Nearly every writer is hit with the question: Where do you get your ideas from? Aargh! Sacrilege! Anathema! Seriously though, no writer wants to answer that question – mostly because they don’t really know the answer. Harlan Ellison supposedly told people he used to go to a little idea shop in Schenectady. Neil Gaiman says he plays little ‘what if’ games – ‘what if a werewolf bit a chair?’ Stephen King claims the ideas just ‘come to him out of the blue’. Hilarious, but really, now.
The ancient Greeks and Romans thought that spiritual creatures known as Muses brought ideas and inspiration to artists and other creatives. Some people still believe that, or a variation of it. Modern scientists think that ideas happen at the intersections of areas of interest or experience within the creative. Orson Scott Card thinks that ideas are all around, but that most people miss them. Some credit the subconscious mind, others credit the environment. I’m not sure that a single explanation will suffice even for a singular artist.
I never have an issue coming up with ideas. Part of this, I think, stems from the fact that I’ve been looking for ideas for so long that they just show up everywhere. Useful inventions show up in my mind through cross-pollination of the various sciences I study. Paintings get inspired by music, or during long walks. Sculptures begin their lives as raw emotion. And stories just seem to pop out of nothing, right in front of me. Even these blog posts tend to begin as random grumbles or jokes. It’s a startling and fun way to walk through life. But I think there’s also an unspoken question here: How can I learn to find ideas?
First, let’s manage a few expectations. Not everyone is naturally creative – that’s an oversimplification. Anyone can learn to do crafts, anyone can learn to sketch, to cook, to decorate and build simple objects. These are good and useful skills to have. Most people can learn to give a speech, paint a room or a house, work in the garden, sing and dance well enough. All of these things are very good and should be encouraged in everyone. These skills make a life more full, more expressive. They do not make you into an artist in the truest sense of the word – they do not make you creative. Let’s use a different illustration.
If you did fairly well with math in school, if you were good at arithmetic, got high marks in algebra and geometry (or just one of them, which is more often the case), or perhaps you took elementary calculus – fantastic! Mathematics is a useful skill to have. This does not make you a mathematician, and you would probably not have an issue with that assessment. Knowing how to treat a cut doesn’t make you a doctor, knowing how to solve an algebra problem doesn’t make you an engineer. We are all well aware of this. These jobs are hard, they take years of specialized training. Believe it or not, so do the arts.
The arts in this country and throughout the developed world have fallen victim to an insidious bias created by the Industrial Revolution. Math, science, even sports training were seen as useful skills to develop in the population, in order to create a limitless supply of workers and managers for the ever-hungry mills, foundries and mines. The arts and artists were of no obvious use to the factory owners and were therefore discouraged. The populace picked up on and internalized this bias, believing that art was frivolous and pointless, that anyone could learn to do it, and only the most lazy and dissolute members of society would become artists. This is a bald-faced lie, and we need to stop believing it.
Creativity, by one definition, is the ability to have and develop new ideas which have value. This requires not just a high degree of intelligence from the creative, and a high degree of skill, but also a highly sensitive nature – especially a sensitivity to connections, emotions and values. Most creatives start with a basic ability to find or invent new ideas, but then they find they have to search hard for further ideas, new roads, new visions to follow. This is not an easy job. On top of that, the creative will usually find that they are drawn to one or more modes of expression – painting, writing, dance, to name a few. These are skills that take years, sometimes decades to master. For every child prodigy writing symphonies in his teens, there are hundreds, even thousands more who don’t reach that level until their thirties or forties – if at all.
Creativity is a very high risk/high reward career path. Most people cannot develop a highly creative nature, by simply wanting to. And even fewer develop the skills required to fully realize their potential. But if they do manage both feats, the chances for success and recognition are extremely small. Many people fantasize about being a best-selling author, without realizing how difficult and unlikely it is to become one. Getting a great idea for a story is barely step one.
So, getting back to the topic, where do the good ideas come from? That remains largely a mystery, because the process is different for each creative, and very often different from moment to moment for the individual. The one common element I’ve seen is that each creative spends more time and energy looking for ideas than anyone else does. Like any good hunter, they look more, so they see more. That particular skill can be learned, so if you’re interested in coming up with more and better ideas, remember these two things: those who look harder for ideas find more of them. And also – most ideas are garbage. You not only need to be able to see new ideas, you need to figure out which ones are worth a damn.
Good hunting. Be well.
bcd