how to come up with ideas #4
Pay attention as you go through life and collect all the curiosities the tides of fortune deposit into your path. Then just put them in your work when the rightsized hole gapes.
I did this while writing The Virtual Book. I suppose it shows, the hodgepodge it is. It’s not the easiest thing to pull off. But when you do, it gives dimension to your work. Instead of giving your audience a line to trace from start to end, you put in their hands a knot to pick at, an object to turn over and examine.
A master of embedding meaning in enigma is David Lynch. His work is rife with bizarre and baffling elements that entreat contemplation but promise no easy translation. And as he has said in numerous interviews and written in his books, he doesn’t come up with his ideas, he receives them. Lost Highway, his neo-noir film from 1997, begins with a cryptic message murmured into the protagonist’s intercom. Dick Laurent is dead. This message came to Lynch not from his subconscious mind but from his own intercom. When this happened to Lynch, he went to the window to try to see the speaker but he struggled to get a view of the front of his house from inside. So determined was he to recreate this scenario in film that he bought a house and reconfigured the indoors, just so he could graft this strange personal memory onto a film that he in turn developed out of horrified fascination with the O.J. Simpson case, another event that he was compelled to translate into art.
Lynch is no doubt an eccentric. But this process of
curating and appropriating from real lifehow to live in the moment #2
As writing is selection, so is storytelling
like curation. From an infinite stream of events and evergrowing crowds of people, the writer plucks out a chosen few to construct their narrative. This is the case also at the elemental level of words and sentences. Of all the action and detail available for depiction in a scene, the writer says very little. Good literature distills from life the beautiful and the resonant normally diluted in a sea of mundanity.
Reading good books is practice in looking through this lens at your own life. Practice in noticing the beauty that hides in plain sight. Even more so if you try writing about it as well. You need nothing but experience of living and the words in your head. Cast your attention out into the world like a fishing line and wait until you notice something. A tug from the subconscious. Something stirring your curiosity. What is it? The sound of the breeze rustling in the leaves overhead? The colors lit up in the sunlight? The oddly pleasing way the shapes of things arrange themselves?
Art is a means for capturing these moments. Take a picture, draw the scene, put it in words. What you produce is an observation not of objective reality but of subjective experience. Like the jarring of a firefly, you’ve taken from the vastness a little treasure so that the magic of that moment might endure a little longer. Something for the future, for yourself and for sharing with others. But you’re also doing something now. You’re enjoying being alive.
is so common among artists I dare call it standard practice. Kurt Vonnegut writes in the prologue to Breakfast of Champions that the book “is a sidewalk strewn with trash” that resulted from his attempt to empty his mind “of all the junk in there.” Paul Harding, whose debut novel Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, describes the positive version of this in his interview with David Perell:
I’ll go for months on end where to all appearances I’m napping on the couch…but I’m always reading, I’ve got books all over the place and I’m reading a little bit of this, a little bit of that…and I’ll just spend time letting the language, the books, and the music that I’m [consuming]…become coextensive….and I just let it kind of all go into the pot.
He opens up his mind and fills it,
absorbing in preparation to producehow to work
(Originally posted on okjuan.medium.com.)
When I do work and I get stuck I leave my desk and wander down the hallway. I meander and look out the window as I think lightly about the problem. I weave through the complications crowding my thoughts until I’ve sorted them out. Then I return to my desk and refocus on the screen.
Focus narrows the mind. It zooms you into the fine details and blurs everything else out. But sometimes you need to relax your attention and widen your view to notice the missing piece, or the jagged edge that would snag your approach. You need to loosen up and make space to have new thoughts and interact with them.
Focus guzzles energy like an SUV. But accessing your energy reserves isn’t as easy as pressing the gas pedal. Hour by hour your energy levels rise and fall. If you tune into your body it tells you how much energy is available.
For long I’ve known my energy dips after I eat but still I’d push myself to be productive. Now I embrace it as a natural part of my day and let myself relax for a few minutes. I lay on the couch and play chess on my phone and soon I feel fresh and ready to resume work. Taking those 15 minutes to repose lifts my mood. Listening and adapting to my internal state makes work pleasant and less draining. It makes it sustainable.
Sometimes you need more than a few minutes. Energy levels can dip for days. This could mean you need to rest or do something to replenish your energy. Rest isn’t the only activity that reenergizes.
When you lose steam you can spend time absorbing instead of producing. Moments of low energy are a chance to listen and think passively. When you relax, your creativity stirs and feeds on what your senses are gathering. When you can’t be diligent, be curious. Let yourself follow a thread and soon you’ll be moving.
Watch movies, go for walks, listen to music, spend time in the sun, talk with friends, flip through photos, clean the house. Open yourself and allow thoughts to trickle in and out. Replenish the energy and ideas you’ll use to produce next chance you get. You can delay rest, but you can’t skip it. Dues you don’t pay today you pay twice tomorrow.
. He lets the ideas “percolate and simmer together” – as he said in another interview – and then, when his internal milieu shifts him into motion, he “rides the updraft.”
I let everything I’m interested in at the moment I’m writing into the book…If it all comes from my mind and I’m interested in all of it, it is going to be like a stand of Aspen trees…Aspen trees look like they’re different trees, but actually they all have the same root system, it’s actually one organism…I love having a bunch of stuff that’s just floating around in a manuscript for years and I’m like, I have no idea how you belong but I think you do.
That last bit is important. The choice to include an element is not arbitrary. It relies on intuition to determine where an element belongs, even if how or why it belongs remains a mystery.
I don’t contend this approach is a necessary one, but it’s one I like. It produces art that feels organic, spontaneous, unpredictable, alive. It favors intuition and its riches over the reducibility of rational cohesion. It’s a method for developing in different directions at once. Sometimes you get lost but that can be a good thing. I love art of this kind for the same reason I love jazz. So many interesting things are happening all the time.