If you don't already know the old joke about where writers get their ideas, the standard reaction to the question is "a newsletter from Poughkeepsie."
I've heard of people actually taking the response seriously, like asking for the address. The reason it's an inside joke is because we rarely know where ideas come from. Or rather, we might know, but the process is a such a convolution of inspiration and perspiration that it's often impossible to retrace the steps to origin of the idea.
I once got into a fierce argument with a writer friend who insisted that her ideas (and all the artistic expression that goes into every sentence) came from "outside" of her. She attributed all her inspiration to a muse that existed separately from her, which she merely channeled. That drove me nuts. Frankly, she was an overly artsy-fartsy writer who liked thinking of herself as a mystical artist more than actually writing.
But... every now and then I get hit with an idea I can't trace to anything no matter how hard I try. Writing (I believe) is about doing on a conscious and unconscious level something that we humans are particularly good at all around; pattern identification. It's why we see faces in clouds and why wind in trees sometimes sounds like a moaning person and creeps us out. It's the root of two cornerstones of fiction; metaphor and meaning derived from events that seem meaningless in other light.
When we write, we show readers patterns they're familiar with in situations they wouldn't have expected to feel any kind of connection to. Nobody has the experience of living as a giant ape on Skull Island and falling in love with some skinny white chick from New York, but we all relate to feeling like we belong nowhere, like we just want one person to be nice to us, and that we're the victims of powers beyond our control. The art is in finding the connections between the two. Sometimes those connections are the result of deliberate work, and sometimes they're the result of your subconscious finding the patterns automatically.
As writers, we learn to listen hard to our subconscious pattern-machine.
And sometimes it comes from who-the-hell-knows-where. I'm writing this post because this morning I woke up with my brain screaming this sentence: "If a character in your dream says something and you don't hear him, does he make a sound?"
Wide awake, I'm lying there, staring at the ceiling as my brain goes nuts with this sentence. In seconds, 90% of a story fell together right there. As I got out of bed to start hammering the keys, my two-year old woke up and demanded attention, and the morning was lost. Fortunately, I managed to write down the entire idea, but I can't help but marvel that some part of my brain that I'm barely connected to was cranking away even in my sleep. I don't believe in the mystical Muse, but man, sometimes you've gotta wonder what is going on in your head when you're not paying attention.
I've heard of people actually taking the response seriously, like asking for the address. The reason it's an inside joke is because we rarely know where ideas come from. Or rather, we might know, but the process is a such a convolution of inspiration and perspiration that it's often impossible to retrace the steps to origin of the idea.
I once got into a fierce argument with a writer friend who insisted that her ideas (and all the artistic expression that goes into every sentence) came from "outside" of her. She attributed all her inspiration to a muse that existed separately from her, which she merely channeled. That drove me nuts. Frankly, she was an overly artsy-fartsy writer who liked thinking of herself as a mystical artist more than actually writing.
But... every now and then I get hit with an idea I can't trace to anything no matter how hard I try. Writing (I believe) is about doing on a conscious and unconscious level something that we humans are particularly good at all around; pattern identification. It's why we see faces in clouds and why wind in trees sometimes sounds like a moaning person and creeps us out. It's the root of two cornerstones of fiction; metaphor and meaning derived from events that seem meaningless in other light.
When we write, we show readers patterns they're familiar with in situations they wouldn't have expected to feel any kind of connection to. Nobody has the experience of living as a giant ape on Skull Island and falling in love with some skinny white chick from New York, but we all relate to feeling like we belong nowhere, like we just want one person to be nice to us, and that we're the victims of powers beyond our control. The art is in finding the connections between the two. Sometimes those connections are the result of deliberate work, and sometimes they're the result of your subconscious finding the patterns automatically.
As writers, we learn to listen hard to our subconscious pattern-machine.
And sometimes it comes from who-the-hell-knows-where. I'm writing this post because this morning I woke up with my brain screaming this sentence: "If a character in your dream says something and you don't hear him, does he make a sound?"
Wide awake, I'm lying there, staring at the ceiling as my brain goes nuts with this sentence. In seconds, 90% of a story fell together right there. As I got out of bed to start hammering the keys, my two-year old woke up and demanded attention, and the morning was lost. Fortunately, I managed to write down the entire idea, but I can't help but marvel that some part of my brain that I'm barely connected to was cranking away even in my sleep. I don't believe in the mystical Muse, but man, sometimes you've gotta wonder what is going on in your head when you're not paying attention.
Comments
I'll be damned if I can remember her name now. Doh!
I've definitely been able to solve problems in my dreams, get story ideas from my dreams, and influence my dreams - but I'm still of the school of my dreams are mine and not Juju the Dream God. Or Mrs. Muse. I think I grew out of that in my late teens. :-)