Techniques of Understanding

Finding inspiration and ideas.
I got to thinking: What is my process for coming up with ideas? I am a veritable fount of the damn things, to tell the truth. Good, bad or indifferent, if you want an idea, I can usually come up with stuff, given a few moments and something to riff from. [It's that whole follow through thing that is problematic!] Because, to me, ideas litter the ground around us, just waiting for us to notice. Or maybe it's more like Whack-A-Mole... What really gets me is that at least a couple of times a year, some movie or tv show comes out and it's like, hey, I thought of just that thing! Which, if I'd have written it could have made me millions. Yeah, likely, I know.

Just goes to show, though: Ideas are the easy part for me. But I gather to some others it isn't that easy. I suspect it is just my 'take brain out and play with it' mentality, the product of being a dreadfully shy and imaginative child who hid away from the world as much as possible. I learned to entertain myself by looking at things from varying directions and asking What If? a lot.

Ask questions and you always get answers.
That's the first rule of getting an idea. Ask "What if?" or "Why?" or some other question. You'll always get some kind of answer. Sometimes, you get snippets or an idea that is a jump off point, things that you know have meat and bone, but which you do not yet understand. It might be the way the garbage man moves, or the smell; it might be the young man slumping down the street, his slouched slacker posture, the mussed and worn-yesterday-and-likely-the-day-before's garments, the skateboard under his arm combined with a wallet with a chain in his rear pocket, or the fact that his rumpled clothing consists of a suit vest over a Black Sabbath tee shirt and Dockers. Why does the kid dress like that? Or, What if he is wearing those clothes because he had blood all over his own?

Sometimes, if you're really lucky, you get an epiphany, an Athena leaping full blown from your skull. Usually it's a knot of potential you must tease into a story thread.

But you always get something. Always. Just keep asking.

The important thing is to recognize your muse when she arrives.
This is often subtle. Like learning to understand your toddler's botched speech, it takes practice, too. Look at what is around you. What are you experiencing? Maybe you see a woman on a park bench, feeding sandwich crust to birds. Ask yourself Why the woman is feeding pigeons part of her sandwich? Is it because she is upset because she caught her husband cheating? Is she anorexic and needs to hide her lack of intake, the birds are convenient garbage disposals? Is it that she's contemplating suicide? Or has she more concern for a sick pigeon whom she's been nursing back to health? Perhaps she is feeding the birds poisoned food because she's pathologically convinced that they are part of an alien collective which is trying to take over mankind?

See what I mean? There are always ideas. Just ask the questions. And listen to the answers, too, of course.