An average day brings 78 thousand ideas. The difficulty lies remembering them all. An idea book cannot help with this. There is no Moleskine that can fit person's ideas, and it is not merely a matter of page count. Ideas do not fit onto a page, at least in any form that may be useful later. Ideas exist only in the mind and it is there they fester and change, and it is directly from there they are germ cells that spring forth into fully formed (and self-sufficient) adults. Like that Greek godess who was born from Zeus's head, or something.
I can write to myself, "MAKE A NOVEL ABOUT BLOOD CELLS ARGUING WITH THEIR PARENTS" but by then it is too late. By then either the novel has been written or the idea has died completely, or changed completely its guise.
Irving Berlin once said (speaking specifically of music and lyrics) that ideas should not be conceived on paper. The best ideas come on elevator rides and trips in and out of taxicabs. Brad Bird has said it is impossible force inspiration to come. One can only recreate an environment which invites inspiration.
And harder than inspiration is recollection. What has worked before? There have been billions upon zillions upon googelplexes of ideas. Most of these, sadly, have never made it out of the mind. Many have made it from mind to Moleskine at least, but as gravesites, not as ideas. Looking through the gravesites of a fantastic mind, one invevitably compares them to the ideas which happened to make it out. Maybe the fantastic mind was Dostoevsky, and Crime and Punishment was the survivor that left behind a short story entitled "Save the Last Dance for Maurice." Maybe the fantastic mind was nobody at all, but somebody who hoped there would at least be something he could be proud of. To keep an idea book is strictly a habit for the neurotic.
Here is a picture of my idea book:
No comments:
Post a Comment