The Closet of Lurking Ideas

Many years ago, at a science fiction convention, I opened my mouth to ask Poul Anderson an insightful question about his use of mythic themes in his works. But as I was very young and nervous, and talking to a world-famous author, what came out was, "Where do you get your ideas?"

I was mortified. I already knew that this was the question you absolutely do not ask authors. Some of them will answer you as graciously as Poul Anderson answered me. Some will not.

But why is it such a bad question? Isn't it a normal, wanting to know the answer? After all, not everyone is an author. Not everyone snatches ideas out of the air and makes them into story. And because stories are powerful, it's important for us to understand the process of storytelling. Stories help us understand our world and our place within it: they are metaphors for the deepest truths of our hearts. Stories teach us how to be human. As a result, there is a bit of magic attached to the role of storyteller. Storytellers create transformational magic.

There is a lot of curiosity about what makes storytellers, or writers, different. Since the bottom line of writing starts with an idea or ideas, that's what people want to understand. Where does it come from? How are writers different from me?

The real answer is -- we aren't different. Our ideas come from the same place every idea comes from; interaction between our minds and the world.

The reason this is important is because it means that anyone can access this part of themselves. Anyone can create. Authors may be more experienced, or less inhibited, in taking their ideas and forging them into narrative, but they're not inherently more blessed with ideas than anyone else. They simply have the key to their closet of their unconscious minds, and have a good storage system for those ideas that make their way into story.

Each individual, writer or not, gets ideas every day from multiple places. A rainy day may inspire someone who is not a writer to create a wind-proof umbrella, and may inspire a writer to create a story involving rain. A third person may simply say, "I'll have to remember to bring my raincoat next time." None of these is the wrong answer.

What a writer does do differently is to take that rain, and the impulse to write a story about rain, and to connect that rain to something emotionally or archetypally universal. From there they come up with a story structure through which they can express those ideas. The first part may be done either consciously or unconsciously, but the second part is a product of experience, practice, and often training. In other words, what a writer does differently is to write. It sounds like a tautology, but it's not, because the process of writing creates a writer. The transformational magic occurs when the writer accepts that they are making themselves vulnerable by not only accepting the idea, but by matching it with a piece of themselves: their story. And if they've done it right, that story will connect to the experience of others.

A lot of the further work of writing isn't the creative sort: it may range from churning out uninspired words, revising, and trying to get ideas to flow when they're being recalcitrant. That's when that key to the storage closet is so useful. It's where ideas are stored when they're not in use, where they are filed for the future. Perhaps writers are more able to recognize ideas when they come; but perhaps not, too. (That person making the wind-proof umbrella might recognize their idea equally as fast.)

My uncle was a writer of children's books in the 1950's, and worked a lot with children. I remember him having told me that children are natural poets, and that it's only when they're taught what poetry is "supposed to" be like that they stopped expressing poetry. That's pretty much what I think about writing; we're all storytellers, even if we're not all authors. We all have an internal narrative, and we all explain our lives to ourselves in some way. Those ideas aren't unique to a person who has learned to craft words on paper; they are universal and human.

Ideas are human coin, and we all spend them So, where do we get our ideas? From the imagination; from being human; and from the need to create which is inextricable from our common natures.