Churning Out Ideas
I’ve been pondering this since last week. I can write til the cows come home. Write, write, write. It’s not a problem for me. Ideas are. If I could generate ideas as much as I could write, I’d have 30 novels by now. Okay, maybe not 30, but you get the idea. And I doubt many of them would be good.
Ideas are a very slow process for me. I have to think of a question, or a problem, then let it soak. Sometimes I have to bask in a problem for a week or more and suddenly an idea appears. We could call this an incubation period. The problem is if you add incubation periods for every idea, then a decent collection of ideas takes months to evolve.
I’ve only found one thing to speed this process up, and that’s talking about my ideas and idea problems with other people. Picking their brain, and finding out what they think about your problem. You get a kind of point counterpoint going, a dialogue. That dialogue helps you to clarify and refine your ideas. The limitation is that there’s not always somebody around for you to share your ideas with. Another might be that you don’t want to share your ideas with anyone.
Do you have tricks for getting ideas faster?
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January 23rd, 2007 at 1:43 am
Most anything having to do with water. Shower, washing dishes, watering the yard, swimming, anything. After about an hour, I’ll have an idea. I got the idea for my first novel at my kids’ swimming lesson back in July 2005. It just so happened I was reading a book that gave me the idea, but I blame the water for it.
January 23rd, 2007 at 3:30 pm
I can not help. Ideas I seem to have an abundence (sp) of. All I do is start writing with a basic idea it starts to evolve…No idea where they come from or how I get them, they just come.
Though I do love talking about ideas. I find that really makes things explode and go wild (at least for me).
January 23rd, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Interesting comments. I can’t help be amused, that any discussion of ideas often turns into “Where do ideas come from?” I suppose that’s the root question, and if nobody really knows where they come from then it’s hard to ask how we might get ideas faster. :)
Maybe it’s just my process, but I don’t seem to get ideas from writing itself. It’s the other way around for me, I get ideas and I write from those. Simply sitting down and writing only produces a bunch of text devoid of ideas for me. I need to have a rich vein of source material to work with. For that reason I’ve never really understood “Writing all the bad ideas out.” That implies that you have an endless supply of ideas, some good, some bad.
Sounds like a good problem to have!