Strange Times for Ideas

We've all heard the stories of creative geniuses bolting upright in the middle of the night and dashing off to their workspace, a brilliant new idea sitting fully-formed in their minds.  We hear these stories and laugh, sure they're a sign of some sort of creative insanity, and certain that they don't/won't/can't happen for us.

The weird thing is, once you embrace creativity as part of your life, you will find yourself having ideas -- perhaps not brilliant, but at least good -- at the weirdest of times.  For me personally, I've had really good ideas come to me in the shower, in the car driving down the road, at the mall looking at store signs, while stopped at a stoplight and seeing some birds on a telephone wire, and at the supermarket.  Compared to where some people get their ideas, these locales are tame.

But the fact remains that for a creative person, ideas will come at the oddest of times, and seemingly without warning.  Why is it a writer can sit at a computer keyboard for four hours, typing through scene by scene, page by page, word by word, and have only mediocre ideas, yet when she gets up and starts planting flowers in her garden (something which, at least in Indiana and with several inches of snow on the ground, isn't likely to happen) she suddenly realizes that her protagonist's wife's mother is really a spy for a foreign government, and suddenly the whole novel makes sense?  Why do such incredible revelations come to us when they seem least likely to occur?

It happens for a number of reasons:

• Our minds are relaxed.  Good ideas are the result of intense play, yet when we sit down to get something done on a project, our brains are dealing in intense work.  This "work" mindset lets us move forward on a project, but it hinders the sort of free-spirited free association our minds need to make the sort of outlandish connections we call "genius."
• We get some distance from our work.  I'd often heard of not being able to see the forest for the trees, but I didn't really understand what it meant until I first saw one of my teachers writing a word on the chalkboard and spelling it wrong -- a simple, everyday word.  Why?  He was too close to it: the simple act of standing so close to the board was causing him to see each letter as its own individual unit, and he couldn't get the sense of the word, or even see where he was in the word in relation to the other letters.  We do the same when we work diligently on some task: the more we work on it, the closer we get to it, the harder it is to see the overall picture.  We need some space to get a sense of the whole.
• We're not watching our subconscious.  We all know people (or may be one ourselves) who will sing in the shower at the top of their lungs, yet when they're in public and people are watching, they clam up, opening their lips only a hair's breadth.  For many people, the simple act of being watched hinders their ability to do a thing freely, without inhibitions or self-consciousness.  I get this when I play organ at church: a prelude that goes smoothly in practice comes crashing to the ground during service, and all because I know people are watching and listening.  The same goes for our subconscious -- when we're working in the garden, we're not watching our subconscious play around with creative plot twists, so it's more likely to get some really good ideas, and let a couple of them leak out to our conscious minds.  

 
Of course, this is only the first part of the problem.  Once we start getting these great ideas at weird times, there then comes the problem of remembering them long enough to actually use them in our work.  I offer here an example:

One of my recent good ideas (which turned into my handbell piece Sarabande) came to me as I was dashing out the door to go teach at school.  I had waited till the last minute, and as I was petting Marcus (my feline creative consultant) goodbye, I had this sudden idea for a handbell melody.  I had no time to put it on the computer -- I didn't even have time to jot anything down on paper.  My solution?  I sang that melody to myself for the entire half-hour drive in to school, and the minute I got there and got sat down at my desk and had a free second, I pulled out a manuscript book and jotted it down.  I knew it was a good idea and had a good chance of becoming a published piece, so that half hour was one of sheer terror that I would forget the tune and it would be gone forever.

At least now, you understand why and how we get our ideas at strange times.  This can, of course, be used to your advantage, if you so choose: if you're having trouble coming up with a creative idea, do something completely uncreative to get some distance and give your subconscious a chance to work unfettered on the problem.

As for how to remember our ideas when they happen at such weird times, the next four regular posts here on The Creative will talk about how we can use technology in our creative life, including how technology can save us when ideas come to us at awkward moments.  Look for the first in that series Sunday.

Until then, here's hoping your good ideas come at convenient times!