The Dreams Stuff Is Made Of

(I stole the title of this column from a book title by Thomas M. Disch. I love that title.)

I get asked a lot, "Where do you get your ideas?" I hate being asked that. Not because it's a bad question -- it isn't, it's quite valid -- but because the only answer that I have to that question is so long and involved, I usually just smile and say, "I dunno."

It's a complicated thing. It's not just sitting down and doing it, and it's not a matter of daydreaming all day -- it's something in between. When I was younger and worked various jobs -- in a warehouse, mowing lawns for the park service, stuff like that -- I used to say, "Someday I want a job where I do nothing but think." Years later, when I worked as a writer/designer for TSR and I was talking to my friend Bruce (who did not work for TSR at the time), I brought up that dream again. Bruce looked at me dumbfounded and said, "Monte, that is your job now."

I honestly hadn't even thought about it until then, but he was right. What I did (and still do) for a living was entirely cerebral. The actual "typing" is sort of a byproduct. The rest of it, working with editors, coordinating with artists, and so on -- purely secondary stuff. So how do I do my job? Seems like an easy question, but I've already mentioned that I don't think the answer is easy at all.

It's easy to understand how the Greeks came up with the belief that ideas came from supernatural sources: the muses. I think I've probably mentioned in this column before that I like to write at night, and I feel most creative after I've been up for a while. Nevertheless, I often wake up with a great idea. Literally, as I move from sleep to wakefulness, my mind is bursting with some wonderful concept or solution to a problem that I had. It's where I got the idea for this very column this week, in fact.

Now, did a muse whisper in my ear while I slept? Maybe, but I doubt it.

When I was at the Clarion West Writer's Workshop, Greg Bear, one of my favorite writers, told me he looks at it like this: You've got these workmen in your brain. You give them some work to do. Then, you go eat dinner, read a book, or go to sleep. But the workmen are still working. Ideas and thoughts and solutions to problems don't just come out of the blue -- they come from within you. And they don't necessarily come instantaneously, or even quickly. When you "suddenly" get an idea, it's probably something you've actually been thinking about in the back of your mind for some time, only subconsciously (although I hesitate a little bit to use that word).

How Many Stories?
There are theories (you usually run into them when talking to college professors) that the number of ideas in the world is finite. Some will even tell you that all the ideas have already been thought of. What a pile of trash. In a creative writing class I had in college, a girl wrote a story that the whole class read. It was about a future where aliens came down and hunted people for sport. (It was a thinly veiled anti-hunting rant, but that's neither here nor there.) One other student said, "This story seems familiar. Like I've read it, or something like it, before."

The professor said, "That's not surprising. There is a school of thought that there are only seven stories that can be told. So it's common to have that feeling."

"There are only seven stories?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied.

"And one of the seven is that aliens come down and hunt people for sport? What the heck are the other six?"

Now, this theory (which has many versions, with different numbers of stories) may have some merit, but only because it boils the idea of a story down so far as to make it unrecognizable. "Man confronts self." "Man confronts man." It's like saying there are only two kinds of elephants: big ones and bigger ones. How is that helpful?

Either Side of an Idea
I do think that ideas (or at least most of them) come from merging existing ideas/concepts/images into new things. It might be a merging of things in a totally new way, or it might be merging things that have never been merged before. So your brain, even when you're not aware of it, can be taking ideas from your experience and combining them in new ways. You can even train yourself to do this a lot, or at least become more aware of it. One thing I have trained myself to do -- although I've never looked at it quite that way before this very minute -- is to "look to either side of an idea."

Imagine, for example, that you're presented with the idea of a car for the first time. You say to yourself, "Okay, four wheels, motorized, transports people." If you think about that for a while, you might ask, "Does it have to have four wheels? What if it only had two?" Suddenly, you have the idea of a motorcycle. Then you say, "What if it didn't carry people? What if it transported goods?" Now you've got the idea of a semi truck.

In this abstract view, the motorcycle and the semi are ideas on either side of the idea of a car. When I'm presented with some new sci-fi/fantasy/game design idea or concept, I immediately look to either side to see what's there. There's not always anything good there, but I've gotten a lot of ideas I liked by doing that. The idea for metamagic feats in D&D, for example, came about that way. I was looking at the idea of spell levels, and realized that you could take aspects of a spell and judge them as an addition or subtraction to its level.

Some people, of course, will tell you that ideas are a dime a dozen and that it's actually hard work that's rare. If that were true, we'd all be walking around with concepts like the mechanics of a ringworld, the smile on the Mona Lisa, and the storytelling techniques used in Citizen Kane. A few of us would do something with these great ideas, but none of us would ever be all that impressed, because we'd had similar ideas as well, but were busy doing something else.

But this is not an accurate description of the world as I see it. I think people who say that ideas are a dime a dozen are either extremely creative (and thus great ideas truly come oozing out of them all the time) or they are not creative at all and have no appreciation of the difference between the ideas involved in the Lord of the Rings and an idea of what they should have for lunch.

I think ideas may be a dime a dozen, but good ideas are rare and should be savored and cherished. By rare, I don't mean once in a lifetime, though. I know plenty of people who have these remarkable sorts of ideas practically every day. But those people are fairly rare themselves. I mean that not every idea is a good one, and a willingness to work hard isn't enough.

Nature vs. Nurture
So, are some people more creative than others? It certainly seems so. Some of that may be natural talent, but clearly some of that creativity comes simply from exercise. It's like an athlete. Even if I exercised all day long, I could never beat Michael Jordan in a game of one-on-one. Still, if Michael never practiced and sat around on the couch all day for years, and I did practice all day, I'd probably take him. Natural talent is nice, and you won't become a star without it, but hard work and practice is just as important. I've encountered many people in my life who wanted to be writers. A few of them had natural talent, many more of them worked hard. A few people got published on talent alone. A few others got in print just by sheer hard work. (If you submit things enough times, and keep trying over and over and over, eventually, you're going to get in somewhere.) Only the people with both traits are ever going to get very far.

So how do you practice being creative? I don't know if I really have all the answers to that. Here are a few ideas you can try:

1. Don't accept everything you're given when you read a book, watch a movie, or read a game product. By that, I don't mean question whether it's good or not (that's being critical, a good skill, but not necessarily related). I mean think about what else is going on with that idea. Extrapolate. If you're watching Star Wars, and you hear about how Luke's family works on a moisture farm, think: What do they do with all the water? Where do they store it? Are there "moisture thieves?" Is there a black market for water?

2. Be patient with your brain. If you're trying to come up with an idea, and nothing's coming, don't get frustrated. Go eat a sandwich. Go for a walk. Work on something else. (I think I frustrated some of my bosses at TSR/Wizards by adhering to this last one. It meant that when I wrote something, I didn't start at page one and write to the last page. I started where the ideas were -- which might be page 10. Then, when I was stuck there, I'd switch to another section, maybe on what would be page 84. When they would ask to see how something was going, all I'd have to show them were a lot of apparently disjointed bits and pieces until I was well into the process. Oh well, that's the way I work.)

3. Constantly expose yourself to new stimuli. If ideas are the combination of other ideas, give your mind as much to work with as possible. Read (books), watch (movies), listen (to music). Try new types of things to read, watch and listen to stuff you've never tried.

4. Talk to people. Talk about your ideas. You'll find that while you try to explain something so that someone else will understand, your mind will fill in blanks with ideas you never even realized you had. You'll find and fill in blanks you didn't know were there. Defending an idea is a great way to define that idea. No better way to develop something than by sticking your neck out and putting it out there for someone else to see.

So, where do I get my ideas? Uh, I dunno.