I used to think of myself as someone who needed to let their creative ideas marinate for a long time. I wouldn’t actually generate anything, I’d just sit with them. And in my mind, that counted as progress. I’d know when they were ready for my full attention. I’d feel it.
What a cerebral and romantic notion that is. It would make for a really great pull quote in an interview, wouldn’t it?
It’s also an absolute load of shit.
“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”
- Pablo Picasso
One of the reasons “Where do you get your ideas?” is such a dull question is that the answer is so boring and unsexy. Ideas are cheap. That’s the simple part. You know where to find them? By sitting down and doing the work.
There. I told you it wasn’t sexy. But that’s the big secret.
I spent a couple of years convinced that I had run out of things to say. I wanted to make something… anything… but the tank seemed empty. I came up with a number of explanations and excuses for that, but in the end, the only way out of that debilitating creative block… was to start creating.
I’m not trying to be glib. Let me explain…
I mentioned in my previous post that I have a bunch of spiral notebooks where I document anything that resonates with me — a premise, a character, a single line of dialogue, or just an image I find striking. I don’t overthink it. If it grabs my attention, it goes in a notebook.
So I took one off the shelf, flipped to a random page, saw a little doodle I’d made in one of the margins, and started writing about it in an almost stream-of-consciousness fashion.
“But, wait!” I can hear some of you saying, “You had something to start with, that doesn’t count!”
Yeah, but guess what? So do you. You may not have your own version of those notebooks, but ANYTHING can be a jumping-off point. Just google “creative prompt” and you’ll have hundreds and hundreds of pages of results to sort through. And don’t treat them like you’re mining for gold, just pick one. It really, really doesn’t matter. Here’s why…
I may have begun with that drawing in my notebook, but as I was writing, the whole thing eventually evolved into something completely different. It became the treatment for a short film and there’s nothing resembling the image I started from anywhere in there. And that sort of thing happens a lot.
The Strange Case of Lucy Chandler is about a young woman with schizophrenia who has to navigate her delusions in order to solve her dad’s murder. Do you know how that got started? It was originally a Doctor Who-esque procedural about a plucky college student that solves crimes with some help from the ghost of a 19th-century mystery author.
Yeah. And maybe that would have been pretty cool, but part of that original premise was that the main character’s family believed she had some sort of mental illness. As I was writing those scenes, I realized I was way more interested and invested in that story and how those types of characters are often portrayed in media.
Inspiration found me, but only because I was doing the work. I would never have figured out the show I actually wanted to make if I’d just been passively walking around waiting for that first idea to “marinate”.
It’s a lesson I had to learn all over again with this most recent block. I hadn’t run out of ideas, I’d just let that muscle atrophy. Once I started working it again, a steady stream of ideas followed.
Here’s another case in point — one of the reasons I was hesitant to start this newsletter was that I was afraid I’d run out of things to write about in a couple of weeks. As it turns out, the more posts I publish, the longer the list of potential topics grows.
In fact, just typing up those last few paragraphs about my notebooks made me realize I could probably do an entire post about idea collection systems. So there you go. That just got added to the list.
It might seem counterintuitive, but here’s the bottom line…
I don’t start creating once I have an idea. I have ideas once I start creating.
Take care, friends. Talk to you soon.