When someone asks me “where do your ideas come from?” I often experience this high-functioning autistic shut down I experience with many questions. I am rather obsessed with speaking to the question someone’s asking. Dinosaur that I am becoming, my mind works almost in complete opposition to the way that most moderns think. “Where do your ideas come from?” My brain reboots and I wonder: which question are they asking?

Where do your ideas come from?

Are they asking, “Metaphysically, from whence come ideas?”

In some ways, consciousness is donated. In others, our will adjudicates ideas and sorts them into various categories, accidents, and the rest. But that’s a whole conversation about the nature of consciousness. Most people aren’t asking that, though we could talk about it: it involves words like logoi and hypostasis. If you want to have that conversation, tell me in the comments.

Are they asking, “Are you possessed of the muse?”

Yes, as with the above, but no more than anyone else. The difference is I’m aware of it. I’m trying my best to move away from the sorts of minds that tear down mind, reality, and beauty. So there’s muse and Muse and simply seeking to move away from amusement isn’t enough. You have to seek the right inspiration. So that’s also a complete conversation about reading the wisest books by the greatest minds who encourage the swelling of goodness and truth and beauty within you. Letting your mind bloom through intransitive education.

Are they asking, “How did you get to be so creative?”

All humans are as creative as I am, it’s just their muscles have atrophied through cynicism. If so, the general rule is practice play. Play often. Say, yes and to the world and play the game of shared context. Riff. There’s a quality to quantity that can help and iteration is the only way to get there. Yes, that’s an idea. But what else? Can you come up with 117 imaginative uses for a sheet? Try now. Look to the ordinary: how is it extraordinary? Collaborate with others — say “yes” to their ideas and see if you have some new exploration of their vision. Try to stylize an old idea of yours in a completely new skin. Be confident: stand up straight with your shoulders back and build that damn blanket fort. Sandboxes aren’t for wimps:

Children we were—our forts of sand were even as weak as we,
High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.
Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd,
When all church bells were silent our cap and bells were heard.

Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world.

— Chesterton

…Take a break, eat some fat and protein, play with something else, come back and see if you can look at the puzzle differently. Perseverance and persistence is good, but not monotonous persistence: that’s how you break an arm. Don’t slice the Gordian knot with a sword, that’s not just cheating, the man who chopped it in half later wept for there were no more worlds to conquer. Instead, go away and think. Return to play with the knot again. Return to recofigure the way you’re getting that couch into the new apartment. Riff and riff and riff. Most of life is jazz if you let it.

Are they asking, “When you get an idea, how do you catch it and hold it captive forever?”

If so, the way you capture ideas is to create three file folders in digital or analog. The first says bucket, the second chunk, the third marinade. Any two stupid ideas can become a great idea if you stick them together. So any time you get an idea or a weird observation or a sudden thought, pay enough attention to it to throw it in the bucket. It’ll start getting other ideas to stick to it. Once you have a paragraph, copy and paste it into chunk. Several chunks will start associating. Once you have a page of them, throw it into marinade. Let it sit in there for awhile until you have an outline. Once you have an outline, you’re ready to write the book. Jim Butcher rather famously combined the two ideas of Pokemon and the Lost Roman Legion to make Codex Alera. He did it to prove that any dumb idea can become a bestselling idea if you play with it long enough.

Are they asking, “When your idea runs out of steam and you get writer’s block, how do you get unstuck?”

If so, there are only two reasons you’re stuck. One is because you’re a human who is depressed or anxious. Perfectly normal. Go get professional help from a CBT licensed therapist or a CBT oriented confession booth and get some healing. The other is because you ran out of fodder. If you ran out of fodder for your great idea, there are three ways to restore it: imagination, research, memory.

1. Imagination. It’s one thing for me to think up a world in which carpenters take on an oil company. It’s quite another for me to figure out what the main character can do with all that unused black coil oil pipes in his backyard. That’s riffing on the details of the big idea. It’s not enough to say, “The Weasleys are pranksters.” What if they’re professionals? How do they make money at it? You may be stuck simply because you haven’t played with the details of your big idea. Go away and tinker and worldbuild a la this checklist.
   
2. Research. You haven’t hit the library. It’s true that a good bibliography will take you through The Tree of Porphyry in order to specialize in a given topic. And it’s true that Wikipedia will help you skip over the surface in manic fashion to see how the particulars and externals of ideas are related. BUT! A library is ordered by categories in a way that will let you explore humanity spatially. There, in the Science Industry and Business library, I not only discovered the resource surveys that became the map in Bell Hammers. I also discovered the greatest textbook of all time. It’s a book on combustion engineering, of all things, two shelves away from the table where I was writing. The book begins, I kid you not, “With enough pressure and heat, anything explodes.” That became central to the plot.
   
3. Memory. You didn’t take a few seconds to meditate on what it’s really like doing or being a certain thing. Being a kid (we’ve all been one). Or a person who is bleeding. Or the sound of a tea kettle. Have you actually listened to a tea kettle? It doesn’t whistle even when it’s whistling. It mostly sounds like some eldritch boilerroom in a dwarven factory. Take a second. Breathe. Remember.

Of course, sometimes someone will come to you and just say, “Write this.” That’s called a commission. If you get one of those, you’ve likely already practiced all of the above plenty, but you’ll be using it all once more.

That’s the long answer to “where do your ideas come from?”