Where ideas come from (Patreon)

A question any writer gets asked a lot is "where do you get your ideas from?" 

This will invariably be asked as though it were the first time you've heard it, by someone who genuinely has no idea that this is a famous question that is famously impossible to answer.

It is always surprising to me that non-writers seem to think the hard part is coming up with ideas. I have had it explained to me that sure, AI is bad at research since it will spit out lots of incorrect answers mixed with the correct ones. And sure, AI can only write in a rudimentary way riddled with cliché. But a good use case for AI, I have been told, is that it can come up with ideas for us, getting rid of that difficult labor.

Leaving aside the fact that the ideas an AI is capable of coming up with are invariably boring and stolen from someone else, ideas are absolutely the easiest part of the process. I already have more ideas for projects than I have life left to live. Here are three ideas I will come up with right now, as I type them:

1. A play or novel that alternates between two days, the day a young man opens his little corner store, and the day that the same man, now old, closes up shop.

2.  A child learns that the grandfather that his family has been visiting once a month her whole childhood is not related to them, but instead is powerful criminal to whom her parents owe a terrible favor.

3. A murder mystery in which the murder victim turned out to be the killer, but was killed in self-defense by the intended victim.

Writers know that any idea could be something great, and even a great idea could be something terrible. The trick of any work is all in the execution.

In fact, there is no part of writing that can be usefully skipped by "using AI". Every part of it, even the boring parts (reading the whole thing out loud to make sure there's no combination of words that sounds a little awkward, or carefully making sure that every verb is in the same tense) are all  part of figuring out what the thing is. It's all the work, and it can no more be farmed out than someone building a house can ask a concrete mixer to go ahead and lay the foundation on its own while the builders take a break. 

As for where ideas come from, my answers are twofold:

1. The best person to ask this to would be a neuroscientist. Just as a professional basketball player is unlikely to be a medical expert in the muscles used in basketball, a writer only knows that, when needed, the ideas arrive. I have no education on how the brain does that.

2. That said, I think it's a lot like dreams. Dreams are presumably related to everything we experience in the real world. Sometimes this relationship is obvious (I have a flight tomorrow and I dreamed about missing that flight). Sometimes the relationship is obscure and indirect (I have a flight tomorrow and I dreamed there was a new building in my neighborhood, a skyscraper with no windows. When I put my ears to its walls, I heard a strange roaring sound). But either way, we don't really have control over how our life relates to our dreams. 

Similarly, ideas are presumably based somehow in our experiences. Sometimes they are direct (my experience as a writing professor having an affair in a New England town resulted in my award winning novel about a writing professor having an affair in a New England town). Sometimes they are indirect (my experience as a writing professor having an affair in a New England town resulted in my award winning novel about the colonization of Mars). But either way, we don't really have control over which ideas come and when.

The only thing we can do is live our lives, experience as much as we can, and know that, when the time is right, dreams and ideas will come.  

And we don't need AI to do that. It's too busy getting the basic facts wrong in a listicle about Star Wars.  

-Joseph Fink