On Ideas

I sit here and try to crank out a brief piece of interesting literature once a day. It isn't always once a day and it isn't always interesting. But I try. I often wonder though, how far "trying" can get someone in the world of ideas. How hard must a writer try to put something on paper that's interesting to read? How long must songwriter sit with his instrument before some melody comes to him that is worth expounding on? How hard must a scientist or philosopher think to come up with an orginal theory?

There's some best selling literature out there right now that is tackling these concepts far better and exhaustively than I intend to. Nevertheless, reading books like Outliers and The Tipping Point (both by Malcolm Gladwell), though helpful in understanding the why of execution, don't really serve as a how-to formula for generating and marketing something good. It's not that simple. In fact, Gladwell's main overarching thesis to his books are that it's truly NOT that simple; there's so much that goes into a successful idea and often it literally seem to arrive ex-nihilo. But I wish not to indulge in analysis of these works or attempt to critique or re-formulate the ideas behind them. Rather, as usual, I wish to complain. Being a comedian by nature, God has gifted me with a keen observational sense that allows me to look at the world, notice what's wrong, and then essentially complain about it in a humorous and relatable way.

My main complaint on ideas is that you cannot generate them on purpose. This is a huge problem for any creative type; you simply never know where ideas come from or when they're gonna strike...let alone a good one. Granted, you can do things and put yourself in situations that are conducive to inspiration and reflection but ultimately the actual idea seems to come about randomly, from no purposeful source. Even just a moment ago when I sat down to write this blog; I always wonder "what's interesting to write about today". I drew suck a huge blank that, as you can see, I ended up writing about the fact that I often don't know what to write about.

In my field--the creative arts--I have nothing by my own mind to rely on which is a downright scary scenario in and of itself. And like anyone else, my success is contingent upon my work (among many other things), and my work is contingent upon ideas, and ideas are merely intellectual properties, the source of which is an abstraction--the mind. So if the artist encounters some kind of creative blockage, then he basically has no new work to show.

Obviously, I'm in that place right now which is why this blog entry sucks big time. But I think what bothers me the most is that it's out of my control. All I can do is keep reading, writing, going to shows, interacting with peers and friends, and keeping my eyes open to things that seem funny or odd to me. This is all one can do to cause ideas to surface.

So what have we learned thus far? Well, we've learned that I've been writing for a solid 20 minutes now and have only been able to produce this crap that you just read; seemingly interesting but ultimately without a point. And that's exactly my point. Sometimes you just cannot make a point no matter how hard you try. And when this happens, I think the creative person just needs to put the pen, brush, guitar, or microphone down, and consider his attempt valiant but with an ultimately resounding answer "Not today I guess." Which is exactly what I'm going to do now.