Every year I get older I think I'm more fucked because I can't "work" the way successful people work. They're extroverts. They tweet five times an hour. They write serial novels in their sleep. They keep notepads, they use ToDo lists, they read "Getting Things Done" and slip into its prescription program like a silk-socked foot in a slipper. Somebody else has a deck of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies they reach for. Someone else snarfs down LD-50 doses of Piracetam and Modafinil (in lieu of cocaine) and go off to sell their Startup to Google for eight figures. AND NONE OF THEM WORK FOR ME! Mind Mapping software, Evernote, meditation, Ginko Biloba, polyphasic sleep, long walks in the woods, Exegesis therapy, eating proteins before carbohydrates, Pomodoro, I've tried it all: creativity techniques and productivity techniques and idea tracking techniques and confidence builders and motivation builders and they're all quackery. Once or twice a year I discover something that, at first, I think is going to change everything. The "Hipster PDA" I transformed into my own version of Eno's Oblique Strategies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies), or my current flirtation with outlining software. I can't keep up with them, though. Using a fixed strategy to either come up with new ideas or keep track of them never works. Something about the method, or the software, or the user interface turns my brain into vanilla pudding. In the long run, there have only been two things that worked. The first is from Ernest Hemmingway: Write Drunk, Edit Sober. The second is being a squirrel-brained idiot who bumps around Hubski and Reddit and Hacker News and Twitter until something clips the jumper cables from the car battery to my brain and I've written 4,000 words without having intended to. I've easily spent several hundred dollars on Moleskine notepads and G3 pens, but whenever an idea occurs to me I've either forgotten I have them, or they aren't nearby. Instead, I have to rely on my memory. I get an idea and realize that I don't know enough about the subject, so I begin to research. Spastically. I once paid $210 for a book, Origin of Life: Chemical Approach that reprints a slew of peer-reviewed papers about abiogenesis. Here's all I've read of it so far: "The question 'what is the origin of life?' cannot be approached without considering the prerequisite question 'what is life?'. While the latter question has always been fundamentally related to philosophical reflections and, accordingly, to historical circumstances, the first question can be probed experimentally." Now, you're going to love this, but the $210 book, bought Brand New from Amazon, was printed upside-down. The cover of the book is upside-down in relation to its inner pages, so you have to flip it over to start reading. And there are many other books on my shelf that I bought in fugues of research frenzy but that I've yet to read. I didn't return it because I couldn't be bothered (it's still readable) and, I dunno, maybe a collector's item someday. When I get into a Good State I pace up and down and imagine a conversation with a Straight Man, or an interview with a TV journalist, or someone like Benjamin Franklin transported forward in time, where I have to explain how something works. You want to know what that's like? Read this: http://www.scq.ubc.ca/a-dialogue-with-sarah-aged-3-in-which-.../ Now imagine that happening in your head with an imaginary daughter, or imaginary Ben Franklin wanting to know how antibiotics work, a dozen times a day. Ben Franklin: "What was that pill you just swallowed?" Me: "That was Amoxycillin, which is what we call an antibiotic and probably the biggest contributor to human health and longevity since Jenner's vaccine for Smallpox." Ben Franklin: "How does it work?" Me: "Well we figured out that most sickness was caused by germs, which are organisms so small you can't see them with the naked eye, much like if you imagined a kind of flea that was capable of infesting a regular flea. They're so small that their 'skin' is a very fragile membrane that we call peptidoglycan, and the penicillin family of drugs--which Amoxycillin is a member of--interferes with the production of it. When the bacteria try to divide--a process called b... b..." (I grope around for my phone, or do a Cmd-T to open a new browser tab, and search for 'bacteria cell dividi...' AH! Binary Fission!) This happens inside my head all the time, and the same imaginary conversations play-out many times over the course of months or years, prompted by some outside stimulus or another. Sometimes, as I play the scene back, I can answer my own self-asked questions with Google, while in others I am sufficiently excited enough that I rush to Amazon and buy a $200 book, only to have forgotten the imaginary dialog by the time it's delivered. Inbetween those unproductive and semi-forgotten crackles, I occasionally churn something out worth publishing. Perhaps, with discipline and a Method (tm), I can be more productive, but I either haven't the willpower or all those methods sabotage the art. And that's why, every year I get older, I think I'm more fucked than the year before.
Great post. When I'm trying to write, which is about as creative as I get, I tend to go biking with some music. Or get in my car and take a bunch of random turns. Sometimes I start with a quote and try to spin my own interpretation into a poem.
@humanodon mentioned walking and you mentioned biking, and I believe they call that "creative pause". Two years ago I was in a job interview and, because it was for a computer programming position, they asked about my approach to solving difficult problems, such as debugging weird problems. So I said something, like, "well sometimes I can't figure out the solution right away, so I think about it and then the next morning, while I'm taking a shower, it just comes to me." Oh brother. Now I did get the job, and it was a pretty laid-back place, but one of the guys from the interview made sure to whip that one out as a jest now and then. "Wanna take a shower on that?" "Did you think of that in the shower?" Thinking isn't a linear algorithm that runs on a single thread, it's a menagerie of algorithms running on separate threads and some of them are running in the background. You said that you sometimes start with a quote and spin it into your own interpretation, and now I want to gush about how I take the settings and characters of some book, movie or TV show and assemble my own story around it. Serial TV shows, for example, are like warehouses of characters and settings that you come to be organically familiar with, since those shows span months and years of viewing and development, and therefore can take for granted. It's like working with Lego bricks in your head. After you've hashed out the fundamentals, you replace the plastic bricks with something of your own, something with personal flesh and originality. Maybe this catapults you into another cycle of reinvention, but that's for the best. And, like you, I also like to get lost in my car. That's how I discovered a town named after a football player who had never been to that same town in his life. Jim Thorpe. I was somewhere in Pennsylvania and said to myself, "erm... THAT WAY!" I bought a wind-chime there.
I got lost in my car the other weekend and found a wonderful place called Drumright, Oklahoma, a tiny town that I'd never heard of. It had graffiti murals, a fort, and an old-style main street/storefront combo. I loved it. It was Sunday and everything was closed, or I would have bought a wind-chime.
Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, is a really pretty town. It used to be a stomping ground of the Molly Maguires, and is nestled in the cleavage of some magnificent geology--forgive the metaphors. And when I'm in Oklahoma, I'm going to make a point of visiting Drumright. It sounds like something you want to visit on the Sunday before a national Monday-holiday :)
Oh man, research. I intentionally left that out of the post, but I'm glad you touched on it. For me, there have been ecstatic moments during research when everything connects and suddenly it's clear what must be written. Until it's on paper and it's shit. It seems like you're a productive guy. When you say you're fucked, does that mean it's a problem that needs to be fixed or is it just the way things are?
"Until it's on paper and it's shit." If you mean what I think you mean--that everything clicks and angels start singing and your iPod just started playing the BEST FUCKING SONG EVAR in your headphones, but when you try to write it all down it just evaporates and it feels like your pen's ink is made from cardboard--I know that. I didn't get to go to college, and perhaps as a consequence I fear that I've missed all the important things about what I like to study and write about. There's this class, y'see, where the professor goes "oh by the way, this is the equation you have to memorize, and which is never seen outside these walls, and after that you'll be safe to pontificate about anything without fear of embarrassing criticism." So when I research I put some more personal "oomph" into it to compensate. When I say I'm fucked, I don't know if it's a problem that needs to be fixed or if it's the way things are. That's the nature of the fucked-ness. I think it might be on the verge of a coping mechanism, and that makes me kick like a mule: Oh-Well-I'm-Screwed-Might-As-Well-Get-On-Social-Security. Urrggg!! shivers Do Not Want. I've noticed that other people believe they lack an important function--such as socialization, expressing themselves to a lover, treating subordinates as human, taking initiative, whatever--and although it's often kinda right, it's the attention that helps. Most of us are not cast in the molds of fictional stereotypes with immutable "critical flaws," so we can address and repair our problems. So when I say I'm fucked, and then say I don't know exactly how, you're watching someone trying to figure out how. I don't want to believe that this is "just the way things are." To properly answer the question, I don't think "just the way things are" is anything more than a holiday, but the fix for the problem is going to be personal. You asked how people generate ideas and keep track of them, and it's that second half which, I posit, is most important. It's why I keep trying different things. By accident, I think I've discovered that the persistent act of trying different techniques is what keeps things circulating in my head, and therefore my long term memory. My "technique" is to keep trying techniques :-)
I like that. Yeah, I think that you're right in that keeping track of the ideas is the important part of the question. One thing I've been noticing recently is that older ideas are kind of percolating through to stuff I've been producing lately. I'll write something and then get the feeling I've experienced it before. Then, I'll go digging and find that what I've written is kind of an expansion or a different point of view of something I've worked on previously. Honestly, your technique is something that I paid a whole lot of money to learn in university. Speaking only from my own experience, there is no magic equation. I am shocked at the people I know from college who have gone on to be successful and respected. Shit, even revered. My good friend who was in the creative writing program with me started shacking up with a girl who reminded me so much of a cow in looks and mannerisms, not to mention intellect. I wake up one day a few years back, to find that she's involved with a big project involving the arts and the internet and co-founded by an influential magazine. She's done interviews and been given awards and a bunch of other shit that makes people who don't know her think she's hip, cool and smart. My point is, part of the right to pontificate is perception. Case in point: you've got a whole website dedicated to your words and writing credits. Me? I'm just some dude on the internet. And yes, that's exactly what I meant, about angels and the flaccid pen. During a discussion about this very thing with my advisor in university, he told me that sometimes you have a great idea for a poem and that's all it is. You get an idea of what the product will be like and have a vague idea of how to accomplish it and it just turns into nothing. Sometimes the thing to do, according to him, is to let the idea stay there on the edge, while you begin writing about it. That is, realizing things on paper while holding a thought at arm's length might often work better.
What a fantastic comment. I wish I had any kind of creative talent, music, writing, or drawing. I find myself having all these ideas and all these images going around my head, they are mostly an escape mechanism I use when I'm feeling extremely anxious (especially when I'm surrounded by many people) or when I'm seriously considering a trip to the 69th pole of the Golden Gate Bridge, but I just don't know how to put them in words, much less in a drawing. I guess these things just come naturally to people like you, I mean, your post was beautifully written after all. Whenever I do manage to write something, I scrap it after a few pages, and if I look back at the stuff I've saved I cannot help but cringe at how badly written or how cliched it is. I'm not a native English speaker, but if I try to write in Spanish, I begin to worry about the accents and other grammatical complications of the language until I just cannot write any longer. I wonder how did you feel in you mid twenties. I share the same perplexity towards the "extrovert kind". I keep reading (especially on reddit) and people keep telling me how making connections is the most important thing you'll ever do in your life. Well, tough luck, because I'm literally incapable of talking to people I don't know. At some point during my previous job I realized it takes around 6 months before I even feel comfortable talking to someone new. But I digress. I have a good job, even though I dropped out of college, but it seems every day I am reminded of how much I hate corporate environments. Working in software development, am I the only one convinced that all these metrics, all these methodologies, all these meetings, just kill creativity? Living everyday life, am I the only who is incapable of feeling any connection with anybody else? And yet, I see people my age, already starting their own businesses, a few of them getting their first kick starters, all of them already finishing their degrees... I would ask my self what am I missing but I'm well aware that I either just can't function socially or I'm simply too lazy and uninterested in the rest of the world. Depression and anxiety might just be a pathetic excuse. But I digress. Again. As proof of my incredibly shitty writing skills, you are probably wondering what the hell am I babbling about since I keep switching subjects every two seconds.
I'm replying to this just after @humanodon, so I'll begin by pointing over there and agreeing with it. Buy or borrow the DVD for Pixar's The Incredibles and watch the special features. They show storyboard sketches for an early idea they had for the beginning of the movie, and it is cringe-worthy. It's not that bad, but it's cliche--a "psst! These guys are actually superheroes, but noone at their backyard barbecue really know it!" opening. They toyed with it for a while, then dumped the idea in favor of what was evolving to be the movie we'd see in the cinema. Early efforts almost always suck, and the best artists are the ones who abhor their early work, but some pieces will suck slightly less than other pieces. As you read more good fiction, look at more good art, listen to more good music, you start to develop a taste that helps you identify which pieces of your early work are less crap than other pieces. They may still suck, but now you cannibalize them and try again with something else. Again, most of it sucks, but some pieces suck less than others. Maybe an idea or two will survive more than two or three generations, but the more you do it the more nuggets you get that have been bred for survival. After a while (which can be decades--you might have heard of the "10,000 hour" rule) a lot of your stuff is better than crap. You should watch another movie (a documentary, actually), and one that I didn't see until last night when I couldn't sleep: Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Near the end, the 3-star Michelin reviewed sushi chef laments that he doesn't have the nose of his favorite french chef. Sense of smell is paramount, especially when you're serving raw fish, and while Jiro considers his nose to be very good, he thinks it doesn't hold a candle to Joel Robuchon. We simultaneously learn two things: the ability to sense what's good is instrumental in being able to produce good things, and someone who thinks his senses are bollocks compared to another guy can still be a freekin' 3-star Michelin chef. Jiro, like you and I, is intensely self-critical. He sees his success as the product of constant refinement, getting a little bit less crap each year through practice, experimentation, dedication and inspiration. As for introverts living in a world of extroverts, it is a source of constant stress. Most of the population are extroverts, which I think is partially why contacts and networking are so important. Extroverts tend to think in terms of people, introverts tend to think in terms of things. An extrovert is more likely to pick someone he knows, an introvert is more likely to scrutinize a CV and study portfolios. Ah well. Don't compare yourself to anyone of any age, especially if they're doing things that you don't really want to do. Take some time to really think about what you want and what you think you want. Kickstarters and businesses might be what you want, or you might only think that's what you want. Give them a shot if you want to be sure, but if you find that you're not enjoying it, then it's not what you really want. Expertise and creativity take years to develop, and all endeavors that lead to success take daily, habitual effort, and you won't find the energy to keep that up for years and years unless you really like doing it.
I'm gonna jump in here. Creative talent needs nurture. It doesn't spring forth from one's head, fully formed. The cringe is good. Don't get used to it, look at it and try to use it to make the next one better. Worry is not good. Have you tried having a drink or something and just letting your mind wander when you sit down to write? Minds should wander, it's what they do.