ideas

Very often, what should be the easiest aspect of this writing thing is the most difficult. The moment you tell someone that you write novels they will ask you where you get your ideas. This will 100% happen every single time, and you will have to resign yourself to people demanding to know where you get your ideas as if they suspect there’s an Idea Store somewhere making drone deliveries.

The assumption is that ideas are plentiful and easy. The reality is, we’ve all sat in front of a blinking cursor or blank page and had zero ideas. Zero. It drives some of us to drink. Because the reality is ideas are cheap, and ideas are everywhere, but you have to combine your idea with that mystical energy (for once I’m not referring to whiskey, although it helps) that gets the creative energies focused on that idea. Without that thrilling sense of excitement, even perfectly good story ideas will sit there, inert and mocking.

The good news is, coming up with ideas to write about is easy enough. One of the easiest ways is plenty effective: Just answer a question.

Forty Two

There are two ways to go about this.

The first is to ask a question and then provide the answer. It’s important to note that we’re not looking for actual answers—in other words it’s okay to ask a question that has an answer but to ignore that answer in favor of something more fanciful, impossible, or insane. For example, maybe you wonder why UPS trucks are brown. There’s a real-world answer to that question, but fuck it: Maybe they’re brown because the wormhole technology they use to shift freight around the world reacts badly with other colors.

The second way to approach this is to come up with an answer and then wonder what the question is. If the answer is putting birthday cake into the dryer, figuring out the problem that solves is gonna be fun. It might not lead you to a coherent story, but it’ll get the juices flowing and for the moment that’s all we care about.

Don’t get chained to reality and the actual answers that exist. Plenty of stories have ignored easily observable reality in favor of crazy bullshit. The crazy bullshit is always more entertaining. I should know; at this point the local cops arrest me for public intoxication mainly for the stories I tell to explain my nudity.

You’ve probably heard the line about comedy being tragedy plus time. Time is a pretty powerful force in this universe. It makes cool things uncool; I wore a baseball hat every day of my life from the age of ten to the age of twenty-five, and now photos from that era are embarrassing, to say the least. Time also renders every experience you’ve ever had into grist for your stories, but you have to wait it out, because it’s not just time that turns your worst moments into interesting stories to entertain others. It also requires distance.

Not geographical distance (though, yes, that sometimes helps) but mental and emotional distance. Those usually come automatically with time, but not always; I think we’ve all hung onto a grudge or a painful memory for far too long, cherishing that drama and suffering long past its sell-by date. There are a lot of good reasons to work through past traumas and put them behind you (that is, get some distance from them) but the best reason of all is that you can’t write about them effectively until you do.

Ideas = Suffering

It’s no secret that a lot of writers re-purpose their low times into stories; that’s pretty much how this works. The trick is waiting long enough. You might think you’re ready to turn your heartbreak and depression into a darkly hilarious novel, but if you haven’t gained enough time and distance from it, chances are all you’ll produce is therapy notes.

How can you know if you’re ready? One sign is when you no longer seek to punish the other parties in your writing. Another is when you’re ready to mock yourself and see your own role in your troubles instead of insisting you’re the hero of every story. Another is when you frankly can no longer remember why you were so worked up in the first place.

The good news is, once you get there, you’re golden. You can mine the fossilized remains of your tragedy and render them into a combustible fuel for your writing.

Just remember: Change the names. Always change the names.

I read somewhere long ago—so to be clear, this isn’t my idea, even if I can’t remember where I got it—that the best way to deal with a great idea is to immediately try to forget it. Don’t write down notes, don’t spend the next six hours in a frenzy of enthusiastic research or writing. Put it out of your mind.

The theory is, if it’s that rare and wonderful thing known as a good idea, it will come back to you. It will keep bobbing to the surface until you can’t ignore it any more. And only the ideas that you resolutely cannot ignore should be developed and worked on. If the idea just sinks under the mental waves, it was probably not a strong swimmer to begin with.

Can confirm: This works a charm.

If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free

My memory is a terrible thing. I routinely forget things like my own name, or why I’m walking pantsless along the highway carrying a small pig. My childhood is a vague and gray place, with most of the details of my life forgotten. I once told my wife in all seriousness that my Mother was Lutheran, which amused Mom to no end.

So forgetting things on purpose is anxiety-producing for me, and I have an urge to preserve every thought I’ve ever had on paper, just in case it’s good. But forgetting works, because most of my ideas are terrible. Most of your ideas are also terrible. Forget them. You won’t ever miss them. The few fragile good ideas you generate? in my experience yes, they will come back.

Forgetting ideas not only stops you from devoting hours of precious time to half-baked concepts while your more developed novels and stories languish, it also means you will simply have fewer ideas to worry over and thus more time to devote to the ones that come back to you. And trust me, even if a halfway decent idea never comes back to you, you’re not gonna miss it. Because you forgot about it. Jeesh, try to keep up.

So: Next time you wake up in the middle of the night with an idea throbbing in your head, forget it and go back to bad. Future You will thank you.

It’s been repeated endlessly that writers read—that an essential part of the creative process is taking in someone else’s work and ideas. If you stay locked in an echo chamber where your creative process is just your own work and your own reactions to it, your creative process winds up like that scene in Being John Malkovich when John Malkovich dives into himself:

https://youtu.be/lIpev8JXJHQ?t=48s

So, yes, read—read a lot. but you know what? Also go for other forms of art and other modes of creative expression, because some of the best ideas I’ve ever had occurred to me when I was mesmerized or slightly bored at a play or concert.

Mama Mia!

My wife, The Duchess, likes a certain kind of cheesy pop-culture show that I myself find kind of terrible. At home this manifests as sessions spent watching America’s Got Talent while I drink myself into an early grave. Other times it means she drags me to Broadway musicals like Mama Mia! or other atrocities. Or sometimes my one friend who still goes to concerts (I mean, I’m old, and concerts are loud and the booze is super expensive and you can’t sit, amiright?) drags me to a show. And inevitably at these entertainments I find my mind wandering. And I can enter a sort of trance: Someone else’s (admittedly awful) ideas being poured in, and me unable to do anything but stand there and experience everything. It tends to be a creative tonic.

For example, I got some of the basic plot for the third Avery Cates book, The Eternal Prison while being forced to watch a Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas. And I had a breakthrough on an unsold novel currently with my agent when I was enduring the aforementioned horrors of Mama Mia!.

This works in part because I’m out of my comfort zone and forced to exist in a way I’m not used to. And it works because the ideas I’m exposed to are foreign and kind of irritating, not something I naturally find compelling. And it works because it’s a few hours when I can’t do anything else. I can’t read, or write, or watch something, or fiddle with my phone. It’s a little like an isolation chamber. An isolation chamber in which ABBA songs are pumped endlessly, sure, but still.

Freelance Writing and Fiction Writing are two different beasts in many (most) ways, but they do share one thing in common aside from not paying nearly what they’re both worth: They both require you to be an Idea Machine.

We’ve discussed previously here how little value, in reality, a simple unadorned idea has in the sphere of writing. Ideas are cheap and plentiful, like widgets, and no one particularly cares that you have one—it’s only what you do with that idea that matters. For example, earlier today I had an idea for a post about the Idea Olympics, and until I started writing this post it wasn’t worth squat. Now it’s not worth much, but since I’ve shaped it into this post it’s worth something, so you see the magic trick involved.

The thing about all kinds of professional writing is this: You have to generate ideas. A lot of ideas.

Do We Need to Specify Good Ideas?

My ratio of sold, published novels to novels written is pretty low, because about 80% of my ideas are shit. I don’t know they’re shit until I write them, sadly. Because this ratio is so low, part of being a novelist is a constant stream of ideas that you then turn into a constant stream of books. Now, your definition of constant will vary. Some folks are more deliberate in their approach, and some folks, by dint of high sales, good reviews, and reputation can pick and choose which ideas to work on, because whatever they wind up producing will get published. For me, it’s all about finding that new idea that gets me excited and can sell to a publisher, which isn’t always easy.

Freelance is even more exhausting: As much as you’re producing content for people, you’re also expected to pitch ideas on a constant basis. The key to any freelance career, in fact, is the constant, steady pitching of ideas to the people who have the budget to buy ideas.

Either way, if you can’t come up with ideas on a steady basis, you’re not going to do great. So you should start training yourself for the Idea Olympics right now: Force yourself to come up with ideas, then shape those ideas into pitches, into queries, into synopses and other useful documents. The better you get at flexing those idea-generation muscles, the better your writing career will go. The trick to this is not to worry about bad ideas. Bad ideas will come. Embrace them, learn to identify them, and move on.

Or, if you’re me, spend years working on the bad ones, then drink very, very heavily.