Ideopathic Ideation
Every so often, someone will ask me where I get my ideas. These are people who either never imagined having to put words on a page, themselves—or thought about it briefly and quickly abandoned the idea for something more reasonable. Before I was a writer, I was a visual artist of various kinds: painter, photographer, and illustrator. For a while, I even dabbled in conceptual art (which meant I didn’t really have to make any art).
I only mention this because I was beset by the same question—as an artist—that hounds me as a writer. Folks who don’t pursue artistic careers seem mystified by the process. That high-fallutin’ title, at the top of the page is a falsely impressive way of side-stepping a question none of us “in the trade” have been able to successfully answer.
Certainly, we would like to know the source of our ideas—if only to revisit the place when we are bereft of ideas. The truth is we don’t know. The ancients, such as Homer and Virgil, believed that the gods somehow sang through them—that a poet was just a conduit for ideas that come from the gods. We no longer believe that (partly because our inflated sense of self-worth wants to claim all the credit for our ideas).
But, in our heart-of-hearts, we know it’s not true.
We have no idea from whence our ideas spring. We just know that, when we’re working, they just appear. Hence the title (its big words mean creativity just manifests itself, spontaneously and without obvious cause). When they do, we welcome the little bits of productive clues that let us go on about our business—and we don’t invest much time in analyzing the process. I suspect we’re afraid too much curiosity might scare away whatever it is that brings them.
We fear that the muses are just goose-deities that happen to lay golden eggs, and are well aware of the risks involved in cutting them open.
The essay, below, addresses a related—but slightly different—question about the creative process. It is part of a memoirish (i.e., “self-indulgent”) book, The Digressions of Dr Sanscravat: Gastronomical Ramblings & Other Diversions.
The Bus
Early one morning—lying in that half-dreaming, half-waking state where one can imagine things and also watch oneself imagining them—I saw myself driving to a reading I was to give. Writers often do them, partly to inform the public about the literary life, partly to promote the sales of their work, but mostly because writers get to listen to the sound of their own voices blathering along, largely uninterrupted for an hour or so.
Twain described such events as “dignified insurrections.” In my dream, an insurrection was to be fomented before a group of students from some previously unknown school. One of the things writers get to indulge, when giving these talks, is a bit of self-aggrandizing about the writerly life. Of course it’s all self-aggrandizing but, specifically, we get to prattle on about the sources of our so-called “inspiration,” and creative urges in general. It’s all a load of equine excrescence, but we can’t help ourselves.
Anyway, I was driving along, attempting, without much luck, to pry open a few imaginary oysters in search of pearls of wisdom to include in my opening remarks. Soon, without realizing it—as is so often the case in dreams—I arrived at my destination. I reconnoitered the scene, looking for a good parking spot—one that offered a quick escape in the event that the proceedings turn surly.
Just outside, I saw a bus.
A little bus.
You know what I’m talking about, right? I don’t have to resort to a bunch of un-PC remarks about the sort of students who ride those little buses, do I? There are words that insensitive people use to describe them—words that I would never use—words that distinguish them, rightly or wrongly, from all the “normal” children who ride bigger buses.
It was a little bus.
Having already leapt to all the inappropriate conclusions about the audience I was about to address, an entirely different notion popped into my head. It was how my potential audience was strangely à propos, after all.
My realization, upon seeing the little bus, was that I, and the riders of the little bus, had so much in common. I don’t mean to say that writing doesn’t require some degree of intellectual acumen. One does need to know how to string words together in some sort of coherent order, and have some degree of familiarity with the rules of grammar, for example. However, intellectual considerations only apply to the “how” of the writing process.
They don’t address the “why.”
That’s the locus of our obvious shared feeble-mindedness. How, otherwise, can we explain the fact that we’re willing to spend years of our lives poking away at a keyboard (in my case, with just two fingers), for practically no money?
Non-writers often ask, in supposed innocence, “How do writers do it? Where do the ideas come from? How can they face, not just one blank page, but reams of blank paper?” I used to answer, in equally bogus modesty, that writing is easy: just be willing to sit in one place, for a very long time, without being tempted to find something more useful to do.
After seeing that little bus, I know the real answer.
Being a writer is only possible for those who never ask, “why do it?”—or, at least, be sufficiently addle-pated to disregard the obvious answer. Everyone knows Einstein’s definition of insanity, but we continue because it’s also the definition of our chosen career.
Editor’s Note: This is another of Dr Sanscravat’s contributions to the long tradition of writers kvetching about the writing life, in writing, for other writers. Considering all of their complaints, why is that none of them give it up and just get a real job?
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