Much Ado About Ideas

The hard truth about any creative endeavor is that a good idea is essential, but not sufficient, to bring something to life.

Many aspiring writers, painters, musicians, and filmmakers never become artists because they are stuck waiting for the right idea or are obsessed with a single idea. They cannot move forward until the ideal idea is perfectly realized.

Having an idea for a thing is intoxicating. It’s one of life’s great pleasures. But having an idea is not the same as doing the thing. The difference between the amateur and the professional is that the amateur simultaneously takes ideas too seriously and doesn’t take them seriously enough.

Taking ideas too seriously

Ideas are everywhere. In the moment, it’s almost impossible to tell if an idea is good or not. Ideas need time to percolate, to ferment in the stew of your experiences, memories, and knowledge. Ideas change as they collide with other ideas.

Amateurs tend to latch too tightly onto one idea, scared to share it lest someone else “steal” it, and unable to move forward with their craft unless it relates to the one specific idea.

But ideas are not precious. A precious gemstone is precious because it is rare. Ideas are not rare. Ideas are everywhere. Not even good ideas are precious. They are everywhere, too. You hurt your creativity when you hoard ideas and refuse to share them.

Taking ideas too seriously stunts creativity. You become obsessed with making the thing exactly like you imagined it. Becoming a writer or artist is about narrowing the gap between what you imagine and what you make. However, there will always be a gap. When you refuse to finish a work because it is not perfect, you never get better. You never narrow the gap.

Not taking ideas seriously enough

Ideas are living things, independent of us. They are in the air. This is one reason simultaneous discovery is so common. Often, several movies will come out around the same time. This is not because someone is stealing ideas. Rather, this happens because sometimes ideas are in the zeitgeist, and different versions of those ideas strike multiple people.

Artists know that if they don’t act on an idea, someone else will. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about an experience like this in her book on creativity, Big Magic. She had an idea for a novel that she felt she couldn’t undertake because of personal issues, and a year later, another author published their version of the same concept.

Gilbert didn’t think her idea had been stolen. Rather, she understood that the idea was right for the moment and found someone ready to execute it.

The difference between an aspiring artist and a working artist is that working artists respect ideas enough to start taking imperfect steps to bring them to life.

They also respect ideas enough to let some of them go. Not every idea that occurs to you is right for you. The more you practice being sensitive to the world around you, the more ideas you will discover. I don’t know a single professional artist who doesn’t have far more ideas than they have the capacity to execute.

When it comes to being a working artist in any field, having ideas is the easiest part.

Art is in the execution

The real work of creativity is transmuting an idea into a thing. An idea for a script is not the same as a script.

Like every author, I’ve met people who, once they discover I’ve published books, gleefully tell me they have a great idea for a book. They just haven’t gotten around to writing it yet. As if the writing of the book is the trivial part, and the real work is the idea.

Having an idea for a book does not make you an author.

This same phenomenon plays out with AI. So many people, including a fair number of studio executives, believe that they are artistic geniuses who are only kept from greatness because they lack the resources to make a movie.

They want to use AI to shortcut all the actual work involved in making a movie. Having an idea for a movie doesn’t make you a filmmaker.

If you use AI to do all the work involved in writing a book, making a movie, or creating a drawing, what do you have to be proud of? You haven’t done anything. You had an idea and outsourced all the work to AI.

Art is in the execution of an idea, not in the halving of an idea.

Learn the skills

If you want to be an artist, learn the skills to be an artist. You do not need an MFA to be a writer. You don’t need to go to art school to be an artist.

You do need to learn how to do things. Writers write and painter’s paint. The more you do the thing, the better you will get at it.

The more technical skills you have, the easier it will be to bring your ideas to life in a way that is close to what you imagined.

Narrowing the gap requires iteration and perspiration. You have to keep at it.

I’ve been a working writer for more than fourteen years. I’m better today than I was when I started. I don’t have a degree in writing or English. However, I read obsessively and am deeply curious about what makes a piece of writing work.

Like a developing auto mechanic, I disassemble and reassemble other people’s sentences and paragraphs to see what makes them hum.

The ideas I work with are not any better than what I had when I started, but my ability to harness those ideas has improved. I also have better judgment when it comes to choosing an idea to execute on.

Several years ago, I had an idea for making poetry comics. I had no visual arts skills. I had stopped any kind of painting or drawing when I was humiliated by an art teacher in middle school. Visual art wasn’t for me.

But I liked the idea of poetry comics. I couldn’t afford to hire an illustrator, and I loathed involving someone else in a project I was sure would be a commercial failure.

That left me with one option. Learn to become a good enough illustrator to make my ideas a reality. I focused on being good enough, not on being great.

My illustration work is not polished, but I have my own process, visual language, and style. I’ve been commissioned by people to do illustration work for them.

Somehow, much to my surprise, I became not only a professional writer but also a professional illustrator.

It takes a lot of work to learn the skills required to execute my ideas. I still work on my writing and illustration skills daily. Just like musicians continue to practice their instruments, I continue to practice my craft.

But the practice is not onerous. It’s joy. It’s play. It’s life.

If you yearn to be an artist of any kind, spend more time practicing your craft than you do worrying about ideas. There will always be ideas.

We live in a universe of infinite ideas. But there will only be a finite number of people willing to do the work to bring some of those ideas into the physical world.

Those people are called artists.