IDEAS
Where do ideas come from?
Everyone wants to know the answer to this. Many writers resent the question and answer with a joke and a knowing wink.
They might respond with something like, “Ideas may be found growing on the eastern slope of the world’s tallest ice shelf, but… they can only be plucked by those who climb the cliff naked in sub-zero temperatures, and, even then, only on February 29th during a solar eclipse.”
But even those who respond this way will admit, privately, that they love to hear other writers attempts to answer the question.The generation of ideas has a certain mystery to it, even for highly creative folks. We don’t necessarily know where they come from (and the sarcastic answer is an easy way to mask that ignorance).
Our brain engages in an ongoing stream of consciousness. Our thoughts don’t really come from anywhere (except perhaps from our previous thoughts). Our thought about feeling hungry prompts a thought about lunch, that prompts a thought about a nearby restaurant, that reminds us of Hitchcock’s illustration about suspense (the one about the bomb under the restaurant table) which prompts us to wonder why fertilizer is so often used in home-made explosives, leading to thoughts about the gardening we have been putting off, etc.
No wonder, the question of where our ideas come from in writing is a bit intimidating and, possibly, seems a little hard to pin down.That said, there are a number of techniques that writers use to help them generate ideas. After-all, writers actively look for ideas and rarely (and this is crucial) settle on the first ones they come across.
CREATIVITY
Brainstorming
The first strategy for deliberately generating ideas I was ever taught was brainstorming. I still use it. But there are a set of rules that accompany the technique.Grab a blank piece of paper, or a white board, or a blank sheet of poster paper and begin writing ideas.
It can be helpful to narrow your brainstorming topic to something a bit more manageable (like suspicious characters, crimes committed in a mystery, sci-fi gadgets, and what have you) but sometimes broad topics work as well (story ideas, for example).
Firstly, you mustn’t self-censor. Every idea is valid while brainstorming. The really bad idea that you write down may be just the prompt needed to lead to that really good idea you will ultimately use.
Secondly, quantity is more important than quality. The more ideas you generate, the greater the chance that a truly good idea will be found in the mix. The sad reality is this; for every good idea we come up with, we will have had to discard a truck-load of bad and average ideas. BUT – the average and bad ideas are part of the process – you don’t arrive at the good ideas without having the bad and average ideas along the way.
Thirdly, don’t stop too early. Aim to record between thirty and fifty ideas. Studies have shown that the best ideas tend to show up after the first 25 ideas have been recorded. It’s almost as if the brain needs to warm up to the task of being creative, before we get to the best stuff it can come up with.
What if?
Another preferred strategy is to ask “what if?”What if Nicolai Tesla was an alien? What if all the water in the world suddenly turned into champagne? What if thunder was really the speech of the gods and an eight-year-old girl, living in Mumbai, was the only person in the world who could understand it?Brainstorming “what if” can be a particularly useful exercise.
Transformation
A further strategy that I find really helpful is to take my list of ideas and transform them.
Substitution
Take the parts of an idea and switch them for something else. Replace the wheels on cars with mechanical legs, for example. Or replace a natural lifespan with one determined by a person’s contribution to society. Or replace the vacuum of space with a breathable atmosphere that allows travel between planets on open-decked ships.
Combination
Take different ideas and put them together. Combine that idea for a railway heist with that fantasy or sci-fi setting you were considering. Combine human and jellyfish DNA. Combine the features of a village with a military tank.
Adaptation
Put your idea in a different context. Take that civil war story and set it in the far future… or the distant past. Take that story of gang rivalry and set it in a commercial kitchen.
Addition
Add something to your idea. Give your ordinary human protagonist the ability to read minds… or a superpower.
Elimination
Remove something from the idea. Give your protagonist a disability (one eye, a missing hand, etc.)
Change the purpose or motivation
Invent a weapon that causes cooperation. A fast food outlet that seeks to promote weight loss.Reversal.What would this idea look like if it was reversed. The alien invaders are actually our friends. All the dogs in the world are actually cats made from cat DNA. The heist is actually an attempt to return a stolen painting.
ORIGINALITY
We live in a world saturated by stories. This generation has greater access and exposure to stories than any other in human history. It is possible, now, to have read, listened to, and viewed thousands of stories in a lifetime, where people in the past had no such luxury.
For the writer this is a fantastic resource. Every successful writer will tell you that reading is a major part of their professional development. Writers read, and listen, and watch, to learn new techniques, gather inspiration, and develop their personal sense of style.
But this incredible treasure-house of story that surrounds us has a downside as well.
We are so saturated with story that originality is, perhaps, more difficult to come by for this generation of writers than for any other.
We have so many stories stored in our brains that when we begin thinking of ideas to pursue in our own scripts, we unavoidably dredge up large numbers of ideas we have seen and heard over and over before. In fact, these clichés are likely to be the closest to the surface and most easily accessible of ideas.
For many writers, the problem of ideas isn’t one of how to come up with an idea, but rather how to find something original to say.
For this reason, it is essential to distrust, clear out, and disregard those first thoughts we have when trying to come up with an idea for a story or character in a script. The best ideas are buried just a little deeper. As a result, I am a big fan of these creativity strategies, if only as a technique for pushing deeper and arriving at slightly more creative ideas than I might otherwise have done if I had settled for the first couple of things to cross my mind.
CHOOSING AN IDEA
Once you have your list of ideas, it’s time to choose which one to pursue.
The difference between someone who wants to be a writer and someone who is a writer is, to put it indelicately, “the application of the seat of the trousers to the seat of the chair”. You have to start writing and that means making some choices”.During the “idea-generating stage” no self-censorship is allowed. You want to generate ideas. But once that is done, you want to turn that censor back on and find the idea you want to pursue.
In this a number of factors are important. And sometimes the choice is very personal.
For myself, I try to think about my audience (the kind of person I am writing for). That person may have niche tastes, but I try to keep someone in mind who is representative of the real-world group that I would like my stories to entertain. With that person in mind, I want to pick an idea that would appeal to him/her. If an idea wouldn’t work for my target audience, then it should probably be discarded.
I then look for the most original ideas (those that haven’t already been done a thousand times before) in my list. I definitely want to pick something original. If the idea is a cliché, it absolutely must be removed from my list.
Lastly, I look for the idea that excites me the most. In this case, it is the idea that makes me impatient to get started and looks like it has the capacity to carry its weight all the way to the end.
In the best of all possible worlds, I want to choose a story idea that meets all three of those criteria. More often than not, if I’ve done the hard work of generating a good list to begin with, it’s quite possible to do so.
SUMMARY
So, where do you find ideas?
They are found in your own brain. Many are the sum of the stories you have been exposed to over time. The best and most original ideas are rarely at the surface of your thoughts, though. Ideas, the ideas you can turn into the best scripts you can write, often need to be mined out of the granite of your imagination with a bit of hard work. Hopefully, the strategies we discussed today will be of some use to you.
But ideas aren’t enough.
You need to choose the best ones; and the best ones, generally, are those that will appeal to your target audience, are original in nature, and excite you to get writing.
By Philip Robotham, Copyright 2021.
