Lately I’ve been sketching first thing in the morning (after a suggestion from Havi). It gives me the tug of Something Fun to get up early for, especially on days when sleeping in seems a better option than facing the pissing rain or pressure of things to do.
This morning I sat staring at the blank pages of my sketchbook. The very, very blank pages. And I thought “Where are all the ideas?” “Why don’t I have any?” All the while, an ear worm circling in my head: “Where the fuck do ideas come from?” (That one courtesy of Ze Frank’s brilliant riff on ideas as brain crack. Thanks for that one, Darren.)
So without further delay, here are two answers I came up with this morning. They’re not definitive, mind you. And I hope you will share your answers to these important questions in the comments.
The first answer is so obvious I’m probably not the first to think of it.
It must be the Greedy Squirrels.
You see, an idea manifests in your brain. When it’s ripe for the picking, before you even know what’s happening, it falls out of your brain and a greedy idea squirrel comes along and takes it. He then squirrels it away underground somewhere. So, odds are, when you see a truly fabulous tree, it’s thriving on the pile of ideas buried within it’s roots. So I say next time you’re short on ideas, go squirrel hunting! What the heck, it can’t hurt and it’s better than banging your head against the keyboard.
So that explains why you might lose an idea. Where do they come from in the first place?
Idea Factories
My theory is that orbiting the earth are giant indetectable idea factories. Day in, day out, minute after minute, they pump out ideas like so many widgets. So many in fact that they have an entire department devoted to randomization. This department ensures that every idea is just a little bit different from every other idea.
When ideas reach the end of the production line, they are shot out of thousands of giant Suessian tubes pointed at Earth. They travel the long, dangerous journey, and if they’re lucky enough to miss the satellites, airplanes, birds, and skyscrapers and such, they’ll land safely in one of our minds.
And if you are really lucky, the ideas you receive have lots of randomness and survived the journey without getting bruised or shat upon by a brid.
I think this theory explains why I get so many ideas outside or in the shower. Some of those ideas must land in the streams and end up coming through the shower head.
Now it’s your turn. Where do you think ideas come from? What/who’s to blame when you have none?
