Last week, I hit upon an idea that isn’t letting go.
It grabbed my attention and now I’m working it out every spare moment, and working the text out in a prewrite, just so I can write a well polished piece out of the image in my head.
Not every idea does this to me, and in fact, a lot of them I have to work until they even seem interesting.
When I was younger, I believed in ‘the muse’ like so many, and it was moments like this that we referenced. Brilliant creativity that just, comes to us. But I’ve learned over the years, it very rarely comes like that, and it’s not always my best ideas that leap fully formed to the page.
And I’m okay with this, now. I’ve learned to chase ideas wherever they come from.
Those ideas that need development I follow long enough to see if there’s something there that holds my interest and speaks to the way I see things, if not, I leave it in a little text file, to be pulled out if it ever does. Those that do get added to the project queue, and eventually get turned into something (though not always what I thought they’d become!)
How about you, readers, how do you get into your creative projects?
I sometimes think I’m a bit of a strange writer because I’ve never thought about having a muse and my characters do what I tell them to do
When an idea comes to me, I’ll keep it in a file until the right moment. Sometimes I’ve had to abandon an idea from the file because once I started working on it, I realized it wasn’t going to mature the way I wanted. Other times, like you said, it turned into something more than I ever could have imaged.
Great post, Patrick, and I can relate to Marcy’s comment as well.
Your comment about the “muse” reminds me of a quote attributed to Thomas Edison: “Invention is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration.” That’s the way my game ideas get developed – not full formed from the forehead of Zeus, but little notions that need to be cultivated and re-worked into something that either becomes original and fun to play *or* a completely boring re-hash of an already-been-done. Since neither of us is Mozart, that’s the way our creativity has to work – like tending a garden, not launching a rocket.