How to Get Ideas
Photo by Norbert Boeren
“Getting ideas” is an interesting line of work. It’s not something you can force. To put it crudely, f you wanted someone to build a fence or dig a ditch you could put a gun to their head and you might very well succeed and make them do it. But you can’t put a gun to someone’s head and force them to “get an idea.”
That means you can’t force yourself to get ideas either.
Ideas are not mechanical. They don’t obey the laws of the material world But in my experience, at least when it becomes to artistic ideas, there are some things you can do to facilitate and smooth the “getting” of them.
First, establish whom you are getting these ideas for. Whom are you communicating to? What type of audience are you speaking to; whom is this for?
Select or create an “avatar” of the type of person you’re communicating to. When you think of artistic ideas, think about communicating to that person only. What would they like? How would they react? What would make sense to them or emotionally influence them? Picking one person, either from real life or from your imagination, helps in making things specific. It stops you from feeling like you’re communicating to a nebulous mass of people (which never works).
As a songwriter, it sometimes also helps me to picture the singer who would be singing the song, if it is not myself. This can help get the genre right. For example, picture Ella Fitzgerald singing to a specific person, or picture Dinah Washington or Nina Simone singing to a specific person (all very different).
If you have no idea of whom you could communicate to, or if you don’t feel any desire to communicate about anything, go out and experience some things in life. Visit places where there are lots of people, look at individual people and what they are doing. Go out in nature, travel, do what you must—but make sure you are also looking at people. Two months in a mountain cabin might be great for authors who want to complete their book AFTER they have they have crystallized their idea (and completed their research!), but I am a strong believer in looking at PEOPLE specifically in order to inspire a desire to communicate and getting the original spark (theme) for what a song (or other work of art) will be about.
Start with what they call the “payoff,” the main idea that is the climax, “reveal” or “aha moment” of the song. It is sort of the main idea (in visual terms) around which the song is built. It is usually also the title of the song. In jazz songs, it is often the last line of each repeated section of the song. Think “My Baby Just Cares For Me” in the song by Nina Simone. “Our Love Is Here To Stay.” “I believe in yesterday” in “Yesterday” by the Beatles. “In my house of make believe” in my own song “House of Make Believe.” “Just A Fool Over You.” A song evokes emotion and visuals, like a movie playing in someone’s mind. Start with the central “visual,” if you will, that you want the song to end up with. This can also be considered “the point” of the song.
When you live enough life, are experiencing enough experiences, and observe enough people in their mundane daily interactions, it is likely that you will suddenly come up with such an idea. It often feels like an epiphany, like something is being “downloaded” to you from some kind of spiritual universe or upper-level realm of ideas. It can happen while you are looking at something, or a person, or it can happen at a random moment when you’re thinking about some other things.
It also often happens while you’re doing some mundane activity such as taking a shower or washing dishes, something that doesn’t require your mind to be actively engaged in problem solving. But I find it helpful to beforehand plant the idea “in the back of my mind” that I would like to get an idea about XYZ or solve some creative problem relating to XYZ. Then later, while you’re not actively thinking about it or doing something mundane, the idea often comes. Or it can come while you are looking at things or people. But it doesn’t come if you are trying to force the idea, if you’re actively engaged trying to get the idea.
Also, some people advice that in order to get ideas, you just get started with doing something and then ideas come. For example, if you are a pianist trying to write a song, you just start tinkering with keys on the piano, until an idea hits you that is actually interesting and that you want to explore further. For me personally, this is not at all my preferred method of doing things, but I know that it can also work for people.
In my experience, you must live lots of life AND establish the fact that you wish for a specific idea to materialize (but keep it on the back burner), and then either while you’re doing mundane things or while you’re looking at people or things and have your attention extraverted on things outside of yourself and are least expecting it, an idea comes. I do believe that “doing the prep work” of establishing for yourself what type of idea you would like to have beforehand, and what purpose this idea is to accomplish, massively contributes to actually getting the idea that accomplishes that purpose. Interestingly, I have read stories online of people taking a very similar approach to solving creative problems in other types of work, such as engineering and software development.
You don’t have to take the first idea that comes to you. You will likely have many ideas, some better than others. The artists I know have ideas all the time. I too have ideas all the time, all day long, about all sorts of things in life. Not all ideas are good, some can be a bit random. You may have ten ideas (or a hundred) before a really good idea hits you. But for me, personally, I know right away if something is a mediocre idea or a fantastic idea. When I get a fantastic idea, I run with it.
One way that I know an idea is very good is that I don’t forget it. I don’t have to write it down, it just stays with me. The first four of five jazz songs I ever wrote, and also some of the later ones, I never recorded or wrote down until they were totally complete in my head. I worked on them for months, one song I even worked on for several years, completely in my head and I never worried that I would forget the lyrics or the melody. The ideas were so good I just couldn’t forget them! Later, when I started writing more and more songs and it became sort of a routine thing, I did start writing down things (especially lyrics, which I would otherwise sometimes forget). So you can go by gut feeling about writing things down or not, if you feel you will otherwise forget it. But a good idea is something that you tend to recognize when it hits you, like falling in love.
Once you have the core idea, you need to develop it. People say that the core idea comes by inspiration, and the rest of it you develop through “craft” (meaning having technical skill, and actually “constructing” the song in logical ways). In my experience, the core idea and the whole rest of the song (or other artwork) sometimes come in one big swoop of inspiration (in about 30 min or less). Other times, you get only the core idea, or little bits of ideas, but sort of disjointed, and sometimes over a lengthy period of time. After you've decided that you have enough to get to work (or that you have all you’re probably ever going to get), then you have to really “sit down” and work out the rest of it using your technical skills.
And then you rework the final product until you are satisfied with it. If, in filling in the blanks, you get stumped by a specific section, you may have to start the process again and park that problem in the back of your mind while you visit places, look at people, etc, and the solution (or a better solution than the one you had!) may just come to you. In the end, everyone wins.
Lastly, I’m going to leave you with this video that an artist friend of mine sent me:
It’s surprising how many aspects there are to the subject of creativity. I hope some of this helps you with your own creative endeavors!