On Ideas and Creativity
A few years ago, I watched a television interview with Dean Koontz, and naturally, one of the first questions asked was “Where do you come up with your ideas?” As an aspiring writer, my ears suddenly perked up as I waited for the answer. Here was an author with at least a dozen books on the market, and he was about to reveal his secret behind something that had plagued me for years. I was convinced that Dean Koontz himself was about to tell me something that would change my life and put me on the path to becoming the most successful author in history.
Thinking back on that day, I don’t remember exactly what his answer was; I only remember feeling extremely disappointed. His answer was an incoherent mess that raised more questions than it answered.
But that’s kind of the nature of ideas, isn’t it? Ideas are vague, intangible constructs of the mind, born out of experience and thought, and until you decide to do something with an idea, it has neither substance nor longevity.
The key to what I am trying to say here is that we don’t need to fully understand where ideas come from in order to generate the kind of ideas that make good stories. If Mr. Koontz had gone on for half an hour about where his ideas came from, I might have felt a little better about the writing process, but I probably wouldn’t have been any closer to coming up with an idea for my next story.
So how do we generate these award-winning ideas?
Easy. Just start writing!
“It can’t be that simple!” you shout. “What am I supposed to write about if I don’t have any ideas to start with?”
One of the beautiful things that I have discovered about writing is that it always seems to be a pathway to discovery. The process of writing forces you to think more deeply than usual, and you’ll discover as you write that even the worst ideas will often trigger a line of thought that leads you towards some of the best ideas you’ve ever had. This is why writing is so often used as a means of therapy. Writing helps you think through issues, problems, and even ideas, and it can often lead you towards amazing discoveries.
One of the things that kept me from writing for so many years was the mistaken notion that brilliant ideas were a prerequisite for putting pen to paper. I was so afraid of writing something stupid that I hardly wrote anything at all, and in so doing, I missed out on one of the most important aspects of discipline–the old adage that practice makes perfect.
I once heard that every songwriter has a thousand bad songs to get out of his system before he starts writing songs that sell, and while this may be a bit of an exaggeration, it certainly contains a profound element of truth. Very rarely will your first, second, or even third story sell. But you’ll discover that as you start to put stories on paper, even if they’re bad stories, you will almost always come away from the experience with new ideas that never would have come to you if you hadn’t just started writing.
One of the reasons for this, I believe, is that as you write, you begin to find yourself taking a closer look at the world around you. You start paying closer attention to how people talk and how they interact with others. You start to wonder what other people are like when they’re by themselves, in the comfort of seclusion. You notice your environment more, and your senses become more acute. You slowly train yourself to pay more attention to what’s going on around you, and you soon find that the problem is no longer coming up with ideas. Your new problem is finding enough time to flesh out all the ideas that start flooding in.
You’ve probably heard someone say before that creativity is a muscle that must be exercised, and even if we accept this on an academic level, I think that deep down, part of us refuses to believe this. We think that creativity is just something that some people are born with, but while it’s true that some people have it a little easier than others, creativity really is something that can be learned. It may sound strange and counter-intuitive, but one of the keys to creativity is practice. Doing creative things strains your creative muscles and ultimately results in growth.
So just write. Forget about writing well for now, and just write. How are you going to get those 1,000 bad stories out of your system if you don’t start now? (Don’t worry, it won’t really take 1,000 bad stories before you start to find yourself!)
Write! Write! Write! Write stories! Keep journals! Write every day! If it’s really what you want to do, then why aren’t you doing it?
~C. Milton Campbell