Where Ideas Come From

When asked where he gets his ideas, Neil Gaiman often gives the pithy answer, “I make them up. Out of my head.” When a seven-year-old asked the same, he felt compelled to expound a bit (or rather a lot, really, but for my purposes here I've edited out most of it):

“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

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All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

And when you've an idea - which is, after all, merely something to hold on to as you begin - what then?

Well, then you write. You put one word after another until it's finished - whatever it is.”

Daydreaming is a huge part of the creative process. You don't have to stare at a blank page until ideas come—in fact I would advise against it. Gaze blankly out of a window once in a while. Go for walks and stare at clouds. Get lost in your thoughts. Let your inner child wander.

If ever anyone remarks that you look like you're doing nothing, don't be ashamed. Treat it as a badge of honor.

Neil Gaiman's 2012 Commencement Speech [Video]

This link was originally published before the launch of The Spark Journal. I will be republishing (and lightly editing, in some cases) a handful of such things in the coming days, mainly because I feel they're worth seeing twice. My apologies if this annoys anyone.

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Somehow I completely missed out on watching this speech until recently. It seems like the kind of thing I should have come across sooner, since my internet friends presumably would have been linking it left and right at the time. But I guess better late than never right?

Here are a few of my favorite highlights, with accompanying time markers:

[1:51] - “First of all, when you start out on a career in the arts, you have no idea what you're doing. This is great. People who know what they're doing know the rules, and they know what is possible, and what is impossible. You do not, and you should not.”

[2:10] “The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can. If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do. And because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that particular thing again.”

[19:29] “And now, go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make. Good. Art.”