Dad is an inventor. In 1912 his submarine had the world’s record for staying under water. Running as it did by means of a gasoline engine, it left bubbles on the surface, so it was not employed during World War 1. Dad says he does his best work when he is sound asleep. I was explaining at the New School that the way to get ideas is to do something boring. For instance, composing in such a way that the process of composing is boring induces ideas. They fly into one’s head like birds. Is that what Dad meant?
—John Cage, “Experimental Music”
Toward the beginning of a recent podcast interview, Alan Moore offered a (perhaps) surprising perspective on a question writers and other creative folks often bemoan: “Where do you get your ideas?”
Remembering his days of attending conventions, he said that when asked that question by unassuming fans and aspiring writers,
we would heap scorn upon anybody who asked that and say, “What a stupid question!” — because basically we didn’t know. We couldn’t answer that question, and for creative people whose lives depend upon this, that has got to be a bit unnerving. It’s like being a farmer and having no clue as to how the weather works or how crop rotation works or anything. So, I mean, this was one of the things that led me at the age of 40 to start thinking about magic.
Moore of course is famous not only for his writing but for being a practicing magician. In one of the best interviews I’ve read with him about his magic practice, he offered a similar point to the above:
I think that yes, the creative process is wonderful and mysterious, but the fact that it’s mysterious doesn’t make it unknowable. All of our existences are fairly precarious, but mine has been made considerably less precarious by actually understanding in some form how the processes that I depend on actually work. Now, alright, my understanding, or the understanding that I’ve gleaned from magic, might be correctly wrongheaded for all I know. But as long as the results are good, as long as the work that I’m turning out either maintains my previous levels of quality or, as I think is the case with a couple of those magical performances, actually exceeds those limits, then I’m not really complaining.
I was pleased to hear Moore criticize the scorn with which many professionals approach the question “Where do you get your ideas?” because I think it can be among the most interesting questions for any artist. And while I’m all for people embracing whatever they consider magic, I don’t think you need to be a wizard to see the value in keeping yourself open to investigating — and experimenting with — idea generation.
Of course, we’re not just talking about “ideas” in the sense of “basic concepts”. That narrow perception of “ideas” may be one of the things people dislike about the question. Most creative people I know would agree that it’s not initial concepts that are the challenge, it’s the work of bringing those concepts into concrete shape, turning inspiration into whatever ultimate item you make. I’ve always had scraps of paper and online files filled with phrases and sentences pointing toward something or other, but 99% of them will never become a finished story or essay because I will never find a way to bring them forth in a way that satisfies me. But for me, that way of bringing forth initial concepts into form is itself a network of ideas.
Bringing forth. Summoning. In a brief blog entry last spring, M. John Harrison pointed to the idea of emergence. Not “Where do you get your ideas?” but “How do you summon ideas and follow their emergence into the world?”
Another reason that professionals get frustrated with this question may not be because they don’t themselves know, but because they know that one person’s process probably won’t work for another. Sometimes it can feel like aspiring writers (or artists, musicians, whatever) are asking, “What do you do that I can emulate so that I can become like you?” This is challenging on a few levels. First, no practices are universal, so I could recommend one thing that has worked for me and you could try it and it would do nothing for you. More broadly, though, it’s a rare artist who wants somebody else to become like them. I’m busy out here being me, please don’t try to compete with that! You do you!
That’s true for a lot of professional paths, however. I was just with a bunch of people who have PhDs in English and we were talking with some grad students. Naturally, the grad students wanted to know from those of us who have been lucky enough to end up with tenure-track jobs how they, too, could get tenure-track jobs. Especially these days, there is no advice to answer that question. (I got my job through the luck of timing and where I happened to be living. Had my job come up a year earlier or a year later, I would not have landed it. And my job’s not even in the field I got my PhD in! Many of us at the event had similar stories — almost none of us had taken a “normal” route to employment. For each of us, we landed where we did because we were open to possibilities that came our way. That’s the same answer, generally speaking, that most honest folks want to give to the ideas question: Where do you get your ideas? Damned if I know, but I try to remain open to possibilities.)
While many creative people may scoff at the “Where do you get your ideas?” question generally, they are often more open to it when it is about a specific work. Then it becomes a question of process. “What was your process for writing your most recent novel?” is not a question most writers shy away from. But it’s also less useful than most people asking the question might wish. Writer X can tell how they bathed in a hot spring for a month while plotting their novel, then wrote it out in ink they mixed themselves onto the bark of fallen birch trees, but that process would be unlikely to lead the rest of us to write something similar.
The “Where do you get your ideas?” question is so vexing and wonderful because of its generality. We try to avoid it, not wanting to generalize about our processes because that’s where it begins to feel like magic … and magic is unsettling.
Q: “Where do you get your ideas?” A: “Magic!”
Even if we’re the most die-hard of die-hard materialists, it can feel both reductive and banal to try to bottle the lightning of inspiration. (And of course, many folks don’t even like the term inspiration, since it suggests a clichéd Romantic poet sitting under a tree and thinking Deep Thoughts.) But I find the scorned “Where do you get your ideas?” question far more interesting than “What’s your process?”, probably because, for better or (more likely) worse, I don’t have any real sense of having a process. (I hate routines.) For things I write without a set deadline or topic, I chew on ideas for a long time and then when it feels like I absolutely must write it, I do. That doesn’t feel like a process to me; it feels like expectoration.
How might we investigate where we get our ideas — and the implied question, quite important for anyone with a creative bent: Where might we get some more?
I know I’m not the only person who, finishing a successful bit of work, worries that this is the end, there will be nothing more, the well is dry. (I wrote about some of this for Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook ten years ago in a short essay on writer’s block.) It doesn’t matter how much experience I have, how many fallow times I’ve lived through, some part of my self is a habitual doomsayer, certain that all creative ability and impulse is at its end. This is one reason why it’s useful to have some sense of ways to generate new material. It may not lead to anything — indeed, you may need a fallow time to let the soil of your inspiration replenish — but it helps with those times when it feels like all creative spark is gone.
For a lot of people, that can be freewriting. I’ve never gotten much from it, however. I used to teach first-year composition courses and, in the spirit of the great Peter Elbow, taught all sorts of different types of freewriting, but in some ways I’m too fluent a writer for freewriting to lead to much. Generating words is easy for me. Generating words that will lead to anything is much harder, and typically requires thought more than it requires blathering onto a blank page. Many other people are quite the opposite, which is one reason why I liked teaching freewriting, even if it didn’t work well for me. Students, especially if they’ve had difficult or highly structured writing instruction, often struggle to get anything onto the page, editing too much in their heads, rejecting everything before it ever has the chance to succeed. For them, and for people who tend to be too self-critical, freewriting can be a godsend if they practice it regularly.
Often, we will say that the way to get ideas is to help yourself become open to receiving ideas. If there is such a thing as a creative person, that person is different from other people in seeing life and the world as always offering the potential of its own representation. Life and the world are material for our reimagining of the life and the world.
I like Susan Perry’s book Writing in Flow, not because the pop-psych concept of “flow” is especially useful, or because Perry’s conclusions are better than others, but because Perry interviewed all sorts of writers about how they bring ideas into fruition. The book shows the diversity of approaches while also helping readers think about the question at hand: not just how do you get ideas, but how do you stay with ideas, letting them find their way.
I like the ancient, Heraclitean and/or Buddhist idea of flow: everything is change, stasis is illusion. Meditation teaches us that ideas arise and fall, drifting, floating, appearing, disappearing. I strive not to cling to ideas, because there is a paradoxical effect whereby trying hard to hold the One Great Idea causes it to evaporate, and if I’m left with anything at all, it’s just a hollow shell of what I’d hoped so hard the idea might become. Ideas are air. The key is to keep breathing, not hold your breath.
One example I often come back to is my story “Where’s the Rest of Me?” (in Blood: Stories), which resulted from literally years of work researching and drafting an academic book that never came to be. It was going to be a book about Ronald Reagan and 1980s action movies, and I spent countless hours researching Reagan’s life and presidency. I could never make the whole cohere, despite writing chapters of it and developing a full book proposal. But then I happened to watch the documentary Going Clear, about Scientology, and suddenly Ronald Reagan and L. Ron Hubbard were melding in my mind. A childhood obsession with 1940s and 1950s science fiction brought all sorts of random ideas back into my brain. Suddenly, I had a story — one I had not sought out, one that almost wrote itself. The book died, the story lived, getting reprinted in a best-of-the-year collection and gaining praise in reviews of my book. Other stories have come from similar experiences of the project I thought I was working on falling apart and the work on it then leading to something utterly different, but “Where’s the Rest of Me?” is the most obvious example in my own writing life.
Q: “Where do you get your ideas?” A: “From other ideas that failed.”
The most important thing here is trust of yourself. Or, allow yourself to trust that the work may not be what you think it is. Allowing the flow of life, reading, thinking, reflecting. Allowing the fallow times. Being ready. I have a pact with myself that I will try not to get anxious when for days, weeks, even months at a time I have no fiction to write, it feels like I will never write anything creative again — I will not try to get anxious because once the unconscious seeds start sprouting, I will set everything else aside that I can and give them the attention they call for. This has been the best deal I’ve made with myself. Not to try to force my schedule-hating self into a schedule, but to be ready and willing to cancel dates, miss deadlines, let the ktichen turn to a terrible mess if and when a new story asserts itself, especially after a fairly long dry spell.
Once again, we’ve turned away from ideas as ideas and more toward process, structure, development. That’s the magic, whether the magic Alan Moore means or a more metaphorical sort of magic. The good stuff. The reason we take pleasure in creative work.
Inspiration, from the Latin inspirare, to blow or breathe into. The breath of spirit, of living. That’s where ideas come from.
Breathe in. Live.
Q: “Where do you get your ideas?” A: “From breathing.”
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Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash
Photo of Alan Moore by Mitch Jenkins
