How To Get Ideas

I've had this issue rattling around in my brain this week, coming up in conversation, appearing thematically in my web searches, screaming for attention.. and since this place has sort of turned into my current brain dump location.. well, you get to hear all about it.

When you ask a creative person, any creative person, where they get their ideas from, you are just literally stepping into one of the most trite clichés ever created. No one has an answer; or, at least, no one has a real working answer that they're willing to part with, or that will ever work for anyone other than them. (My answer may be just as useless.)

Every writer has a rehearsed comeback. Harlan Ellison used to tell people that he bought his ideas in bulk from a small shop in Schenectady, NY, and some variation of that is a pretty common response. Neil Gaiman's answers are probably the most honest I've seen. He simply says "No one really knows" and "You get your project ideas from the discarded bits of other projects." Not super useful, but I can respect that as a good faith attempt.

What I've never really found satisfying about any of those answers though is that they all sort of imply that the idea comes first. You're sitting around, minding your own business, and then the Idea Fairy shows up and hits you with the Idea Wand and suddenly there's this great idea in your head and all you have to do now is make the thing, do the work. 

The suggestion, basically, is that if the result isn't happening for you, then either you are imaginatively bereft or you don't want to work. Which is another way of saying, "You aren't a creative type, so go sell insurance for a living and leave this to the artistics."

And worse than that, personally, I've never ever known the creative process to actually work that way. There is no Idea Fairy. If this bold idea just popped in your head all of a sudden, you are most likely just copying something else and not realizing it.

Maybe that means I'm not a creative. That's okay. I'd actually rather solve the thing.

Sherlock Holmes and Solution Pathing

So where do ideas come from, anyway?

I suspect Arthur Conan Doyle got very close to the answer, with the famous Sherlock Holmes line: "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

He meant it as an expression of deduction. Cut away the nonsense, rule out the impossible, narrow your options, reduce the number of paths until the only one left is the solution. 

It's the fundamental principle of problem solving, instantly familiar to anyone who has coded for any length of time. There are thousands of ways to solve any problem, and almost all of them are terrible, and some of them are okay. But there's usually only one way to solve the problem right. Your job as a problem solver is to be patient, and not settle for an almost-right solution when you can do it the right way.

But the thing is, the Holmes maxim isn't just a statement about deduction and logic. It actually covers much more ground than that, and it gets back to this creative idea stuff.

Creative Compression

I used to run a small marketing firm, and many years ago we once landed a logo design job for a regular client. Sometimes these things run super smoothly, other times not so much, and this time it ran about as smoothly as a rusty cheese grater over gravel.

We went through three or four rounds, back and forth between the client, the creative director (me), and the graphic designer, everyone getting more exasperated at each stage. The client simply didn't like their options but couldn't articulate why; the designer was getting tired of being asked to come up with options with minimal workable feedback; I was about to fire both of them, pack a bindle and go become a train hobo or something. It was just a rough scene, one of the most ridiculous professional standoffs I've ever experienced.

It came down to the client being unwilling to pay for more drafts, the designer unwilling to MAKE more drafts, the client and designer not really being willing to talk directly to each other, and it becoming a choice between negotiating out some sort of compromise or.. I dunno.. screaming and throwing things, I guess.

I remember sitting at my desk, reviewing that last design round, which was actually pretty good even though the client still hated everything, and absentmindedly taking a blue ballpoint pen and just filling in a little box in the middle of the design. It was just a tiny bit, a doodle really, at the visual focal point of the whole thing, an almost-nothing change.. but, I realized, it was one I could sell. I could explain it as meaningful in the context of the overall design. It could work. I loaded up the logo on the screen, filled the box, shipped it off.

A little while later the client came back, saying, "FINALLY.  Yes, that's IT."

(Greslin throws hands in air and gives up, grabs the bindle, heads for the train yard)

And like that, we were done. Client was happy. Designer was relieved. We were getting paid. Ten years later, the company is still using that logo.

Now you can take a lot of lessons from that. Clients can be high maintenance and weird. So can creatives. Maybe I was awful at project management. Obviously, mistakes were made and that conflict could probably have been avoided. 

But what that particular situation came down to was, no one had the idea that would work. We all came to the table with almost-good ideas. None of us had the one correct solution to the problem. None of us had the idea.

I thought about that again a few months ago when I read this 2014 article by programmer Casey Muratori, the guy who does Handmade Hero.   

Casey's talking here about what he's calling "semantic compression", adopting a programming practice that emphasizes streamlining code as the primary creative process driver. If you have nothing else to do today, he's saying, make your code cost less.

I've been coding all my life, going back to cramming endless BASIC subroutines into a 32K sardine can called the Atari 400 in 1983, and compression has always been where it's at. You constantly worked to find ways of simplifying the code in order to do more in less space, because back in those old days, you HAD no space. You either achieved compression, or you achieved nothing at all.

I find myself still doing that today. If I have no ideas that day for a new project or feature or improvement, I know that I can always work on compression. I can always make it somehow do the exact same thing in slightly less space, with a bit less code, and with just a touch fewer resources, and it keeps me busy until the good ideas do inevitably come along. Because once I eliminate all the impossible things, all the things that don't work, all the almost-right solutions, the only thing that remains - as improbable as it may be - is the truth. The idea that counts. And that truth becomes inevitable.

Which returns us to the original question of where ideas come from.    

The Idea Comes Last

The error I've been making on this subject, for decades, is clinging to the same popular belief in the Idea Fairy, the principle that somehow these mythical ideas just spring forth from the Muse and that my job is to faithfully run along behind and make them into something.

If there's no idea, therefore, the Muse hates me and I suck and should do something else with my life.

But what if it actually works the other way around? What if the "idea" is the last thing in the process, the thing that happens because you logically compressed the problem space so hard that the only way to solve it is with this one novel take? That, basically, the "idea" that you're looking for is the improbable truth that appears simply because you've ruled out any other possible outcome, and you've forced a single unique possible solution? 

There are basically two ways to obtain a diamond in this world, other than simply buying one from someone else. You can go digging around until you get lucky and just happen to find a diamond. Or you can compress the hell out of a piece of worthless carbon. They both require time and resources; the difference is that one is the lottery and the other is engineering and energy management.

So my point in all this - other than just getting it out of my head, because I'm still churning all this and may well follow this up with other thoughts later - is that you shouldn't berate yourself if you want to create but you don't have ideas. Don't let that hang you up, because that focus may actually be backwards to how your brain works. 

Instead, find something that seems almost-right, something a bit shaggy, a bit sloppy, something that could stand a little compression, and just get to work doing that. Smash that thing down into a singularity and give the "idea" the freedom to come along when the time is right. Work the problems, confident that in the end, there will be only one real solution to the impossible dilemma that your compression efforts have created.. and that the solution will probably be a doozy.

Or.. go buy your ideas. I hear there's this nice little shop upstate, sells them five for a buck. And it's near a train yard.