For writers, ideas are the primal matter. No ideas, no stories. But sometimes trying to figure out how to find your best ideas is like catching butterflies. They flit in; they flit out. If we aren’t paying attention, sometimes we don’t even recognize that they’ve been there. Even when we do stop short in awe of their beauty, we risk damaging them if we get too excited and try to capture them too quickly or too forcefully.
Not all ideas are this fragile, of course. There are different kinds of ideas. There are solid, logical, left-brain ideas. These are the ones we feel in control of. We come up with them. We guide them. We get to decide whether our protagonists take Road A or Road B because we are the ones who have also decided what’s going to be at the end of those roads.
But other ideas—the butterfly ideas—are more ephemeral, spontaneous, right-brain ideas. These are the “inspired” ideas, the ones gifted to us from beyond our own conscious understanding. These are the ideas that happen when our subconscious takes over. The story writes us rather than us writing the story.
Although both types of ideas are crucial to the process of wrangling a story into cohesion and resonance, I’d argue the right-brain ideas are really the true substance. Inspiration, after all, is every writer’s absinthe. But inspiration cannot be forced. Indeed, inspiration can’t even really be caught. When the left brain tries to take over a new idea and tame it, the idea may either die in captivity or fade to a pale version of itself. As Natalie Goldberg laments at one point in Wild Mind:
Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg (affiliate link)
[The] problem was that I froze the inspiration into an idea before I even began to actually write.
Subconscious ideation can only be observed, appreciated, and recorded carefully. We must each find our own balance for making sure our ideas don’t leave the preserve, while still letting them run wild on the page. But this can be easier said than done, since all creative spontaneity and no conscious control doesn’t lend itself very well to the true craftsmanship of writing.
6 Ways to Find Your Best Ideas—Before You Start Writing Them
In the 20+ years I’ve been writing, I have noted that my best process is never one that hurries ideas. It lets the ideas come to me—as gifts, surprises. And then it waits, patiently, to see if another idea will come and perhaps yet another.
A motto that has served me well is:
One idea does not a story make.
The rationale behind this is that if I try to sit down and write an entire story based on just one idea (or perhaps even a small handful of ideas), I inevitably end up filling in most of the story with left-brain ideas. The stories can be still be pretty good this way, but in my view neither the process nor the product is the same as the stories with a higher ratio of right-brain ideas.
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