People ask me sometimes where my ideas come from. If you’ve ever had a conversation with me, Reader, you probably know where some of them come from. They come from conversations and thinking out loud, where we start out by talking about something, like climate change, or outer space, or inequality, or running, or toothpaste, or whatever big or not big thing comes up in conversation, and suddenly something that is said out loud sparks something in my brain that is connected to random other thing, and I shout: “Wait, wait, I have to write this down!”
If we’re talking on the phone, and I’m doing something else, like driving or cooking dinner, I’ll ask you to text me the idea, so that I can write it down later.
Other times, the conversations are smaller, quieter conversations that I have with myself, where I’m thinking about the world, or something I just read or listened to, and it connects with something else I’ve been thinking about, and I quietly say to myself, “Hmmmm, let me get a pen.”
Sometimes, Reader, I have a very good idea that I write down, and never get to, and then I have the uncanny moment of finding it out in the world a year or so later, written and developed by someone else. This actually happens, and it’s weird. And it reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez, in his book Of Love and Other Demons, where the bishop (I think it’s a bishop) says that ideas are like angels, all floating around up there in the ether, waiting for someone to notice them (I’m paraphrasing, but it’s a great line, Reader. And an excellent book. Go read it.).
And I think ideas work that way. They’re just floating around up there in the ether, circling, waiting. And sometimes you spot one, and you jot it down.
But that’s not enough. Because as any idea jotter knows, sometimes an idea goes sour. The angel loses its wings. And you’re stuck with just some words on a page.
For me, that’s the hard part. It’s keeping the idea alive after it’s pinned to page. But the more I write, and the longer I write, I find that I usually know within a few pages if the idea I captured is going to live or not. And then it’s a matter of persistence, and writing it out until it’s done. That part isn’t easy either, and sometimes the idea needs some CPR a few times along the way, but I reach a point where an idea is the effort to keep it alive.
I’m an inveterate draft starter. I’ll grab an idea from the ether, write anywhere between two paragraphs to five pages, and then that’s it. I don’t like it, I don’t like the idea or the writing or the direction, and I just file it away, and start a new one. And usually the second or third or fourth will be the thing that I write.
But I’ve been thinking about those old drafts lately, too. Because I do save them, in case there is something there after all.
Because some ideas need prodding and coaxing. Some need CPR. And all need persistence. Some ideas need a lot of polishing to make them work.
But other times, like yesterday, I look up there at the ideas floating around in the ether, and I see one that’s particularly shiny, particularly electric, and before I know it, it, BAM! It hits me.
Like lightning.
Electric idea angels. I’m here for it!