your brain will stay blank.  Nothing will happen.

For me, the secret is to relax and do something else.  Go for a walk, clean the dishes, try drawing something (this only works sometimes; it can be a way to become DOUBLE stymied). However it happens, I’m almost always doing something else, and certainly thinking of something else, when the tug of an idea first occurs to me.

So what does this mean for other people?

Simple: if you’re stuck, vary your experience.  Go do something you don’t normally do, and forget about thinking about ideas entirely, and see what turns up.

Generally for me when ideas turn up they’re in the form of a question.  I get to wondering about something, familiar or unfamiliar, and some part of it will suddenly not make sense to me or get me wondering.  The easy ones are generally “what ifs,” and the really big ones (which seem impossible) are usually “hows” and “whys.”

It’s difficult to describe, because you’re mostly working by feel, but you’ll recognize the sensation once it happens.  Jerry Seinfeld described it once as “there’s something there.”  You’ll get a sense that there’s something more, hidden inside of or behind or in back of something familiar, that’s waiting to be brought out.

So, stop trying.  Wait by doing something else.  “Vary your experience,” but going into that in detail is for another post.  Listen for questions and wonderings.

Of course, if you’re in a real crisis of a deadline and you need an idea, you can always drink a lot of coffee and start writing down everything that comes to mind, and hope that something worthwhile will come out of it.  It never gives good results, but hey, it might work for you!

Practice

Practice really goes hand in hand with patience.  

I know I just said you have to stop trying to force an idea into existence if you’re going to get anywhere.  At the same time, if you don’t do anything to make ready for ideas when they come along, you’ll have a hard time getting any use out of them, or even realizing when they’ve appeared.

What you have to do is this: set aside some time every day for scribbling.  If you’re a musician, set aside some time to just mess around without having any set tune or song or rules in mind, just stay in one place, try to relax and not feel stupid (this is not easy and is exactly what the practice is for) and just play for a while.

If you draw, just scribble and doodle.  Do not, I repeat, do not care if it looks good or not (without practice, this is almost impossible).  If it helps, cover a page with random squiggles of pencil, then look for images in that and trace them with a marker.  Draw a large “X” on the page first thing, then draw around that, so that you know that it’s messed-up and won’t be perfect from the start, and you don’t have to worry about it.

If you’re trying to write, do the same thing but with words: put down whatever the first thing is to come to mind.  If you don’t keep a journal, start doing that.  Once you’re keeping one, try to also set aside some time to do writing prompts, or find some exercises online, there’s almost an infinite number.  Pick a random news article and try writing it from the perspective of someone inside the story.  Just do something to get yourself writing, and to get that part of your brain that says “well this is hardly pulitzer-prize stuff” to switch off for a while.

You’re basically making a habit of being comfortable acting like a creative person.  That way, when actual creativity suddenly appears in front of you, you won’t be struck dumb with the mortal terror of feeling responsible for causing something interesting to exist.

It’s kind of like courtship, really.  For best results, figure out how to care a great deal, and at the same time act like you don’t care at all.

This goes hand in hand with patience because it will take some time for you to actually get comfortable.  Don’t be surprised if you still feel silly and uninspired the tenth time you sit down; eventually you’ll get there.  You can’t force this part either, but you can force yourself to keep showing up.  In fact you’ll probably have to.

Once you’re comfortable, and have acquired something like a knack for Patience, then maybe you’ll feel the tug of an idea.  (I’m not saying that these conditions are enough to guarantee that they’ll happen: all I know is that for me, if I don’t do these things, I get nowhere.)  Once you think you have one on the line, you have to know how to finish catching it.

A Small Notebook

This is where the small notebook comes in.

When I was in high school I kept a small flip-top spiral notebook in my pocket to jot things down in.  When I was in college I was more pretentious, so I wore a suit jacket everywhere in order to have a inside jacket pocket in which to put one of those fashionably overpriced black leather codices that I could write and draw in.  I may or may not still have a number of these lying around; I certainly still have the jackets.

Now that I’m grown-up (ha!) I no longer have any excuses for keeping my pretentiousness in check, so I carry a smart phone.  I’m pleased to say that, in addition to social media and sudoku, I’ve managed to use it as an idea-catcher as well, by keeping the notepad application open most of the time, and giving that notepad a direct line to my email inbox.

Whatever you’re using to catch your ideas when they show up, here’s how to use it:

When you get the notebook, put a dot on first page somewhere so that it’s not blank.  Or, write the stupidest thing you can think of on the first page.  Or draw a stupid picture, or just draw another large “X”.  

No matter what you do, do something to take off that edge of “you need to be perfect” that we all know radiates poisonously from any and every perfectly blank page that ever existed.

The reason for this is simple.  You need to never, never be afraid to put something down.  If that first tentative spark of an idea has a nemesis, or an antimatter counterpart that can annihilate it instantly from existence, it’s uncertainty.  Never question whether something is worth remembering.  Just write it down.

Once you’ve defaced your notebook, or whatever, keep it and a pen  on you at all times.  When you go out, keep it in your pocket or purse.  When you get in the shower, leave it on the sink counter (or somewhere it’ll stay dry).  Keep it near your plate when you eat and near your bedside when you sleep.

The reason for this is simple: never believe yourself when you say, “I’ll remember this, there’s no need to write it down.”  You won’t.  So put down everything you can about the idea when it comes to you, all the detail you can clearly see, because you don’t want to have to reconstruct it later, it just won’t have the same feel.

Congratulations!  You’ve got an idea!  Who knows if it’s good or bad, there’s no time to judge -- time to put that idea to use!

Use Them!

An idea that’s never brought to life never really happened.

Once you’ve got your idea noted down, at your very next opportunity to practice with it, give it time, and see where it takes you.  Don’t try to be careful, or wait until the perfect time, or feel like it’s not a complete idea yet because you don’t have all the information.  Just start exploring your idea, without being worried over whether it’s any good or not.  

Concentrate on the work itself, on doing it the way you’ve found to do it through practice.  If you don’t know what that is yet, practice more, but kill time by working with that idea of yours and see what happens.  If you find questions that need answering in order to do more work, note them down for later and keep working anyway.  Just try to engage with the material.  

If you do it right, you won’t have to tell yourself to work.  You’ll have to tell yourself to stop, so that you can eat or sleep or get ready to go to your day job.

The best and strangest thing about being creative is seeing how little work it takes sometimes to turn one good idea into many.  Give them time and energy and you get to watch them grow seemingly on their own.  The work takes over for itself, and all you have to do is marvel at all the surprises that have turned up in the details -- but going into this at length is also for another post.

Uncertainty kills ideas.  This goes double for ideas that have been written down in small notebooks and then ignored for fear of not being good enough to use them.  It doesn’t matter if the idea seems lousy or if you don’t know how to use it: being too careful is the best way to let an idea whither and kill it dead.

So practice every day to keep this part of your brain ready.  Stay on guard.  Be ready to recognize your ideas when they happen, accept them without judgment, and press them into service.  Above all, relax and have patience.  Being creative is a great way to flex your mental powers, to boost your day-to-day morale, and, dare I say it, to find or add meaning to life, But it’s also supposed to be fun.  Live for doing the work while you’re doing it, and forget about how it turns out.  If you get too focused on results, you’re never going to get anywhere.

Most of all, be patient.

Either that, or drink all the coffee you can get your hands on.  Write down everything that come to mind, and see what happens.