how to come up with ideas #4
Pay attention as you go through life and collect all the oddities 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 expands your work in dimension. Instead of giving your audience a line to trace from start to point to point to end, you entangle them in a web of ideas and draw their attention to the meaningful ways they come into contact. Several lines of thought intersect in an intricate nexus then split off in tangential directions each worth pursuing. That’s how it is in reality anyhow.
David Lynch’s enigmatic Lost Highway begins with a cryptic message murmured into the protagonist’s intercom. Dick Laurent is dead. This message came to Lynch not from the depths of his subconscious mind but from his own intercom. Puzzled, Lynch went to the window to try to get a look at the speaker but he struggled to get a view of the front of his house from inside. For the film, Lynch bought a house and reconfigured the inside to reenact this whole scenario. He plucked this strange moment from his personal experience and grafted it onto a film inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial, another event that he was compelled to translate into art.
Lynch is no doubt an eccentric but
curated appropriation 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.
seems to be a common practice among artists. Paul Harding, whose debut novel Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, tells in this interview that he likes to insert into his work the things he is interested in at the time of writing.
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.