Ideas are important. There are two conceptions we seem to have of what ideas are, what ideas do: The first is that the world runs on ideas, that new ideas fundamentally shift the world, and that just coming up with one really good idea is enough to move continents. The second conception is that ideas are nothing, that hard work and sometimes luck is what makes the world move. And, though it may seem obvious, rarely do we approach the slightly more nuanced truth of the matter: Ideas are important, but useless without the labor to manifest them and the luck to make that labor pay off.
But, okay: Let’s take the labor part for granted. That is not to say that the labor isn’t valuable – to the contrary, without the work nothing can happen – but only to say that it can be measured in a way that idea creation cannot. As an example, I’ve already committed to writing every day this month, so we can figure that I’m prepared to spend the hour or so it takes every day to put around 500 words together, take a couple of editing passes at them, and schedule them to upload here the next day. However, the time it takes to find a core idea to write those 500 words is really an unknown quantity: Sometimes an idea will occur to me naturally over the course of the day and I’ll remember that and have it ready to go when I start writing; sometimes I draw a blank and have to hammer at it for hours, maybe take a walk or play some Super Hexagon, both of which I find useful for brainstorming. Sometimes nothing occurs at all, and I have to delay the post, or just try writing words down until something useful emerges. Finding the idea to write a piece around can range from almost no work at all to almost a full day’s work by itself.
That’s not even getting into the difference between an idea and a good idea. A lot of practice, as well, goes into learning how to tell how good an idea is likely to be – the only way to tell for sure is to follow it through and create something out of it, but of course by the time you do that it’s too late to not use the idea any more. Mostly, it’s a sort of projected sense memory, a glimpse into the future, into the piece I might write using the idea and whether, looking at it then, I think it’s an interesting piece which I’m proud of having written and which I believe other people are interested in reading. Every time, before I start writing, I imagine being the man who has written the thing I am thinking of writing, and think about how enthusiastic I am about that idea. I don’t know if that’s how other people do it, but that’s how I do it.
Thus a large part of the process of coming up with an idea is often just discarding ideas that aren’t useful: There’s so much out there that I feel like I have absolutely no new ideas to offer about, where anything I could write on the topic could be improved by replacing it with a link to Wikipedia or some other resource – or, indeed, to some earlier post I’ve already written on the same topic, though when I do (frequently) end up accidentally re-using a topic I usually end up approaching it differently enough to still make for a piece worth writing.
Here’s a topic I’ve touched on before: The similarity of the first idea to the first stroke in a drawing or painting, how these end up unavoidably shaping the final form of the piece no matter how hard we try to rework them. That’s why I think it’s worth taking a bit of extra time to make sure the idea I start from is a worthwhile one, otherwise I am, from the start, creating an inferior version of the piece I could be making. Still, a shape emerges – every time I write I chart a bit of the territory of my mind, and roads start to intersect and show a map. I’m not worried about running out of ideas, since the shape of that terrain keeps changing and expanding: When I cross the same bridge again I find new water running underneath it.
I must know, though, before I ever begin talking, that I have something to say. I don’t want to be one of those who never stops talking but never begins having anything to say.