✍️ Six Reasons Why You’ll Never Run Out of Ideas as a Writer
or, A Deeper Reflection on The Idea Paradox
“Where do you get your ideas?”
As we’ve talked about before, many writers are none too happy to answer that particular question. Neil Gaiman has done so cheerfully on the outside, but you can just tell how dead it makes him inside, answering that question over and over again while trying to keep some semblance of his sanity by, well, making shit up. “From the Idea of the Month Club,” he would say, among other things.
Some ideas are so twisted that we ask fearfully where they come from. Who’s the most twisted writer you can think of? Maybe Chuck Palahniuk springs to mind. You have all heard of Fight Club. That’s not even Palahniuk at his most twisted. Some of you will have said Bret Easton Ellis. American Psycho was so twisted that it was briefly banned in Canada. (I unwittingly smuggled it over the border, and it subsequently got passed around like Flowers in the Attic did in grade school.)
But Bret Easton Ellis gets “horrified and upset” reading disturbing things, never mind writing them. (Or so he said.) And Chuck Palahniuk uses twisted ideas only as a ploy to explore deeper emotions – emotions that men aren’t always comfortable exploring. Hey, you’re not going to get men’s attention through a Hallmark movie. (I can tell you that firsthand.)
Love or hate the books listed above, there’s no denying they’re memorable. Which is exactly the point. If you’ve never read Fight Club or watched the movie, you still know that the number one rule of Fight Club is, Don’t talk about Fight Club.
We writers all want ideas that stick. We may not want to write the next American Psycho, but there are other ideas that have stuck over the centuries. Pride and Prejudice. The Green Mile. Bridget Jones’ Diary...
How do you find your idea?
The Idea Paradox
The thing about ideas is, we’re afraid we’re going to run out. It’s a Writerly Fear we’ve all felt. In truth, there is an Idea Paradox.
On the one hand, we believe that if an idea is “good”, we’ll remember it. That’s a lie, as we’ve already found out. If we want to keep a good idea, we have to write it down.
On the other hand, we believe that ideas are rare. That too is a lie. That’s what I want to talk about today.
So, how can an idea both be too important to leave to memory AND not rare whatsoever?
I love great ideas. I’ve had the germs of several novels, and I feel a rush with every one of them. Most were abandoned early or not even poked at for a wide variety of reasons. I finished one. My current WIP, Novel 5, has been a bumpy ride so far, as I’ve intimated before, but it’s well underway. I still feel the rush.
Will it be the greatest idea ever told? Likely not (though secretly I hope so...) Is it as great an idea as the premises of Fight Club and American Psycho? Yes, I think so – albeit a very different story.
See, as much as I love great ideas, what actually counts is the execution of those ideas. Fight Club by Dr. Seuss, for example, would be a very different book. (“Would you fight him in a box? Would you fight him with a fox? I do not like it, Durden Ty. I do not like to fight with lye.”) Depending on who you believe, there are only one or four or seven different types of stories. Yet all the millions of novels and multi-millions of short stories, poems, non-fiction articles, and so on are unique. How can this be?
It’s another part of The Idea Paradox. Even a unique idea is not unique. However, an un-unique idea can be made into something unique.
An un-unique idea can be made into something unique.
The Great Gatsby doesn’t tell a particularly imaginative story, for example. Jilted, poor lover tries to win back the love of his life from rich, upper-class bore. Goes to all lengths and dies in the process. In fact, when it was first published, many took Gatsby to be a dime-store thriller romance. It’s the execution that really makes the difference between paperback pulp and timeless classic.
So, following that logic, it just doesn’t matter what your idea is, does it? You can start writing about a Tiddlywinks game gone horribly wrong, and create a masterpiece?
Yes and no.
The purpose of a good idea is to keep you, the writer, interested. In turn, it’s your job to keep the reader interested. But here’s the catch. You need that little rush like I described above – and that rush has to last the years it will take you to finish your book. If you lose interest in the story, it’s likely that your reader will, too, because your writing will become flat and literally uninspired.
So finding the right idea for you is important. The good news is, there are a million ideas out there.
Six Reasons Why You’ll Never Run Out of Ideas
Creativity is an endless well. True, sometimes the well needs replenishing. But it always replenishes (unless something else is at work). And if you ever get fearful like I do on occasion that maybe, just maybe, it won’t replenish this time, reflect on these six reasons why it won’t. And, by all means, come up with your own!
The creative mind never rests. Or, at least, it doesn’t rest for long. Most if not all writerly types have what-ifs running through their minds like a ticker tape. All you have to do is reach out and grab one that inspires you...
You learn something new every day. Literally. We read news or hear gossip or watch a movie that show us things we’ve never seen before. All of these new things trigger creative ideas. That’s why travel can be such a creativity boost – you’re learning something new every minute, not just every day.
We’re always thinking. I don’t mean creatively, necessarily. I mean, working out the problem of how to clean out the clog in the sink drain or what’s the best time to go to the grocery store. These somewhat mundane lines of thinking often spark the creative mind.
The Internet is your oyster. Let’s assume for a second that your brain is dry and brittle, barren of any creative seed. Time to surf the web! Whether it’s a true-crime podcast or a twisted website or a YouTube video with a samurai, a snake, and a stir fry, something out there will tweak with you.
You can join the Idea of the Month Club. I think Neil Gaiman too easily dismissed this idea. That’s why I created it myself here. Visit every month, every day, every hour – you’ll get a new idea every time!
Read in your genre. The simple act of reading what you like to write will give you ideas a-plenty. Today’s thriller writers didn’t get there without reading yesterday’s bestsellers. Not only does it help you learn the parameters of your genre, it also helps spark new ideas to do it differently.
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? (Fill in your own blanks here...)
I’m probably not telling you anything new here. But even though we know something, sometimes we feel the opposite. It’s worth speaking these words out loud so that we can assuage our fears about never having a good idea again, and get on with writing the ideas we do have.
Key Takeaways: Creativity is an endless well. You’ll never run out of ideas because we are simply too creative and are exposed to too many new things every day. And we don’t need to waste time searching for the “perfect” idea, just the idea that will spark a rush in us. After all, an un-unique idea can be made into something unique. The purpose of a good idea is to keep you, the writer, interested. We just need to find the idea that’s right for us.
Over to You: Are You Afraid of Running Out of Ideas?
Do you worry your creative mind will dry up? If so, how do you combat that? Do you feel pressure to find “the perfect idea”? Let us know in the comments below!
I’ll leave you with a video by one writer who tried Jane Austen’s writing routine as a way to spark her own creativity. Scroll down below.
Until next time... keep writing with wild abandon!
~Graham
email me if you get lost.
So as you know, our house relies on well water. (Not for drinking, because I’m picky.) This past year was very dry—hardly any snow, and not enough rain in the spring. So we’ve been supplementing our well with lake water, from the pump that supplies lake water to the camp next door. During the dry times, when we’ve got the water hose snaking across the front yard, I can wash “like a regular person”—laundry, dishes, bodies, whenever! Well and storage tank low? No worries! I just fill them up from the lake.
As I was reading your newsletter today, I recognized that that’s what happens for me, too. Is my creative well low? I fill it from the lake.
Just saying it this way helps me see that although I can write and revise at any time of the year (and have done it often), this spring/summer/autumn time, when it’s easy for me to be outdoors, is important to my creative self even if I don’t get words onto the page.
A living metaphor. Thanks!
This piece helped me understand something about myself Graham, and I really appreciate that. Let me explain: in the first year after I retired, I wrote a novel (hell, I serialized it here on Substack). But when I went back to revise it, I realized that I didn’t really want to work on it anymore. I had grown bored with it. I still think the core of it was a good idea, but to keep working on it would have required that I keep my head in the work world (it was largely a workplace novel, about surveillance within corporations), and I no longer wanted my head in the work world. I was, a year after retiring and a year after writing it out of my system, ready to move on.