Idea Machine
And How To Become One
A funny thing happened while I was procrastinating starting this article. I spent about 30 minutes updating my Shelf Life record keeping because I had been very behind on it. I have a spreadsheet where I capture some information about each article. I had faithfully collected each article’s title but had not added any of the word counts since last year. I went ahead and did that because how can you brag about your word count if you don’t know what it is?
For your information, Shelf Life year 2022 to date contains just over 70,000 words. That’s an entire The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain with a few words left over. Shelf Life to date is now approaching 400,000 words, which is far too many words for anything. That’s somewhat longer than The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (but possibly less enjoyable to read).
At the end of the Shelf Life spreadsheet, after the record of the last article, there are dozens of rows filled with future article titles and topics. When I started Shelf Life I had a list of eighty-some topics to write about and I was worried I would run out. In the process of actually writing Shelf Life over these last 19 months, something really cool happened to me: I became an idea machine.
This transformation is evident in the record-keeping exercise I just described above; during the 30 minutes I was opening old Shelf Life articles, getting the word count, and typing it into the sheet, I came up with four new ideas to add to the list of future topics, and the fourth one was this one, how to make yourself over into an idea machine as I have done. You know what they say: If you can’t rage against the machine, join it.
I’m just kidding, no one says that. While I am on the topic of machines, just briefly, I would like to encourage everyone to check out “The Machine Stops,” a 1909 novelette by EM Forster, which you may read online in PDF form if you click the preceding link. It’s about a society in which everyone sits around isolated in their own homes, communicating with one another through “The Machine,” spending their days having ideas, sharing them with their thousands of acquaintances, and discussing each others’ ideas. Did this guy predict the future or what? Alright, onward.
Many writers in their nascent form have an idea they devote a tremendous amount of time and mental resources to. Like a tree, they start with a seed or a bulb or an acorn or a pinecone—I don’t actually know what trees grow from, like one of those little spikey balls or whatever—and they plant it in the fertile soil of their mind, nurture it obsessively, and eventually—well, maybe—they grow it, over years, into a manuscript.
These are writers who will refer to their idea or their manuscript as “their child,” who guard their idea ferociously against theft—even though it is quite literally impossible to “steal” an idea—and who worry, in their secret hearts, that they will never have another idea, or at least not another idea this good.
Truth: Perhaps there exist seasoned writers out there who have completed that first manuscript and have gone on to have no more ideas for stories after that, or who have gone on to plant one new tree-seed and start the growing process again with exactly one more thing. I’m not saying these folks definitely do or don’t exist, but I have not met one.
I meet a couple kinds of people: The people who chisel away forever at their one big idea and never finish it because the idea of being done with it frightens them, and the people who have more ideas then they can realistically get around to writing in the next five years.
There are also people who truly have one book in them, meaning, those who want to write their memoir or autobiography or want to write a treatise on their area of expertise, but I am mainly talking about fiction writers.
It seems to me, anecdotally, drawing from the experiences of the many writers I have met and befriended and worked with, that if you can get yourself over the hump of that first manuscript, you’re going to become an idea machine whether you like it or not. You’re going to start having more story ideas, because whether you realize it or not you learn a tremendous amount about the storytelling you are capable of when you write that first complete manuscript, even if your first manuscript is terrible. And this is true even if it is a novella, a novelette, or a short story: Once you have completed a manuscript, you now have empirical evidence that you can complete a manuscript. That’s very freeing, in my experience.
Before I dive in, a couple of suggested related readings. Quite a while ago in Shelf Life I wrote about the value of ideas in Getting the Right Idea About Ideas. That’s still a great resource on how to distance yourself from the misconception that ideas are rare or valuable (they’re not and they’re not). Last September, I discussed generating ideas to work on, capturing and curating ideas when you have them, and putting yourself into idea-generation mode in Bearer of Bad Muse. Finally, if you have an idea but you’re not sure how to turn that into a fully fleshed-out story, check out Idea to Manuscript Part I and Idea to Manuscript Part II.
Here follows the meat of this article, tips for turning yourself into an idea machine. I guess the above section is all potatoes.
Find Your Thinking Place, or Make One
I can’t say if this is universally true but this works really well for me. Perhaps there are people who can think creatively anywhere, and conversely perhaps there are those who can’t think creatively anywhere (this last bit I doubt). For me, though, there are several places and situations—a small handful of them—that kick my creative brain into overdrive.
My most prolific thinking spot is the shower. I don’t know if it’s because the shower is the place I am least likely to be able to write down my thoughts, or if it’s the white noise of the shower, or if it’s that I clean myself pretty mechanically—too mechanically, in fact, the other day I slopped a handful of face cleanser on my hair—but I know that I can reasonably expect to turn the creative part of my brain on when I get in the shower.
It did not start out this way; I had to cultivate it. What happened was I would get overwhelmed with work or writing or get stuck on something and I’d decide to step away from it for a few minutes, and the perfect thing to do when I’m stepping away from something like that is to jump in the shower: I need to do it once a day anyway, and it’s calming. But showering blanks my mind out so I’d find myself just drafting text in my mind while I showered, solving all kinds of writing problems.
After a while I realized, “hey, I can usually solve a writing problem if I work on it while I’m in the shower so what if I make a point to solve writing problems every time I’m in the shower?” Now, if I’m low on ideas or if I have a concept that doesn’t want to flesh out into an idea or I need to plan a Shelf Life article or I need to figure out how a story ends, I make sure I’m thinking about that when I take a shower and my brain runs with it. I have trained my brain to do this.
I can’t tell you where your own thinking place might be, or where a likely spot to cultivate one is, but any place or activity where your brain gets quiet is a possibility. Maybe it’s when you’re walking your dog (this is another one for me) or commuting to work or chopping vegetables. If you know your mind is going to wander anyway, set it on the path you want it to go down and let it wander.
Welcome Bad Ideas
Allow yourself the freedom to have bad ideas and write them down. Embrace the possibility of failure. This is a trick I learned in my career, and I mean on the business side not on the editing side. Some companies punish failure. Meaning, if they launch a product or service or initiative and it doesn’t work out, the employee who was responsible for it—or the employee that person throws under the bus—is blamed.
You know you’re in one of these environments when nobody wants to authorize anything new and they have “this is how we’ve always done it” on repeat. Environments like that develop stagnancy because if you’re not open to the risk of failure then you can’t grow and develop, either. Failure is necessary for growth. If the you’re afraid to put forth and champion new ideas because the cost of failure is too high, you stick with what’s familiar and safe, and inertia gets you.
By the way, when you stand still you don’t keep your relative position; others pass you by. If you’re not growing, you’re dying.
This is true of writing as well. If you’re afraid to commit to trying out new ideas—or even writing them down—because they might not be good ideas, here’s what happens:
First, you lose good ideas (because inevitably something you dismiss out of hand as “bad” could have ended up in a good final product).
You also miss out on the ideas that would have been bad stories on their own but that could have been grafted on to another idea to form an incredible idea.
You discourage your mind from straying into idea-generation mode, because when you dismiss an idea it comes up with as “bad” or “stupid” you are punishing your brain doing for the activity you want to encourage.
Finally, you reinforce your internalized fear of failure and invite stagnation.
Stagnation is like mildew: If you don’t have it, don’t let it get a foothold. If you do have it, first get rid of it, and then don’t let it get a foothold. Okay? It’s like a tribble. I don’t know what that is but I know you don’t want to let one get on the Death Star or whatever.
What if you run with a bad idea and write a short story, or a novella, or even start working on or complete a novel and it’s bad? Well, so what if you do? Everybody writes bad stuff sometimes. Everybody works an idea sometimes and then realizes it’s not going to pan out the way they thought or just doesn’t have legs. That’s part of learning how to use ideas.
Iterate
Don’t be a player hater, be an iterator. Sorry that’s a real deep cut. Only Suitland High School alumni classes of 1997 through 2001 will get that one.
Has this ever happened to you? You have an idea and it’s great and you run with it, you get enthusiastic about it, you work on it, and then—all the new ideas you come up with for awhile feel like they’re “spun off” or “too similar” to that first idea? Sometimes my mind goes hop-skip-jumping from lily pad to lily pad and everywhere I touch down the idea is just one step removed from the last one. I have like three things recently that involve the dating app Tinder.
This is not a bad thing. It’s not a bad thing if you have a bunch of ideas that are all similar, or are all variations on a theme. This is fine. You’re iterating. This is what you want. This is just a natural result of being excited about an idea. Your brain is like, “heck yeah, dopamine!” and starts making more of the same type of thing to try to get more dopamine.
This next paragraph belongs to both the “Iterate” section and to the previous “Welcome Bad Ideas” section: You don’t have to use every idea you come up with. Louder for the folks in the back:
You don’t have to use every idea you come up with.
This belief comes from the misconception I addressed way back in ye olde starte of today’s article that ideas are precious, that they’re rare and valuable commodities. If you believe that, you might feel like every idea you have deserves to be written, or would be wasted if not written. Good news! Ideas are not valuable, so it’s totally fine to throw them away.
By throw them away what I actually mean is keep them in your idea bucket—a concept I went over in Bearer of Bad Muse—and never work on them. I don’t mean literally throw them away. I mean just stick them in a folder never to be used until one day suddenly, out of nowhere, your mind twists that one Tetris block in exactly the right way and everything falls into place. This usually happens in the shower. Your mileage may vary.
Put Your Anxieties to Work
If there’s one thing I can trust my brain to always be working on, it’s anxiety. If you are a person who experiences anxiety rarely, or experiences anxiety all the time, or anywhere in between, then this brief section is for you. Most anxiety comes from imagining situations that stress you out. What if my car breaks down? What if I get a flat tire? What if I get a blowout? What if a city bus merges into me and crushes my compact into a 2021 Toyota Rubik's Cube?
If this sounds like your brain, put it to work for you. What your brain is doing is imagining fictional situations and all their eventualities. That is exactly what you want your brain doing if you are a fiction writer. Harness the awesome power of your brain’s ability to envision terrifying situations and write some horror. Harness your existential dread of the planet earth ending and write some science fiction. Harness your chronic belief that your life will never improve in any way and write an upbeat beach read where someone’s life actually improves in every way. Your brain is primed for these what-if thought exercises.
For instance, I have a lot of short stories about society getting even worse than it is now. Do I have one about the world’s worst billionaire buying up my favorite social media platform? Well, no. I’m not EM Forster, okay? I can’t see the future.
Hey, guess what? Thursday’s article follows the same thread of this article to its logical end: What do you do when you have just too many ideas and you can’t figure out where to start? As an idea machine, this situation is my frequent bugaboo but, fortunately, I have the answer, so if you liked this one then come back for that one.
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