One Writer Talks About Where An Idea Came From, and Why They're Not as Important as Some Might Think

While no one tends to ask me (I think they're afraid of what the answer might be) other writers seem to at least occasionally get asked where they get ideas from. While most of the responses I've read point out that there's really nothing mysterious about the process, the specifics never really get talked about. Maybe there's some secret fear about revealing that the idea for "Bestseller A" came about while taking care of morning ablutions (by which I'm trying to politely say "sitting on the bloody crapper"). I've decided to use this article to examine the elements involved in the inspiration of an as-yet-unwritten short play "'A Terrible Beauty.'"

The first part of the inspiration behind this idea was fairly mundane. I was putting together a collection of Irish folk music for someone. I don't mean the harp stuff they flog off on people in the New Age section. I'm talking about pub songs, street ballads and songs of rebellion. My mother's maiden name is Kelly, and I grew up well aware of my Irish heritage, but I never really knew all that much about Irish history. Listening to these songs made me want to know more. In particular I wanted to know more about the revolutionary history of Ireland, and from there became even more interested in the Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish War.

From there I read William Butler Yeats' "Easter 1916." I'm not much a one for poetry, but the haunting beauty of this piece touched me. I was fascinated by its duel message of the glory of nationalism and the cost of same. The text of this excellent piece can be found here: Easter, 1916

These things had started sparking off the occasional idea, but nothing terribly concrete. I only knew that I wanted to tell a story set during the Easter Rising. Eventually I managed to shake out a vision for an opening scene. Taken from my notes it reads: "The curtain opens on a group of men standing on some steps. A tricolor flies behind them. Padraic Pearse faces the audience, reading a portion of his proclamation. Curtain closes, there's a flash of red lights, and the sound of 15 gunshots."

A nice visual but an impractical one to say the least. 15 characters is a lot for most productions, (even ones that don't pay the cast and crew) and if most of those characters only appear for one brief scene there's little chance the show would ever be produced. More to the point it's impractical in that while it is a nice visual there's simply no real meat there. It's a potentially powerful scene that tells the audience that these men believed strongly, and that they died for those beliefs, but it's just a visually-dependant scene not a whole story. I had to decide what I wanted to say about this period of time and these events. I settled on examining the very dual nature that Yeats talked about in his poem. I would tell a story that dealt with a young man who had gone off to fight for Irish independence, while at the same time telling the story of the girl he left behind. I came up with, and then promptly discarded, a number of highly improbably staging options which ranged from the cost prohibitive to the physically impractical. Finally I decided on a split stage: each shift in story would be signified by the lights going down on one half of the stage, and coming up on the other. I trimmed it down to four characters, though I still have a strong urge to have Padraic Pearse read his deceleration while standing on a short set of stairs before the play begins.

That's it. It wasn't a particularly exciting journey. I'm about to get to the most important part of the journey, however: to wit, none of it to date matters the least little bit. I had an inspiration, which I refined into a solid idea. Which doesn't mean a thing unless I do something with that idea. This is just one idea. I have plenty of other idea irons in the fire, so to speak, and will probably come up with more. Everyone has ideas. Even the most unimaginative people have creative ideas and insights: they've just never been taught to recognize and treat them as such. The trick is that not everyone knows how to properly articulate those ideas.

"Wait, wait," I imagine someone might say after reading that last bit, "you're saying that ideas don't matter?" To which I answer: yes and no. It might help to think about ideas as being something like a match and fuse. You need those two things in order to get the process started, but unless you actually do something with those ideas the creative bomb won't ever actually go off. So yes, insights and inspirations are important, but no, they're not the most or only important part of the process. A writer, or anyone employed in a creative capacity, has to learn how to actually use those ideas; in the case of a writer that being the ability to put words on a page, and then refine them until they say what the writer wants them to say. I certainly wish it were otherwise. I would be ever so happy if I could simply walk up to a publisher, or movie producer and say, "So I've got this great idea for a story about a boy and his pet man-eating sloth, and now that I've told you about it where's my check?" Because with as many ideas as I have I certainly wouldn't be as flat broke as I am. But until that day comes I'll be here in the salt mine worrying less about where my ideas come from and more about actually writing.